#unix forever

[nephaelia-sims]

When you try to start playing sims again but you're a UNIX based OS user and you forget that downloading a ton of shit onto a Windows PC just willy nilly is a BAD IDEA

So you have to figure out *(more like your windows programming background bf does and you help when he gets frustrated)* how to make a boot key and completely clean reinstall windows... Like, I'm not SURE it was anything from the mods, but I did go from ridiculously good performance on anything I did to... bad. on anything. Right after transferring 100+ gb of CC from my old external drive from my mac and downloading a handful of new things and updates on script mods. So yeah I need help, fml lol

[postgamecontent]

The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer

One topic that often comes up in retro gaming circles is how aspects of gaming history not part of the American story don't get enough attention. I personally feel it's mostly up to the people to whom the stories belong to tell them. So I am going to follow my own advice today and tell the tale of a computer that statistically speaking almost no one has used, and some of that computer's software. I have to tell this story from memory, because this computer and its software functionally no longer exist. Practically no photographs of any of its games exist. We're relying on decades-old recall here, so… I'll do my best.

The Unisys ICON was a computer developed as an initiative by the Ontario Ministry of Education to create a standard for Ontario schools. It used an Intel 80186 CPU and its OS was an early version of a Unix-like system that eventually came to be known as QNX. Yes, the Blackberry one. Still in use, I believe. Each Unisys ICON came with its own monitor and a very robust keyboard with a trackball embedded in it. Computers ran in a network from a designated server machine. They were pretty expensive and the whole program was quite controversial, with many considering it a colossal waste of tax money. I mean, in hindsight… probably?

The first line of ICONs were introduced to schools in Ontario in 1984, and support for the platform continued until 1994. During that time, several models were created along with a fair bit of bespoke software. Most of it was meant to be educational, used for teaching programming to older kids and more general lessons to younger ones. I don't recall any pure games without any educational component, although some of them really danced on that line. When the ICON program was canceled in 1994, the Archives of Ontario declined to preserve the ICON and its software. They were all ordered to be destroyed, and just about all of them were.

Only a few fully working models are known to be in existence today, and some of the software was just straight-up lost forever. No emulators exist, and there is no way to play any ICON software unless you have access to one of those few remaining units. So yes, all my UK friends out there? I know you dislike it when Americans make jokes about your Spectrum and Amiga computers and games, but you can only joke about something if you've heard about it. No one jokes about the ICON. I mean, until they find out about its nickname, "The Bionic Beaver". That's easy pickins.

My elementary school in a small Northwestern Ontario town had about a hundred students total from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 6. It was such a small school, we didn't even have a Grade 5 class and teacher. They just divided the Grade 5 students by academic achievement and stuck the higher achievers in the Grade 6 class and the lower ones stayed in the Grade 4 class with slightly more difficult texts and homework. Anyway, it was a small school. It no longer exists. But in the 1980s, we had a couple of Apple II computers. They were pretty old by then, and the green and black monitors didn't impress kids who had tasted the Commodore 64, Tandy, or NES. But hey, we played Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and Crosscountry Canada on them when we could.

I remember when we got our ICONs. It was a pretty big deal! Our school received four of them, with one designated as the server. They were put in a prime location in the hallway, between the fourth grade classroom and the school entrance. If a person was going to the auditorium, they'd have to pass by them. Not like those Apple IIs, tucked away in a less traveled part of the hallways. Our school was proud of those ICONs, and the student body was excited to use them. One of the fun things about visiting the junior high school was that it had a whole lab of ICONs, with different games. Pure decadence! Absolutely sick!

Anyway, the memories of Xennials from Ontario are by and large all that remains of these things now. Even the Wikipedia entry's list of software is missing games I know I played on there. So what can you do? I'm going to talk about some of the games I remember, and since literally no screenshots exist, I drew some pictures. Quickly, mind you. And from 35+ year old memories, no less. Sorry, it's all I've got.

