Lorewegian 📚

he glows at night and it frightens small children and horses
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2023-08-19 04:00:47

ancient lore
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2023-08-15 06:31:11

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@npub1rnm…jss2 maybe that's how he wrote the script but then the model was swapped to more closely match the price of the XPS

2023-08-14 12:21:56

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@npub1cz4…3wx0 yeah, good times, but then your priorities change and it becomes an obstacle to the other things you're trying to do, other than playing with machines all day

2023-08-14 11:07:03

to a mentally healthy person, a failing machine is a problem.
to a young computer geek, it's an exciting learning opportunity.

2023-08-14 11:02:13

in theory, any experienced senior developer ought to be able to do a decent job as a logistics expert, because the problems of modern networked multi-user computer systems resemble those of a logistics network.

2023-08-14 09:33:15

a fair review of Dell XPS vs MacBook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7COWvxlN5g
this is a pretty fair comparison because they're in the same premium price segment, and the differences they point out are true in my experience.

2023-08-14 08:27:15

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sign that a piece of audio software is designed for amateurs: the volume sliders go from 0 to 100.
red flag that it was designed *by* amateurs: when the volume set to 50%, the audio amplitude is 50% and setting low volumes is difficult, because they failed to use a logarithmic scale for the slider.

2023-08-14 08:20:19

it's always mildly infuriating to watch computer programmers misunderstand how PC audio works because they have never looked at a block diagram of the internals of a sound card, nor have they ever used any professional audio software or equipment to give them an idea of what a good audio workflow looks like. audio code is a bit of a specialist subfield and i'm tempted to say it's best left to the experts, because shitty audio software is far too common.

2023-08-14 03:13:58

😱
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2023-08-13 15:48:39

junior and senior
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2023-08-13 12:58:07

🔧
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2023-08-13 11:36:08

if i wanted a giant project that would take years to finish: make something like Logic Pro X with all its bundled plugins and samples, all perfectly integrated and working flawlessly, except for Linux

2023-08-13 11:33:31

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@npub10ta…sw7k yeah but weak wifi wouldn't be a thing if higher signal strengths were permitted - but this would also make WiFi channels more crowded and phone batteries run down faster, sooo...

2023-08-13 11:15:36

yup
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2023-08-13 11:02:35

RF mysteries
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2023-08-13 03:04:05

if your favourite Linux distribution isn't the one everyone's using, then fucking figure out why and fix it. until then, stop bitching about Ubuntu. #rant

2023-08-12 20:44:00

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@npub1phg…a280 prank devices that people bought, probably

2023-08-12 20:36:52

mistakes
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/878/091/407/128/008/original/151dc9bc0d711e04.jpeg

2023-08-12 20:34:30

how to annoy your friends
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/878/082/086/331/784/original/260546d758215c6a.jpeg

2023-08-12 07:17:58

when you know more than tech support
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2023-08-11 13:45:43

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@npub1fhy…0da8 you wonder if it's best to pretend everything is new and being done for the first time

2023-08-11 13:30:58

it feels like anything i could possibly code would just be reinventing the wheel so why bother, other than for the fun of it

2023-08-11 13:26:14

professional software development is pretty ew these days. when i left the business in 2020 i was just having mental issues and a burnout but looking at what the industry has turned into, it's not something i want to participate in. if i could just write nice small programs and sell them, i'd do that, but no one's doing that anymore, and most problems imaginable have already been solved by someone else, so now we're just making up shit no one needs.

