> "hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun."
I'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.
How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion.
In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
I'd like to know what post above yours is using as well.
I'm posting this from the venerable links in a terminal.
HN works OK on a text mode browser, including find in page.
This level of functionality isn't the rule though.
"HN works OK on a text mode browser, including find in page."
Perhaps that's one reason why I spend so much time on HN
"95% of the time", I am a text-mode command line user, no graphics layer (note difference between "text-mode" and "terminal"; I'm not using the later)
I make choices in software based on what I think works well for command line use and what fits own aesthetic preferences
TBH I have no idea what are other peoples' preferred aesthetics, I only know mine
Currently,
I submit/reply/edit on HN using tiny shell scripts, no browser (TCP client to send the HTTP, custom text-processing filter to format the request body)
I search HN using a local SQLite database and a shell one-liner
I read HN using links (modified with some personal changes)
In the past I have stated that I use links as an "HTML reader"; I do not necessarily use links to make HTTP requests nor do I necessarily consume all webpage content as HTML; mostly I am using links to read HTML offline, e.g., an HTML file saved to a tmpfs directory
The point I'm trying to make when I mention I'm not using a popular browser is that, according to the design of the www, www users (e.g., me) get to choose the
software, not web developers or website operators
As such, I would not expect any other www users to necessarily use the same software; nor would I expect any www user to care about any other www user's personal preferences, particularly mine; others could have different expectations
Each www user can choose whatever software they want, including software that isn't popular
When I mention I'm not using a popular browser, I sometimes get these "what browser are you using" comments
I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring
I wish the question was something like "how do you view [example.com]", where example.com is some website the commenter visits that causes them to believe popular
web browsers are required for _every_ website
Chances are, I do not visit the same website; every www user is different
But if I knew what this website was, then perhaps I could demonstrate how I might extract the information I wanted from it and read it as a text file
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed description of your methodology for reading and interacting with Web sites. I found it interesting and I'm going to look a little more closely at what actually happens when I type a Web address into a browser address bar!
I don't spend that much time on HN hence the delay in replying.
> "I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring"
I sort of guessed that you were not using a 'standard' Web browser (tui or gui) which is why I became interested. At least you now have a text that you can post a link to next time someone becomes insistent about this.
Bookworm will get updates for another year if I have read the Debian Wiki correctly so perhaps there is no need for immediate action as Bookworm becomes oldstable?
In addition to Mint and AntiX there is also Slackware (I use xfce rather than KDE) but adding software outside the (large) base install is not an 'apt-get thing' process.
Salix Linux, based on Slackware, does have package repositories with a reasonable selection of applications. Salix is based on the stable Slackware 15.0 so has nicely aged packages.
Void Linux also has an xfce4 based live i686 iso you can look at and decide to install from.
I also use xfce, my computer is an Acer Aspire One, limited in ... well everything, I did upgrade the storage to an SSD, but it's still an Atom CPU, so whatever is the lightest is the best.
If anyone wonders about motivation for this sort of thing, Adam Nicholson's Sea Room might be worth a look. Nicholson was the owner of the Shiants, three small islands off the Hebrides.
Each of the Shiants are a bit larger and have more features than this fort on a rock though. And Nicholson inherited them and passed them on to his son.
When I was self-employed for a shortish period, I went for an assessment interview. The HMRC bod spent most of the 20 minutes trying to find expenses I could claim tax relief on. There wasn't much (working at home, using my own laptop, writing teaching materials based on existing knowledge &c).
We have automatic deductions on paychecks too, the problem is the complicated system of deductions and the way capital gains are handled that we have to apply after that.
Trump and Republicans actually simplified it a lot with their temporary tax changes that boosted up the "standard deduction" that everyone can take at the cost of nerfing a bunch of "itemized deductions" that are more likely to apply to people in blue states (state tax deductions, property tax deductions) with the sneaky provision that the boost to the standard deduction would expire when he was no longer in office in order to make the bill "tax neutral" and let them pass it through budget reconciliation.
Which is nuts, but has actually made filing taxes much simpler and closer to what it should be for some time.
Oddly enough for reasons(+) I've been looking into Gnome's workflows and I have Debian Wheezy with 3.4 on an old machine and
Debian 12 with Gnome 43 on the current laptop.
I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash).
Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce?
(+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.
Monetisation: how about a periodical publication? Edited and curated around a theme and then contributors can write to an appropriate length. Spin-off courses and perhaps even individual sessions where a general theme is applied to a specific situation?
I'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.
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