(Not actual screenshots)

SpectICON: This was a paint program, and when our ICON computers were turned on this is what they defaulted to. When the program loaded up, it had a colorful picture of a tree in autumn in place. You could change the palette using the trackball, and if you rolled it with some power the colors of the tree would wildly alternate. My friend Peter dubbed this "Disco Tree". It could do some simple animation, mostly by morphing between two images. I used this to make an animation of a robot turning into a car, because I was ten years old in 1989 and Transformers was the thing.

Offshore Fishing: One of the more popular games in my school. You would move your boat to different locations on a map, after which it would switch to a side-view. You then used the trackball to maneuver your fishing net, trying to catch as much as you can. If a shark comes, it will break your net and you'll lose a lot of money. This was supposed to teach us about the fishing industry, I think?

Math Maze: Another popular one in my school. You would make your way through a maze, battling monsters and looking for treasures. You could pick a knight or a wizard, and your choice of weapon between a sword and a wand. Knight with wand was splendid. No effect on the gameplay, of course. When you met a monster or found a treasure, it was time to do MATH. The last boss of the dungeon would ask what weighed more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold. We were very proud when we sorted out the answer to that one. The cut-out box at the side showing a close-up of the action had some interesting visuals, at least.

A Day in the Life Of: We didn't have this one at my school, but the junior high school had it and I played it there. A strange game where you played as a student, and you could just straight up cut school and go to the mall if you wanted to. The mall had some different spots to visit, including an arcade where you could play a minigames called Mutant Bunnies Attack or something. It was basically Activision's Kaboom, and since we had a trackball… well, this was a pretty good time. I don't remember the actual point of this one.

Crosscountry Canada & Lemonade Stand: You might know these games from other platforms. They were ported to the ICON and played pretty much the same way here as anywhere else. Both were old hat for us and didn't get much play as a result.

Greenhouse: A gardening game. You had to grow plants by setting a variety of conditions, including temperature, watering, and sunlight. Each plant had different needs, but if you could sort it out you would be rewarded by seeing them grow. I messed around with this one a bit, but it was on the junior high school computers so I didn't get to play it as much as I would have liked.

Robot R&D: Robots! This was a cool one. You would build a robot from different parts and materials. You could then put them through a variety of tests to see how they would react. You could immerse them in water, try to crush them, or just drop them from high places. For most kids, you had them at "build a robot".

There were lots of other games, but these were the ones I played and the ones I remember. I wish I could tell you about all of them, but this is the limit of my knowledge. Maybe someone else out there can remember other ones and talk about them? I hope that one day this off-beat, highly geographically and temporally localized computer is properly archived and its software is made accessible again. I would like to play Offshore Fishing at least one more time in my life. Thanks for reading!

Extra Note: I just remembered the darned things would say HELLO when you booted them up. A talking computer?!

[aqwult]

1 trillion tiny bespoke unix scripts peace and love forever

[redvioletarts]

Pins for programmers, geeks, and compsci nerds

You Had Me At Hello World

"Hello World" is a really old tradition, by tech standards--the Jargon File dates it back to the classic C/Unix days. It's the first test message you print to standard output when you're learning a new programming language.

These days, you might also throw a "Hello World" in a <p> element real quick when you're checking whether your new website's DNS has propagated or your WordPress install is displaying posts cleanly. Maybe it's even what you write in a sample doc when you want to make sure your printer's hooked up right. Basically, it's the minimalist Lorem Ipsum of the programmer world.

And now it's a pin. For fashion. Geeky, geeky fashion.

Progress Incremented

The ++ symbol (aka the incrementor) is often used to express approval or "good job!" in coding circles. Get this pin to celebrate your progress.

Magic / More Magic

The Magic / More Magic Switch is a reference to a piece of obscure old-school hacker lore. Some geek long ago (in the PDP-10 era!) managed to make a switch that, in theory, really shouldn't have been able to do anything, but because of a fluke of electrical engineering it'd crash the computer if you flipped it from "more magic" to just "magic."

Fortunately, the switch on the pin will stay on "more magic" forever, because that's how it's drawn. An excellent good-luck charm for your favorite computer engineer.

Inadvisably Applied JS

JavaScript (derogatory) -- but that doesn't mean we'll stop reaching for it to do... probably too much, from little bits of swoopy animations on a website's front end to whatever random thing you need to hack together with a scripting language real quick.