2023-08-10 21:01:35

at war with your computer
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2023-08-10 07:38:01

Philips Videopac G7200
1983
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2023-08-10 06:45:17

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@npub1cuy…yp9m you tell that to macOS/iOS and BSD

2023-08-10 06:37:47

👻
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2023-08-09 15:53:25

John Berkey
Popular Mechanics
June 1988
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2023-08-09 01:38:35

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@npub10ze…mjrr i mean, it's gonna be highly flexible but i don't want to render video in Python, it's too slow

2023-08-09 01:29:01

Linux enjoyers when a geek has the audacity to use Windows
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2023-08-09 01:23:43

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@npub1um2…6jsa i was hoping for "haha" but

2023-08-09 01:22:44

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@npub1um2…6jsa who is this General Pop and what army does he work for

2023-08-09 01:16:42

the guy who invented vim just died
they won't write about that in the news but countless Internet services were created using that editor

2023-08-07 15:48:49

ohm my
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2023-08-06 17:37:23

a young Steve Jobs talks about recruiting and management and the original Mac developer team talks about the group dynamic
https://youtu.be/fj0hpsJvrko

2023-08-04 12:07:23

my Windows sysadmin friend of mine was assigned a Linux sysadmin task because everyone else was vacation.
it was about resizing partitions on a VMware machine.
he started asking me for help after he had already run resizefs on a mounted filesystem (eek!), without resizing the volume/mapper devices first (eek!), and he was trying to do this without downtime 😬
"it's so simple to do on Windows..."

2023-08-02 21:34:25

saving up for early retirement is a really wise decision to make as a computer programmer, because you might need it, if you end up at age 35+ without the opportunity to move into a different position.

2023-08-02 21:23:28

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@npub1437…ranm did you watch the video in the post that this is a reply to tho

2023-08-02 21:16:28

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like musicianship, computer programming is a young man's job

2023-08-02 21:12:58

this video is about the 7 phases of the life of a professional musician, but if feels it's just as relevant to the career of a computer programmer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqneg2oUcTI

2023-08-01 21:25:09

really cool submersible PC build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFswDJPvtPY

2023-08-01 05:54:51

💋💀
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2023-08-01 05:48:23

🤓
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2023-07-31 10:50:40

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@npub1t6q…htd2 when i started out, Slackware was what you installed to learn Linux but that's many years ago. i'm not a Linux graduate. i'm in a senior position already and thinking about retirement if you know what i mean. just give me a comfortable ride with a nice view and dashboard knobs to get comfortable.

2023-07-31 10:47:03

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@npub1t6q…htd2 right so i'm a veteran in that respect but with the years i am also very much a fan of not having to worry about how it works under the hood. i use computers as a tool or appliance for the most part. i don't like to mess around with them much anymore and mainly just want a workhorse.

2023-07-31 10:20:35

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"old Ubuntu base" is a phrase i hear a fair bit when looking at potential everyday desktop Linux distributions to switch to. i get concerned that this also means outdated versions of the specific packages i'm interested in. and also, trouble if i buy something like a brand new motherboard.
the reviews can never go into specifics of course, but that's naturally where i have all the questions. i guess it's a matter of picking out a few options and throwing them on a USB stick to test them.
top candidate for the moment is Linux Mint. only thing is i kind of wish it had KDE. for that, maybe KDE Neon is an option, but i suspect the Internet will be a lot more useful when troubleshooting if i pick Mint, since it's more popular.
i'm not so sure about Arch. their wiki is good. i'm not sure i see the big benefit in AUR. you can find plenty of officially supported APT repos for third party software too, and those are easy enough to add.
with the emergence of Flatpak, AppImage, etc, it's less of a concern what package manager you use anyway.

2023-07-31 09:24:32

this is the video anyone starting out with Linux in 2023 would see first if they typed "Linux distributions" into YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7-EhGIeGUs
i'm hearing a lot about Ubuntu being far from the best anymore and he ranks it as mid-tier.
as an everyday Linux desktop user, what do you think of his ranking?

2023-07-30 12:33:55

📈
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2023-07-30 00:07:18

the discrete Fourier transform isn't so discrete i think - you can see the formula from a mile away
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/799/645/640/305/502/original/95a212fb37b8ae9c.png

2023-07-29 03:00:32

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@npub1arq…d6te i have used one of Apple's existing death-themed products: Terminal

2023-07-29 02:40:47

the Apple Casket
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2023-07-28 20:16:18

C sells C shells on the C shore
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2023-07-27 08:15:01

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@npub1jdn…ycw3 nope
we have ridiculously many IPv4 addresses in Norway, considering that our population is only 5.5 million, so the pressure to migrate is extremely low:
https://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/no.html
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2023-07-27 05:51:23

*hears about IPv6 again*
fun or interesting? ❌
makes my life easier? ❌
helps my friends? ❌
makes me money? ❌
affects me at all? ❌
hmm. nope. no reason to care. will one of these become true at one point? possibly. then i can start caring.

