Thunderbird

 I had an 'apt hold' on Thunderbird for several years. The new versions had too much whitespace everywhere, and given that I had like 80 subfolders in my mailbox made it unusable for me. All 80 could not fit on my 4K screen, even with the tiniest font settings, because 90 percent was whitespace.

Previous versions of Thunderbird had a much more compact look.

This picture (from over two years ago) compares two versions of Thunderbird, the newer one on the right.

I find whitespace a waste of space.

Yet, sticking with an ancient version is probably not the best idea, so since Trixie I decided to 'suffer thru it' and install the newest Thunderbird.

With the new Thunderbird comes another annoyance... the old version always offered me the choice between opening a picture in gimp or ristretto. The new version has this:

Who designs these things? When it is a good idea to choose between two identical options?

Later today I may find time to file a proper bug report.

Debian Trixie

So my PC, installed with Buster, upgraded to Bullseye, upgraded to Bookworm, is now upgraded to Trixie. The previous upgrades were smooth, Trixie has some annoyances.

 

last, lastb, lastlog are unavailable?

I liked these utils! They were removed because they are not Year 2038 compliant. I do feel honored for being mentioned on the Debian mailing list about this issue:

"Yes, the people who are likely to care are admins with cobwebby
homebrew cronjobs that regularly generate painstakingly formatted
security reports and send them to the fax machine, or whatever."

So yes, only a minor annoyance. There are new tools, but I still live in 1984. :)

each paused mpv uses 2-3 percent CPU???

Starting mpv four times, and pausing the four videos, gives me this:

PID USER    PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 244578 pol     20   0 6614584 378620 239952 S   2.7   0.6   0:03.07 mpv
 244641 pol     20   0 6628548 404728 250220 S   2.3   0.6   0:02.99 mpv
 244706 pol     20   0 6690264 525200 307212 S   2.3   0.8   0:02.49 mpv
 244768 pol     20   0 6723580 513508 342240 S   2.3   0.8   0:02.48 mpv

This is not good! I often have several of these open, up to ten. Can't do that anymore :(


PC is hotter all the time???

k10temp-c3 and nvme-100 are notably hotter all the time. Even after closing all programs, except a terminal (and the XFCE4 desktop), these temps do not go below 34 and 38. Before the upgrade k10temp-c3 often dropped to 26. (Yes the PC is clean of dust.)

right-click context menu requires scroll?

I have a 4K screen and yet some richt-click-context-menus require scrolling? Why? The display can stack at least five of these on top of each other and still have room to spare. Who decided this was a good idea?

xfce4-panel refuses to start (including panel-settings)

When the upgrade to Trixie is finished, you do a reboot. And most annoyingly my xfce4-panel did not show. It flickers four times in less than a second and then disappears forever. Same for the panel settings. I tried removing all of the xfce directories in my home folder, but that does not help.

I ended up creating a new user account, at least that works. I made a bug report, but have little hope for this: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1110743

I vaguely remember adding some 'hacks' to the panel in 2020, for example it always showed the number of seconds since my birth. Bullseye and Bookworm had no problem with it...

No worries, Debian is still the best!

Nieuwe hobby: Venus Vliegenvangers

 Tot zover de nieuwe hobby. Venuskes zijn niet de gemakkelijkste om gelukkig te maken.

Nieuwe hobby: Sarracenia

 Enkele van de Sarracenia zoals ze nu buiten staan. Die eten veel insecten, vooral wespen.

Nieuwe hobby: Nepenthes

Nieuwe hobby sinds 2021; vleesetende plantjes kweken.

Hier vijf bekertjes die Nepenthes mij geven.

2025 = (20 + 25)²

2025 = (20 + 25)²

2025 = 45²

2025 = 1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³

2025 = (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)²

2025 = 1+3+5+7+9+11+...+89

2025 = 9² x 5²

2025 = 40² + 20² + 5²

book: Gabor Mate, Scattered Minds

 

A book written by a doctor that has ADD himself, and it shows.

I was annoyed in the first half by his incessant use of anecdotes to prove that ADD is not genetic. It felt like he had to convince himself, and it read as an excuse for his actions as a father.

He uses clear and obvious examples of how not to raise a child (often with himself as the child or the father) to play on the readers emotion. Most of these examples are not even related to ADD.

But in the end, definitely the second half, it is a good book. Most people will recognize several situations and often it does make one think about life choices and interpretation of actions and emotions.

So for those getting past the disorganization (yes there are parts and chapters in this book, but most of it feels randomly disorganized), the second half of the book is a worthy thought provoking read.

Dissapointing Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition

What a disaster this is, the DIY framework laptop.

The box...

...contains more boxes.

The parts are few...

...so the laptop is assembled in less than a minute?!

Unpacking the thing took longer than assembling it!

Reading this webpage took longer than assembling it!

Installing the DDR5 memory took 1 second: click and done.
Installing the nvme took 3 seconds: unscrew one screw, click and screw.
Installing the bezel was far more challenging, took almost 30 seconds! (*)
Attaching the keyboard: about three seconds?
Installing the four modules: 1 second per module (or less?)

I'm not that good at irony, but I was hoping for at least 20 minutes of fun assembling this thing... and only got one minute. :-/

(*) This gave fond memories of assembling tower PC's in the nineties; ISA/PCI slots click, CD-ROM atapi click, hard disk and IDE jumpers easy. But closing the tower case... well that was the hard part!

Installing an OS

The guide says to be patient when booting (powering on) the laptop for the first time, it may take several minutes.

I timed it, it took 57 seconds to get to this screen:

And now there is this; it has been a long time since I saw a default XFCE, Firefox and terminal.

Let the fun begin!

four books

 

Charlie Mackesy - The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse (2019)

In so far as you can read this book, I read this book. This book allows you to read one page, and then ponder on it for a week. It's a story, but it is also not a story but more a psychological insight into humans. I will probably open this book again several times this year to discover even more about the meaning of a single page.

Brian W. Kernighan - Understanding the digital world (2021)

Kernighan is famous for co-authoring "The C programming Language" with Dennis Ritchie in 1978 and I have always looked up to him.

In this book he gives an excellent overview of computers and networks, including an easy to read introduction to programming, cryptography and (digital) privacy. I would not advice this book for IT-nerds, since it is way too simple. It is though as good an overview as is possible in 260 pages.

David Kushner - Masters of Doom (2003)

Well this was an excellent read! Enjoyable, intriguing, educational and probably only for fans of Doom or of John Carmack.

The book tells the story of the two John's that created the DooM game in the early nineties. David Kushner interviewed a lot of people to get a complete picture of their youth, their first meeting, the development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and of course DooM, and also many games after that like Quake and Heretic.

This book is a nice combo with Sid Meier's Memoir.

Sid Meier's Memoir (2020)

I wanted to link to my tiny review of this book, which I read in 2021, but it turns out I have not written anything about it yet.

The story of the creation of the civilization series of games is a really good read, though probably only if you lived in this era and played some of the early Civilization games. Or earlier 'versions' like Empire or Empire Deluxe, which are mentioned in this book for serving as inspiration for the first Civilization game.

I like the 4X turn-based system of gaming, too bad there are almost no other good games using this (Chess comes close though).