The design is very human. Is it scalable? No. Is it maintainable? No. Is it portable? ...Not really. But at least the pin is! Get it here.

[mentalisttraceur-software]

Process "File" Descriptors (PID FD)

Linux in recent years has fixed some of the biggest annoyances I had with the UNIX model, and I'm feeling rather happy about this. One example of this is with how you can refer to processes.

With traditional UNIX APIs, you can never signal a process without a PID reuse race condition. The problem is somewhat inherent to the model: a PID is just an integer reference to a kernel-level Thing, but crucially, that Thing is not being passed around between processes. If I tell you the PID 42, that's not qualitatively different from you randomly picking the number 42 - either way, you can try to signal whichever process currently has PID 42. You might not have permissions to signal the current resident of that PID for other reasons, but you don't need a prior relationship to signal it - you don't need to receive any capability object from anyone. I haven't given you something tied to any process, I just gave you a number, and in the traditional UNIX model there's nothing better (more intrinsically tied to a single process) to pass around.

Compare file descriptors. An FD is also "just" an integer, but having that integer is worthless unless you also have the kernel-level Thing shared with your process. Even if I give you the number 2, you can't write to my stderr - I have to share my stderr, for example by inheritance or by passing it through a UNIX domain socket.

This difference is subtle but technically crucial for eliminating race conditions: since an FD has to be shared from one process to another through the kernel, and the underlying "file" descriptor/description is managed and owned by the kernel, when you later use the FD in a system call, the kernel can always know a fully unambiguous identity of which Thing you were referring to. If you just told it 42 in some global ID space, well do you mean the thing currently at index 42? Or did you really think you were referring to a thing which existed some time ago at index 42? That information has been lost, or at least isn't being conveyed. But if you told it 42 in your file descriptor table, now that can hold more information, so it can remember precisely which thing your 42 was referring to when you last received or changed it.

So how did Linux fix this?

We now have "PID FDs", which are magic FDs referring to processes. Processes "as a file", in a more true and complete way than the older procfs stuff.

Unlike PIDs, which by design can only travel around like raw numbers divorced from the true identity information they gesture at, a PID FD can never lose track of the process it refers to: if that process dies, its PID FD will forever "know" that its dead even if the PID is reused (because when that process yields to or is preempted by the kernel for the last time, the kernel remembers that there's a PID FD for it which needs to be updated, and even if the kernel recycles the PID it knows not to update that PID FD to point to the new process).

And we now have a system calls which let us

create a new process (or thread!) and have that return a PID FD instead of a PID (or "TID" in the case of threads, but in the Linux kernel those are basically the same thing)

signal a PID FD instead of the traditional PID (or TID), and

wait on a PID FD (in fact, the FDs just plug into the normal poll, select, or epoll system calls, so waiting on process or thread status can just hook into all existing event loops).

The one crucial thing is that we must not forget that these guarantees only start once we've gotten the PID FD: in particular, if you get a PID FD from a PID instead of getting the PID FD directly, you still need to check once if the PID hasn't gotten invalidated between when you got the PID and when you got the PID FD. This is something you can only do as the direct parent or (sub)reaper of the PID in question, because then you can use the traditional "wait" system call on the PID after getting the PID FD - if getting the PID FD succeeded but then the wait reports that the PID exited, that means you could've gotten a PID reuse by the time you got the PID FD from the PID.

So ideally, we just don't deal in PIDs at all anymore. When we create a process, we can get its PID FD atomically with the creation. (If we can't do that, if we're creating the process and then getting the PID FD with a separate system call, we do the wait check described in the last paragraph after getting the PID.) Then we pass the PID FD around - this might superficially look like passing an integer around, for example if you need to use the FD number in a shell redirection or communicate it to a child process, but underneath that the actual FD would be getting passed around either by inheritance, UNIX domain sockets, or whatever other means are available.

I've been wanting this for years. I've spent a lot of mental cycles trying to figure out the most elegantly minimal and composable primitives which could work around various problems in service supervision and automatic restarts in the face of random processes dying or getting killed. Those edge cases are now much more simple to totally cover by using the PID FD stuff, at least so long as we're willing to lose compatibility with the BSDs and other Unix-y systems until they catch up. Which, honestly, is an increasingly appealing proposition as Linux has been adding good stuff like this lately.

