n8   Doesn't follow you @n8@mastodon.social

ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʟᴇꜱꜱ

I'm giving a talk about documentation later on this week, and I want to cite some examples beyond my personal favorites. So, open floor: what FOSS projects would you say do a really good job of documenting (1) tutorial-style material, (2) troubleshooting/diagnosing errors, (3) how to port from another (competing?) platform? Or just in general, if none of those prompt a strong reaction?

I'm a whole lot less impressed with the state of mulit-touch interfaces this weekend as I've been wearing a band-aid over my fingertip. You people have a lot left to figure out.

Contenuous Integration.

Possible podcast ideas: "Release Note Theatre"

Unnamed Large Free-Software Desktop Environment Project: "We have a strict policy on usernames. It applies uniformly to everyone. Everyone newer than a few years ago, that is. And the people other than yourself who we made exceptions for because somebody felt like it."

I'm always a little puzzled when arbitrary "statistics" start circulating the social-media waters and causing alarm. Case in point these days: "70% of global emissions come from 100 companies."

What number were people expecting that to be instead, if that one is shocking? 200 companies? 500 companies? I mean, we're clear it's going to be the world's largest companies, by definition, right? People are shocked that large companies account for lots of this (or any other) activity?

In another front on the "containerized app" wars, apparently if I install GIMP 2.10 through a snap or flatpak package, I can't use G'MIC with it. Who's got a fix for that? 'Cuz I can forsee this being a recurring issue with other applications I use that have extension mechanisms. Which will really bite.

Enough time beating my head against a rooted home-automation hub; life's too short. Now to move on to beating my head against incomplete file-format specifications.

Does Mastodon allow you to turn off reblogs?

Possibly Apple?

Although as far as I know, Microsoft does not hold any typeface design patents. Nor, really, does anyone other than Adobe.

Well, thanks to the Conservancy blog post about the limits & termination clause of the OIN license agreement, I went and read the agreement. Interesting to note that it explicitly covers typeface-design patents (although *not* other design patents).
https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/oin-license-agreement/

Today in "confusing things that sap brain cycles", there is now somebody on a mailing list I subscribe to who is named "Ted Guild" and who is definitely not @ted .... I need my neurons for spotting TXLF messages, thankyouverymuch, not for sifting through dopplegangers. #somepeople #ideclare

Hey, whatever happened to the "Next Thing" C.H.I.P. people?

So, basically, right now there's a broken feature in GNOME Shell, and if I want to look at extension code that others have written (if hopes of fixing it myself), I can't. Plus 60% of the search results from the Extensions DB are dead, and another 20% is code that I can install to my machine and run, but which I *cannot* get the source code to.

Back-reference: all of that was intented to be posted tagged with 'cw' (whatever that stands for) as 'The GNOME Shell Extensions Crapyard', but it isn't because #Whalebird can't correctly count the number of characters in the toot, and fails to post if I turn on the 'cw' field.

Gonna be one of those mornings, is it?

OK. It bugs the hell out of me that the Bluetooth on/off toggle DISAPPEARS if you toggle it to off. That's an antifeature.
But it gets worse. I search the Extensions site for Bluetooth to see if there's an extension to fix this, where I find:
1 result where the upstream URL is dead
3 results where the EXTENSIONS SITE PAGE is 404
1 result that's still alive, but irrelevant

I eventually Wayback my way to a copy of the dead-upstream URL, and the source it points to is now 404 at Gitorious.org

At *best* all that a typeface like OpenDyslexia will do is force the reader to slow down by spending incrementally more time deciphering every word image or by rereading. And you can do that with any bad typeface design: just use hard-to-figure-out letterforms! Use bad spacing! Print in a really light ink color! Slowing the reader down is not improving the situation for them.

(noted now because this has come up again)