2023-07-26 01:46:49

infosec must be a great field to work in if you're paranoid

2023-07-24 05:11:44

after i changed all my spelling dictionaries to British English, the American spellings started looking a little funny, and i end up coding stuff like
let colour = new Color();
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/766/869/754/618/254/original/6afd910a748290a7.jpeg

2023-07-24 03:20:35

okay boss
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2023-07-17 13:43:58

the difference between having one digit in your counting system and having two or more is pretty significant.
with only a single digit, you need it to be 1 to be able to count, and 0 would just be an empty space. a very literal representation of an amount.
adding zero is what gives you multiplicative positions in multiples of the radix. you simply can't have that with less than 2 digits.

2023-07-17 13:20:09

🎬🍿
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2023-07-17 13:11:47

if this was the bee's knees in music playback technology when you were a teenager, you're officially old now
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/729/121/168/447/448/original/97a5adaee0119ef2.jpeg

2023-07-17 05:29:44

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@npub1dqe…epsl if Sony still cared about the CD format, sure. they have completely abandoned it. latest PlayStation has an optical drive but it can't play CDs.

2023-07-17 05:15:46

relics
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/727/249/329/834/245/original/974205a369202fd2.jpeg

2023-07-17 04:45:01

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@npub1qtz…4cf3 i have one at home that is always on. it kind of has to be, because it does double duty as my personal file server, and there are jobs scheduled in it every night to make backups of various other systems that i run

2023-07-17 03:05:37

meanwhile, i have to reboot my computer at least once a week
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2023-07-14 14:01:38

paid ~€100 for the sound recorder and it's a massive upgrade to the sound quality to any video that i record.

2023-07-14 13:51:20

when i have shot video and audio separately, i always rename the files from the recorder to match the video file names. easier to keep track of.
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/712/289/180/337/387/original/58ed694438f34ccd.png

2023-07-14 08:50:43

it's perfectly natural to file bug tickets to a Linux distribution even when the problem is upstream.
it is natural because Linux distributions do their own packaging. the origin of all this software appears to be the distribution itself. also, many distributions allow you to file bugs for packages. the intended use is to discover issues with the packaging itself, but this isn't very intuitive to users.
if you go to a store and get something and there is a problem with it, you contact the store. this is how things work in the normal world.
App Store and Google Play change this rulebook a bit, but it helps that people know how those stores work, and that they're designed to channel feedback directly to the app's authors. and we know that Facebook makes the Facebook app because we're familiar with that brand.
navigating the Linux ecosystem is not easy for a beginner. it's also a subcultural minefield, because you're suddenly in direct contact with the people who built the product. it never works that way with consumer products, which are what most people are used to. it takes a change of mindset, which is not something your average computer user is looking for.

2023-07-14 08:34:57

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@npub1r06…ymdv also, since time is money, the extra effort you have to make to get FOSS software to work for you is more or less equivalent to a form of payment. so you make this payment, expecting a working product in return, and when you don't get it, you naturally feel frustrated. but since no one received anything on the other end, there is no one to complain to.

2023-07-14 08:31:37

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@npub1r06…ymdv the only mistake they made is to use a DIY type distribution like Gentoo. or possibly to use Linux at all. there is a culture among techies and his only mistake is that he's acting like a perfectly normal consumer. people talk about products in this way all the time. most humans on the planet never encounter the people who make the things they use, and most products are made by paid employees, not enthusiasts. it requires a big change of mindset to participate in the Linux ecosystem and culture. the way Linux distributions and apps market themselves sends every signal that this is a consumer product and should be treated as such, but this is misleading, which is a pet peeve i have. don't lead people on with such messaging and then get angry with them when they behave like customers.

