Adderbox76

Hear me out here:

The Essential Phone was let down by a LOT of other factors. Camera Quality was the biggest for sure, but also the touch screen could be glitchy and in general not as responsive as it's peers. Lack of wireless charging, poor marketing, etc...

But...

As far as design goes; how it felt in the hand, the size of it, the build materials (ceramic and titanium), the screen-to-body ratio, the weight, even simply how it felt in the back pocket of your jeans. I have never met it's equal.

So much so that there is STILL a dedicated group keeping her going through projects like LineageOS and e/OS.

Heck, I still use it as my daily driver (on e/os) and ever time I think I'm going to put my sim-card into something slightly newer because the Essential doesn't have 5G, I quickly realize that I don't really need 5G that damn badly after all and I switch back.

Someday, the battery will stop holding a charge for more than a day and a half. Or someday, I'll drop it and the ultimate failure of the Ceramic back will slap me in the face. And on that day I'll be sad.

Been Manjaro for years and years. Latest update (due to my own screw-up...not the distro's fault) shit the bed and corrupted my timeshift backups (again...my fault...not the distro)

Wasn't too concerned because a) I keep everything on a backup drive, and b) I'm a big believer that every computer needs to be refreshed with a new install every few years anyway.

But now that that time is upon me, I got to thinking about maybe giving CachyOS a shot for the "performance improvements". But my desktop is coming up on 9 years old (AMD A10 processor). Would it even be worth it to try Cachy in that instance, or would the performance difference between that and Manjaro be negligible on that particular processor?

Still in the early early stages. Can be a little slow going since I'm treating this like a training project to strengthen my Python skills. Typing mechanics are nailed down, basic UI is in place.

Next is to get the functionality working for new-page, save, export, etc... and the correction tape mode.

I want to go back to the absolute basics for a while; to see if there's something from my old pre-computer life that I have lost.

When I was a teenager in the early 90s, I wrote like crazy on a giant, loud, electric typewriter. It whirred. It clacked. It needed me to manually hit the carraige return just like the older manual typewriters that it had come from.

The old days. No backspace deletion, no italics. Bold meant backing up and typing over the same word twice for effect.

There are apps like focus writer, etc... But I'm looking for something more

There is an online app called typewritesomething.com, and it has the option of installing it. But when I do, it's sluggish and imperfect. So I was hoping someone knew of something just like that, but in a locally installed program (Linux would be ideal, but WINE allows me to run Windows programs just fine and dandy)

Blank Page. Typewriter sound. No deletion on backspace. When you backup and retype, it has the effect of typing over the previous text. Manual carraige return. Literally no other features.

Any ideas?

I was thinking this while watching the SpaceX flight get scrubbed for the third time in as many days.

I don't know if it was the stream I happened to be watching, but it was just a heavy heavy circle jerk about how part of the goal of Starship is to have "30 minutes" to anywhere on earth by going suborbital.

But it struck me that business relies on consistency. Flights leaving on time, arriving on time. If I have a conference in Hong Kong, am I going to wait three days for the perfect launch conditions because my sub-orbital flight launch is delayed by a bad cloud somewhere in the launch zone?

Until orbital and suborbital launches ae robust enough to happen like clockwork in ANY weather condition, it'll never be popular enough to be feasible.

Since Wrestlemania there's been nothing but stories about John Cena winning an amazing 17th title, blah blah blah... It's a "History making moment", yadda yadda yadda...

Like...of course he did. It's the storyline. It's quite literally "in the script".

This isn't an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night's hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

I get it. I loved Wrestling growing up. Back when we all WERE pretending it was real; Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, etc... But I thought at some point they steered into the whole "entertainment" aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.

It sure would explain the similarity between the ever more potential state of America and her novel The Handmaid's Tale.

For example, why do we say "Your pupils are dilated". They aren't. It's the iris aperture that is dilated.

My work uses a whole lot of group texts. I don't know why they don't use something like Signal or whatever...it is what it is.

But every Google Message alternative I've tried sends my replies to every member of the group individually rather than replying IN the group chat itself. Is that an issue with the app itself, or in the settings, or something else entirely.

I want to move away from anything that is linked in any way to stupid Gemini. But this is the last thing keeping me using Google's built-in Messages app.