P.S. On that note, another thing we now have, is the ability to reach into a process (if we have its PID FD and have the same relationship to it (or elevated privileges) that we'd need to hook into it with debugger system calls) and copy a file descriptor out of it. This means we no longer need a child process to have been coded to share it with us through a domain socket or by forking or exec-chaining into a process we specify. Accessing file descriptors in already-running processes enables some neat monkey-patching and composition, and it's simpler to implement than the UNIX domain socket trick. I remember being frustrated about 7 years ago by the lack of ability to do exactly this - reach down into a child process (for example into a shell script, which has no built-in ability to access the "ancillary data" of a socket) and pluck a file descriptor out of it.

[alsjeblieft-zeg]

190 of 2025

Geography How many states have you lived in?

None. I'm European.

How many states have you traveled through/vacationed in?

None.

Which state was/is your favorite?

N/A.

You have two weeks alone in any place in the world; where would you go?

Finland, preferably in summer. Forests, lakes and white nights is what I need.

What would you do?

Rest and visit as many places as I can.

Where would you least like to live?

Any Muslim country, I suppose?

Why?

Because I hate how they treat women.

History How old were you when you first moved out of your parents’ home?

Like, 24 or so. When I finished university and started working.

Did you ever have to move back in?

No.

How old were you when you thought you were “in love��� for the first time?

22, like, for real. Never felt anything special to anyone before.

How old were you when you realized you hadn’t really been?

23. He treated me awfully and it was all over then.

What year did you graduate from high school?

We don't have high schools in our education system.

What was the theme song to your Senior Prom?

Theme song?? I don't think we practice it here.

Math How many letters are in your full name?

12.

How many keys are on your key chain?

4 on my work keychain (two clothing lockers, one breakfast locker and one spare key), and also 4 on my house keychain, 1 to our house, 2 to my parents house and one electronic key to our car.

How many windows are in your home?

7, it seems.

How many exterior doors are in your home?

2. One to the street and ore to the backyard.

How many cars have you owned?

None on my own, but two as a co-owner.

How many states have you had drivers licenses in?

None, I'm not in the US.

How many e-mail addresses in your primary e-mail account address book?

Never checked, I don't care.

How many email accounts do you have?

One from work, one from uni, one very old account I use as a login to some devices, three private ones (one for business, one for spam and a general one). That makes six in total.

Arts & Entertainment What is the last book you read?

A set of short horror stories about trains.

What are you currently reading?

Four books at once, one is about the noble family in Middle Ages, also from Poland.

What do you plan to read next?

I don't know, I have so many books on my wishlist.

What was the last movie you watched alone?

I don't watch movies.

What was the last movie you watched with someone else?

See above.

What (if any) one television program do you watch religiously every day/week?

None, I watch my favourite shows by streaming.

What (if any) is your favorite sport?

Basketball for life.

Soaps?

I've always loved Muneca Brava, about an orphan girl who becomes a maid in a rich house. I don't know why I like it that much, though XD

What is your favorite musical?

Ew, musicals. None.

Have you ever seen a live opera production?

No.

If so, which ones?

None.

What is your favorite opera?

No, thanks.

Who is your favorite poet?

Maya Angelou.

Who is your favorite stand-up comedian?

Oh my, I despise stand-up. It gets on my fucking nerves.

Which Friend would you say you are most like?

None for real. I have a few traits of Monica, though. I like cooking and I have OCD, but I've never wanted to have children.

General Trivia How old are your parents?

Mum is 61, dad is 71.

Are you missing any digits?

What digits?

Do you wear glasses or contacts?

Glasses. My eyesight is terrible, but I cannot wear contacts because my eyes are too sensitive.

Dressing up for an evening out: Pants or skirt?

I'm not a guy who wears skirts, so yeah.

What do you use more of: Tape, staples or paperclips?

Tape and then paperclips at work. Very rarely staples.

Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

PC or Mac?

PC forever.