2023-07-14 08:13:22

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@npub1r06…ymdv funny. it was exactly that comment that i could empathise with.

2023-07-14 07:03:32

i hate everything about how the techs replied to this Kdenlive user, whose software was suddenly 8X slower than normal:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8708855.html?sid=919e130e04ef20e71d087aa54a884d23
i'm often told to use forums to ask for help, but i've seen enough threads in my Google searches to know what that experience is like.
people have this tendency to deny issues that they haven't personally experienced.
it not only applies to software. if you're in a minority group and get discriminated against, you're often blamed for the problem, or told that you're imagining it.
the rest of the world essentially gaslights you about a very real problem, and you only start feeling sane again when you talk to other people who have faced the same issue.
if you then walk out as a group to raise awareness about it, the whole group gets labelled as crazy or extreme.
this is social psychology in action. it's instinctual behaviour, exhibited by most humans on the planet, and the vast majority of people never even thought of it as a problem.

2023-07-13 19:38:15

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@npub15dz…h56t my budget when walking into the pro music shop was the HS-7. then i listened to them side-to-side.
"fuuuck."
and then i ate less well that month.

2023-07-13 19:36:06

open secret: even if you buy the most expensive microphone in the world and connect it to the most expensive audio interface in the world, it's still gonna sound dull unless you know how to post-process it. you can find unprocessed sample recordings made on very expensive gear on the Internet, and it's not very exciting. the gear isn't gonna make it sound great. that's your job.

2023-07-13 19:30:21

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it sounds like i'm full of money with all this fairly expensive gear i own, but it's been purchased over time, whenever i've stumbled upon lumps of cash by chance. when i have more money than usual, i usually look for things to invest in that will be useful on the long term.

2023-07-13 19:27:52

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as for what i listen on when i process audio recordings, it's a pair of Yamaha HS-8 studio monitors driven by a Focusrite 18i20 interface. if i want to check extra fine detail, i pull out my pair of Beyerdynamic DT-770 headphones.

2023-07-13 19:26:39

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if you get the EQ just right when you record ambience, it stops sounding like a microphone recorded it, and starts sounding like you're actually there.

2023-07-13 19:25:32

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the Zoom H1n also seems to be a bit presence-forward, so for some sound environments, i find myself also pulling it down a bit at 3 kHz to make it less honky.

2023-07-13 19:23:56

i find myself consistently pulling down around 500 Hz with the sound from the Zoom H1n recorder. it sounds a bit muddy before you do that. but the sound quality is excellent, so it's very pliable when shaped with some parametric EQ.

2023-07-13 07:26:08

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@npub10ta…sw7k the biggest one being that it won't run on my Linux system because it isn't CentOS or Fedora. next big showstopper is the lack of support for compressed video in the free Linux edition. it's very stripped down compared to the free Windows/Mac edition.

2023-07-13 07:24:59

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@npub10ta…sw7k
"supports" - with serious caveats

2023-07-13 07:20:27

Lightworks is a good Linux video editor.
the big issue i'm having with it is that Lightworks Create is too stripped down, and Lightworks Pro is €19/mo.
i mean, i like it, but enough to pay the price of a phone subscription every month?
for comparison, full access to Adobe Creative Cloud costs €62/mo, and Lightworks just one app.

2023-07-10 13:11:11

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@npub1uj8…usnx i'm just surprised at the modest difference in this particular benchmark. it looks at the performance of a single core in terms of operations per second. not sure how this is measured. can old PassMark scores really be compared to new ones? there are many unknowns. it could be an issue with the benchmark. it's trying to cover a lot of generations. and should the same benchmark on a newer CPU core take advantage of new features or not?

2023-07-10 12:59:01

the single-core CPU benchmarks on PassMark don't look all that impressive compared to my 7-year-old i7-6700K.
the i7 scores 2513 while the top performer in that category scores 4789.
that's a 1.9X boost. but it's been 7 years, and this boost pales in comparison to the multi-core benchmarks. we're still just piling on more cores for performance.
if you look at PassMark's gaming score, single-core performance is single-most important component of that score.
it's hard to parallelise stuff like physics, since it has to happen in sequence, so it's still really important to have good single-core performace.
and considering it's been almost a decade now, progress in that space is at a virtual standstill now compared to the drastic performance jumps we experienced all through the 90s and early 00s.

