I’m so done with “browsing” YouTube. I also hardly ever click the links anymore when people post them here, and that is because of the ads.
There are some good channels that I occasionally checkout whenever I’m really bored, and I absolutely don’t mind them getting the ad revenue like any other free tv show, but it’s nothing that I can’t do without.
In my opinion, good YT channels who make quality content ought to apply for other mean of distribution that doesn’t scare away viewers. Let’s say that f.i. Numberphile, Veritasium or Primitive Technology were on Netflix or even Disney+, I’d prefer to watch it there. That’s how bad YouTube is.
If YouTube managed to get part of the all-in deals that I have on the other “real” streaming services, then they’d get some fraction of whatever my cellphone carrier pays to those. Right now I just don’t want to bother with it.
Notepad is used by anyone who wants to see what is actually in a text file.
It’s used a lot for stuff where data is transferred in a text format. Comma separated files etc. are still widely used for transferring data flawlessly without having to convert types or mapping a document standard or whatever method that could potentially fuck up or just take more time. It’s simple and it works.
F.i if you open a file in excel or word, change one character and then save, you can bet that the entire file is fucked up afterwards, because those programs don’t show the data directly. The moment you open it, it might very well be fucked up just from that. If you transfer a file by some kind of JSON format, which is all the rage currently you’ll have to map it from both ends, and it also begs the question: Why are we doing running all this code just to transfer one byte?
The beauty of text files is that it’s (almost) raw data. (Only “almost” because there are still different localization standards that can fuck up even a text file.)
Notepad covers that. Of course we could use other apps for viewing data, but most of the time, it actually is text and not hexidemal codes or whatever you can save in bytes.
Programming wise, the only thing I use notepad for is making DOS batch files. Again, because it’s raw text and should be created and read as such. No parsing, no compiling. Just text. I’ll also use it for storing data for programs, because it’s easy and raw.
For actual programs, it’d be better to get Notepad++ or MS visual studio code, which at least will highlight commands and collapse functions etc. And still, these also aren’t actually IDEs, because they don’t compile the code (unless you get those add-ins).
We could also use those for text files as well, but it’s overkill. I don’t really want to open an app to view data. Notepad is small and quick and not bloated with features, which is ideal for whenever I only want to see what’s in the file.
The original MS Paint was similar for pictures. They fucked that up real good. Its been…14 years and I haven’t really gotten over how bad it is. It used to be pixel perfect and logical, but now you can’t even save a file with transparency, but hey here’s s brush with stroke width and blur that’ll make sure you can’t edit a single pixel. Way to go Microsoft.
If they do the same to Notepad, I’ll have to resign my job, because it’s not going to work like that.
The only rule on punctuation that I ever learned in English was:
If in doubt - leave it out
Anyway, I fully acknowledge that my cellphone autocorrected my first comment wrongly and that “its” should have had an apostrophe. I’m just not going to edit it, because it makes no sense in any other way, so no one should be able to misunderstand the sentence and the grammar nazi added nothing of value.
My first conscious memory is of me gaining consciousness at age 3 or so. Everything before that are visual or tactile memories that are difficult to describe.
Anyway, when I had children myself, I suddenly remembered a lot more of those. Things that I never knew that I remembered somehow got recalled by watching my own child do the same things. So at age 40 I vividly and weirdly remembered what it’s like to be standing in a crib, holding and twisting the bannisters.
Tactile memories are weird. I’ve always enjoyed coming to my grandparents house later in life, because of the way the handles on the cupboards feel just the way they’re supposed to.
I either hate or love The Far Side. This one hits the spot.
I bought a really old house and some years later an old local guy came in (for completely different reasons), and asked “So you got rid of all the holes?”
And I go “What holes?”
“Yeah the owners some 30 years ago put holes in all the walls to run his train track all over the house.”
I’d like to take moment to appreciate that Space Oddity was released 54 years ago and still hits my daily feed.
Bowie always presented himself as just some dude doing whatever he wanted to do, and while I never did much to seek him out, he still constantly pops up in my life in the most peculiar ways.
Hopefully future historians will be able to explain what he actually did, because I have no clue, but his influence obviously transcended the medium that he used for doing it.