If PC: Windows, Linux, or Unix?

Windows because I'm used to it. The real Windows ended with XP, though.

Do you use paper towels or re-usable rags?

Paper towels.

Ladies: Are your toenails painted?

I'm not a lady.

Do you prefer showers or baths?

Showers because quicker, but baths are great for relaxing.

[sarahrserfati]

The Frontier Between Us

by Jaron Lanier, 1997

"The easiest predictions to make about the next fifty years of computer science are those centering on the computers, ignoring the people. For example, I can predict with a fair degree of confidence that there will be fabulous increases in hardware capability, which will be largely consumed by a corresponding decrease in software elegance as decades of legacy systems tangle like parasitic vines. It's when people are brought into the equation, however, that the business of prediction becomes difficult.

Who would have thought that not only computers, but computer science would become a centerpiece of pop-culture? Who imagined that one would be able to buy magazines with articles on caches and dithering at the supermarket checkout counter? Or that UNIX path punctuation would become a vernacular element of advertising (in the form of web addresses)?

The biggest surprise from the first fifty years of computers is that computation turns out to be a cultural object in its own right, with all its warts and semicolons. Many a visionary had imagined that computers and networks would have a transformative effect on culture, but it was usually assumed that the nasty details would become invisible as their influence increased. It is still part of the marketing orthodoxy of the computer industry that hardware and software must in some misty future become "consumer products", as unobtrusive as toasters. And yet it turns out people love to obsess about the insides of their computers. Children who build elaborate web pages in HTML and Java routinely burn toast.

The public has often warmed to the surface of science and engineering, but never before to the depth. While there are tens of millions of people who love dinosaurs and black holes, how many of them have gone on a dig or analyzed spectrum data? When it comes to computers, though, a mass culture of technical literacy is being born, especially among children. We always thought computers had to become popularized, and instead the public has decided to become surprisingly technical.

This is due in part to the stalwart marketing of awkward software by Microsoft, and in part to the economic pressures favoring open systems, which will always have rougher edges. But those cannot be the only reasons. There is an emotional draw. Maybe it is the ability to control a microworld that is more predictable and less filled with pain and ambiguity than real life. An abstract aquarium, a theater of numbers.

Whatever the reason, I would want to celebrate the public's embrace of computer arcana, except for one thing. The material itself is unrelentingly ugly. I want to cry when I see those toast burning kids endlessly tweaking HTML source code. This is the kind of soul numbing tedium that I once believed would be forever banished by the end of the nineteen-eighties. In those ancient days I thought that by now there would be widespread adoption of brilliant visual programming tools.

Computer science is, alas, the only engine of culture that has not concerned itself with beauty. Why should we have? We didn't know we were making culture. We thought we were making invisible tools. We've been granted a surprise franchise as culture creators. In the next fifty years we have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to contribute in ways we never anticipated.

Our art is abstract, but has a profound emotional and social effect on our audience. There are already masterpieces. TCP/IP, along with the related code that runs the Internet, is perhaps the most dramatic. It is beautiful, and it embodies a profound conception of openness, and therefore of faith. It is rare indeed that an unsuspected and positive attribute of human nature is exposed for the first time through a work of art, but that is exactly what happened in response to TCP/IP. The internet is such fertile earth that it practically commanded the blossoming of exquisite new organisms like the World Wide Web. Never before did we know that millions of people could cooperate almost instantaneously to build something (the Web) merely because they wanted to, with no planning, lines of authority, advertising, or finance. It turns out that in the right conditions, people are good enough for anarchy.

Unfortunately, TCP/IP is the exception. There are far more numerous examples of ugliness, such as MS DOS. A hard fact of life is that ugliness in software is worse than ugliness in other art forms because it is less perishable. Layers of software become locked in place when new layers refer to them, and ugliness from lower layers percolates upwards. So we'll be stuck with MS DOS for many, many years, and it will reduce the beauty of all the software created on top of it.

