XMPP and Matrix don't require a phone number and have fine mobile apps.

And there's a reason they've achieved precisely zero penetration amongst normies.

A chat app is useless if your friends and family won't use it.

I've actually had good luck getting friends and family on Matrix, after they'd previously used either Facebook Messenger or Hangouts.

>the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame

Where? I don't think it's illegal in the US at least. The only things I'm aware of that may have legal issues are related to radios, specifically modem/baseband stuff, and maybe WLAN cards.

Sorry, I meant that decompilation is practically illegal.

You can look at a circuit board and figure things out and there are clean room techniques for decompilation - but neither of these are practical

That's quite the leap. The work is already done, they just can't/won't ship the driver in base, right? Isn't it comparable to installing Debian and needing to load in non-free drivers separately?

I always saw Broadcom as evil, and saw Raspberry Pi as just reusing cheap parts from set top boxes or similar, with all the proprietary stuff that that comes with.

>I also do not enjoy the idea of using the bottom of a laptop on concrete. The latter material isn't nice for scratches (and every time it is put or leaves concrete is a potential mark).

You can get concrete pretty smooth. Look up what some people do with polished concrete floors. Epoxy is sometimes used on top as well. You can get it as shiny as a bowling alley, and smooth enough to slide around on in your socks.

"ten oh oh 7" (how I'd say it or remember it) still seems simpler than "eff dee dee dee colon colon 7". While with ipv4 the dots can be assumed for pauses, v6 doesn't put colons as often, also I could easily see myself forgetting the amount of "d"s. I don't wanna seem too anti-v6, though, I am in favor of everyone adopting the more modern thing.

edit: Well, you said easier to type. I guess I probably agree with that.

There is also the fact that an IPv6 IP has a maximum and minimum number of characters and separators, but not a set one, so the length of any given address is variable.

Instead of being able to run a groove in my head mentally, and read with any sort of rhythm, I have to read them like binary bytes. Every address feels like a foreign phone number where your normal rhythm doesn't fit, but it never gets better.

Perhaps, IMO, the greatest and only sin of IPv6. That and using fucking colons.

Dots weren't an option, because then the syntax would overlap with DNS hostnames. "2001.db8.c.d.e.f.g.ca" is a valid host under the .ca TLD.

TIC-80 is a nice free as in freedom alternative to PICO-8, and it allows more inputs, which makes for better Tetris games (gotta have that hold piece).

TIC-80 is wonderful to play in. Besides being free/open, another advantage over PICO-8 is TIC-80 has native support for Fennel. i.e. you can code within the system editor in Lua OR Fennel (or half a dozen other languages!) You don't have to edit and transpile to Lua on the desktop as you would with PICO-8. This has some value in debugging with error messages and line numbers.

It's also just plain cool to rock the TIC-80 editor fullscreen with narrow font, coding natively in Lisp and publishing the result to a webpage you can share.

I wish the iOS (app) deployment story was a little smoother for TIC-80.

Wait really? I looked into tic80 a while ago and I know it had native support for moon script, but I had to play with it to get fennel to work

Is this about Master of Blocks?

There are a lot of free-as-in-freedom alternatives to (and clones of) PICO-8, but TIC-80 is indeed the most popular one, by far. And popularity is important for any software ecosystem. I really like that it supports other languages, even if that kinda inhibits its ability to be embedded into small hardware.

Apparently the nightly release supports DCPM samples now. Dunno why.

TIC-80 is great indeed, I had even ore fu with it than with PICO-8 and that's a high bar.

But there is one gripe -- when packaging apps into executable, TIC-80 pulls templates from the Internet.

On one hand, it's not that big deal, we are online basically all time nowadays. But on the other hand, I would expect that kind of software to be self-contained.

I found a quite simple (but definitely not frictionless) workaround though - you can build the templates yourself, edit source code to work with localhost instead of TIC website, and host the templates on local webserver.

As I said, it's not a frictionless solution, but I don't know C well enough to make more substantial changes to this behaviour.

I'm planning on doing a TIC-80 implementation as one of the first major pieces of software on an OS I plan on working on (I've already designed the OS on paper, I just need to actually do the hard part (actually implementing it))

It's just that pico8 has much larger ecosystem. There's a new great game almost every day. It is sort of annoying that it's not FOSS, but on the other hand the team/author has sustainable business.

Which free software license was it under?

formally AGPL but they add impossible conditions so it's not really AGPL

It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.

For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).

Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.

About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).

If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.