cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18205906

I have an old ThinkPad T42 coming my way. I plan to use it alongside my daily driver mainly for reading, emacs, and retro gaming. I will be dual booting a lightweight flavour of Linux (TBD) and Windows 98 on it.

However, I am a bit concerned about its ability to handle today's internet, with all of its heavy websites.

I would love to hear from those of you who are still using old ThinkPads (or other vintage laptops) in 2024. How do you make it work? Do you use lightweight browsers, specific configurations, or lightweight websites to get around the limitations of older hardware?

Are there any specific tips or tricks you can share for getting the most out of an old ThinkPad on the modern web?

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

I have an old ThinkPad T42 coming my way. I plan to use it alongside my daily driver mainly for reading, emacs, and retro gaming. I will be dual booting a lightweight flavour of Linux (TBD) and Windows 98 on it.

However, I am a bit concerned about its ability to handle today's internet, with all of its heavy websites.

I would love to hear from those of you who are still using old ThinkPads (or other vintage laptops) in 2024. How do you make it work? Do you use lightweight browsers, specific configurations, or lightweight websites to get around the limitations of older hardware?

Are there any specific tips or tricks you can share for getting the most out of an old ThinkPad on the modern web?

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16240755

Suggestions for a complimentary typeface to JetBrains Mono for reading and writing documents or prose

I am looking for a typeface that complements well to the one that I use to write code (JetBrains Mono). I will be using this to write documents and articles.

For further context, I am configuring Emacs' org-mode where I would be using both typefaces together. I could use JetBrains Mono for both purposes as I find it capable. But I would like to explore my options.

I have also looked at Iosevka. It offers variants for coding, reading, and writing. But I would prefer to stick with JetBrains Mono as much as I can for coding purposes.

In my pursuit to migrate from Vim to Emacs, I have stumbled on yet another roadblock.

When working with files that contain special whitespace characters, Vim/Neovim would automatically highlight these. This saved me a lot of time during debugging or data analysis, and is a functionality that I struggled to get to work on more modern IDEs.

However, this does not work out-of-the-box neither on vanilla Emacs nor Doom Emacs. I am unable to find any working solutions online. I assumed whitespace-mode would have handled this, but it is not the case.

It would be really helpful if the community here can help solve my problem as I deal with such characters on a daily basis. Until then, I have to pause my pursuit and stick with the trusty Neovim.

Thanks to the suggestion by @nmtake@lemm.ee, glyphless-display-mode allows me to view the characters. But it still doesn't play well with vim motions on Emacs.

Here is a demonstration, and below are the keystrokes.

1. C-v to enable VISUAL-BLOCK mode.
2. 9j to select all 9 occurrences.
3. d to delete the selection.

The above vim-motion works on Neovim but not on Emacs with evil-mode.

If anyone wants to try out here is the text I am playing with:

hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world
hello ​ world

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/14145658

[512Pixels] Logitech’s Mouse Software Now Includes ChatGPT Support, Adds Janky ‘ai_overlay_tmp’ Directory to Users’ Home Folders

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15358589

Bloomberg - Apple Says No Major App Developers Accept New Outside Payments

According to Apple, only 38 developers have applied to add such links — out of roughly 65,000 that could.

According to Apple, only 38 developers have applied to add such links — out of roughly 65,000 that could.

HMD is betting that consumers are moving to more environmentally-conscious products and are placing an emphasis on repairability. HMD says the Pulse range is built to “Gen 1 repairability” and that users can pick up self-repair kits from iFixit. Repairs include changing the battery, but also swapping the screen.

As a long time Vimmer, I have recently started using Emacs out of sheer curiosity. I chose Doom Emacs as it has evil-mode enabled by default, and do not want to dive down the rabbit hole of configuring the editor from scratch (at least, not yet!).

After installing and enabling libvterm in Emacs, I am having a frustrating experience. I configured ZSH shell to use vi-mode keybindings which interferes with evil-mode whenever I press Esc or C-[.

After having searched a little, I came across a workaround to disable evil-mode when in vterm. But it is still not a smooth experience. For instance, when switching between buffers (C-w C-w).

I would like to know how others in the community tackled this problem. Is there a better solution to this problem? Or have you made peace with the aforementioned workaround? Or have you stopped using vterm entirely?

After using Apple’s products exclusively for close to a decade, I have seen a pattern emerge with their software updates where every new update introduces a set of trivial regressions in the UX.

1. Swipe to seek a video in iOS’ native player has stopped working since I updated to iOS 17. In fact, this paper cut is what prompted me to write this post. I believe it didn’t work on iOS 15 either but worked flawlessly on iOS 16.
2. Across all of iOS 16 versions installed on my phone, long-pressing an item on screen (links, app icons, files, etc.) to show the contact menu and selecting an entry in the menu without listing the finger didn’t work. It did until iOS 15 and it does now in iOS 17.
3. Spotlight in iOS 14 (and back in iOS 10 or 11, I don’t remember well) took slightly longer to load (and even stutter on iPadOS). I don’t find this issue anymore on the same devices that had this earlier.
4. The magnifying bubble that popped up while moving the caret in a text field stopped working around iOS 14/15. It was reintroduced back in iOS 16.

Now, I understand that these regressions are unintentional unlike the botched System Preferences on macOS or the poor handling of Safari UI across iOS 15 and macOS 12.

I also understand that such regressions are bound to happen as no software is 100% QC-able, but it doesn’t mean one has to wait for an entire year to see these get fixed as is the case with the examples I have mentioned.

It could also be the case that these issues are localised to my devices, and that the yearly updates perhaps cleans the slate (the good ol’ reboot-machine-to-rid-error fix). Regardless, I have raised bug reports for all these and more, along with feature requests.

I would like to hear your experiences across major/minor software updates on Apple devices or services.

Also, let this serve as a PSA to file bug reports if you have the time and effort to spare, it helps the developers a lot (Apple or otherwise). Here is a comprehensive guide to report bugs for a variety of Apple’s offerings:

Bug Reporting: How and Why?

E: Through one of the deleted comments made on this post, I learned that the removal of the magnifying bubble while typing in iOS 13 was intentional.

I know that Nord, Catppuccin and Dracula support a range of apps. There is also Solarized and Gruvbox which have been ported by the community to many other apps.

I have been using Nord (Solarized before it) for a long time and wanted to change things up. I am not really a fan of the use of purple in Dracula and Catppuccin. So, curious if there are more themes out there?

I would submit a feedback every time I missed the feature while using the app.

I can now stop using Google Photos. :D