2023-07-09 21:14:36

tried to enable experimental GPU support in Kdenlive (Linux video editor). it crashed when i tried adding a clip to the timeline.
for this content production stuff, it's somewhat tempting to just dual boot to Windows.
this is another reason for upgrading my PC. it's too old to be supported by Windows 11.

2023-07-08 10:50:08

if i was in charge of making a commercial OS based on Linux, i probably wouldn't call it Linux. i'd also throw out most of the GUI stuff and make my own. which is essentially what Android is, and ordinary people actually want to use it. macOS and iOS are similar except they did it with BSD instead of Linux.

2023-07-08 10:43:51

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if the Linux ecosystem was a boat, it would have 300 captains and everyone would be rowing in different directions, at different speeds, and blaming the others for doing it wrong.

2023-07-08 10:39:16

trying to get different bits of Linux software to work together harmoniously will quickly introduce you to the internal politics and infighting of the FOSS world.
"this isn't working."
"it's those guys' fault."
"i don't care. make it work."

2023-06-30 14:44:47

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@npub1sj5…4nsv the only way such a distribution could work is if the company that made it also made an entire ecosystem around it, where everything Just Works (TM).
...whiiich is pretty much what Apple did for macOS. BSD was turned into NeXTSTEP and then that became mac OS X. it's the closest thing out there to a user friendly Linux distribution.

2023-06-30 08:09:01

wouldn't hurt if more companies developed software for Linux, but if Apple users are the group that is most willing to pay for things, Linux users are probably the opposite extreme, with Microsoft users somewhere in between. very unattractive market.

2023-06-28 02:56:39

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well, i found a boot.efi file in my install eventually, and could see some kernel boot messages, but it appears to have rebooted in the middle of it, and is back at the UEFI boot shell again. based on what i'm finding when i start googling this specific issue, getting macOS to boot in VirtualBox is going to be a lot more complex than the how-to guides make it out to be.

2023-06-28 02:38:50

man, none of the EFI partitions for macOS look like VirtualBox would be able to boot them. i'm tempted to just install OpenCore since it comes with something that looks like a normal EFI boot loader.

2023-06-22 00:23:45

GIMP on Xfce doesn't give two fucks that i set desktop UI zoom to 200% (my monitor is 2160p), so every UI control looks comically tiny. there appears to be no setting to change it...
https://media.berserker.town/media_attachments/files/110/584/532/214/671/708/original/b9f78624579e0e7b.png

2023-06-21 16:58:22

mounting this AFPS disk on Linux to recover files from it isn't going to be as simple as i thought. getting lots of error messages. online, people are saying it's because the disk is encrypted. i can't remember enabling encryption though. also, it Apple's docs say it's your user password that unlocks the disk, but when i give that to fsapfsmount, it doesn't work.

2023-06-21 02:04:56

since no one's merging this pull request in Radicale, i just applied the patch locally, because it was causing me issues.
https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/pull/1252
i don't know how you maintain a locally deployed fork of a Python package, which is what i should be doing here, so i just patched the source file in the site packages, but that'll obviously break if i upgrade.

2023-06-20 19:17:55

(desktop Linux life)
"you're using the wrong Linux distribution"
"you're using the wrong package"
sure, but what tends to happen is that switching those out reveals other show-stopper bugs. or the one feature i needed that other one for is missing from this one.
it's a bit high maintenance. what you aren't paying in money, you're paying in time instead. there's no such thing as a free lunch.

2023-06-20 18:39:06

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@npub1gte…gx92 it kind of feels like the Fediverse because everything appears to be working at first, because it's all using the same protocol, but then you run into compatibility issues

2023-06-20 18:38:18

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@npub1gte…gx92 more specifically, it actually accepts the events that the iOS Calendar app makes. what it doesn't accept is when i try to edit them in Evolution and save them back again...