How do we make beautiful software? General engineering principles, like openness, are good enough to create elegance, but not beauty. Beauty requires an awareness of human affairs outside the computer. When considering the relationship of people and computers, we're sometimes subject to a figure/ground illusion. We can easily see the computer as the center and the person as the peripheral. This illusion is encouraged by the public obsession with computers. It reaches its extreme in the Artificial Intelligence approach. Such disconnects from reality are, I believe, among of the primary ways that computer ugliness comes into being. When software design decisions aren't made in reference to human concerns, they can only be made in reference to each other, leading to a self-referential bundle of nonsense suspended by a sky hook. The simple way to notice the illusion is to point out that computers don't function independently of people. They are cultural artifacts, like language, intelligible only to those who know them. To a Martian, a computer and a toaster are the same.

When we treat information systems as no more than conduits between human imaginations, grand vistas open up. The pleasant news computer scientists can infer from the public's early embrace of computer tinkering is that we will not be serving a population of consumers, but rather of creators. In the next fifty years, computer science will give birth to a delightful new vernacular art form that combines the three great art forms of the twentieth century; cinema, jazz, and programming. The result will be a mass theater of spontaneous shared imagination and dreaming. My fond hope is that it will take the form of networked VR with inspirational authoring tools that are capable of quick, improvisatory creation. But whatever the specific form, what we are building will encourage people to share interior vision and treat it as a tangible, worthy thing, even into adulthood.

This is the frontier that information science opens up to mankind. There are other frontiers enabled by science, of course; the exploration of space, the study of the brain. But only ours will continue to reveal unsuspected potential in the most precious of natural phenomena, relationships between human beings."

[hydralisk98]

Content data to study

Tcl, Fish, KDE Plasma 5.27+, RC, ES, RIO, ACME, Kwin, Liquidshell, Plasmoids, OpenDylan, SimH PDP8, ChrysaLisp, ZealOS' DolDocs, Haiku, NetBSD, Plan9, Smalltalk, Steel Bank Common Lisp, Common Lisp Object System, NetLogo, TROPIX, PhantomOS, ITS, CP/M, DOS, Unix v6-v7, Oberron A2 Bluebottle, ObjectREXX, DEC Alpha, GNU Hurd, MINIX3, Tcl alone, TclX, Tcl/Tk, PAL for PDP8, DIBOL, Synergy DBL, GAS, SVG, TextWorld, AROS, TakeCommandConsole, Krita with G'MIC, Blender, Inkscape, Falkon, Konqueror, LibreWolf, Lemon, Tlick, nsCDE, Turbochannel / Alpha AXP, GRUB, Paradise, Parade, Uxn, Tmux, OpenSSH, POSIX, Hypervisor, KVM, OpenBSD Sandbox / Jails, Git, GNU Bazaar, UTF-8, Microdot Linux, BeagleV-Fire, BeagleboneY-AI, DECmate II+, DECmate III with its dedicated disk drive unit, DEC Alpha, DUNNET, Emacs, Vim, Vi, VimWiki, Org-Mode, Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Evennia, LambdaMOO, , Rust, ALGOL68, Grulx, Frotz, Z-Machine, Dolphin, Midnight Commander, GNU Taler, GDB, BinUtils, Autotools, Coreutils, Linux-libre, GNU Jami, GNUnet, MediaGoblin, Goblin Tools, LilyPond;

Super Cluedo, Die Macher, Century Spice Road, Century A New World, Carcasonne, Werewolves Pact Edition, Talespinner EU, D&D 5E, Pathfinder 2E, Cyberpunk RED, GilaRPGs' NOVA, Mark Rosenfelder, Ken Silverman, Nicky Case, Yukari Hafner, Prosperity ruleset for Landlords Game, Diplomacy, HAM Radio, RTTY, Hard-Copy terminals, interactive video terminals / lightweight clients, tabulators, typewriters, unit record equipment, cardboard counters, printing presses, phonebooks, yellow pages, pen & paper games, gamebooks, zines, atlases, road maps...

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Software of the Week: WingetUI / UniGetUI

Keeping all of the programs on your computer up to date is important for security reasons; just ask LastPass, the disgraced password manager that got hacked because an employee's personal computer was running an old version of Plex Media Server. The particular vulnerability that the hackers exploited had been patched almost 3 years earlier, but because the employee never bothered to update Plex, he never got the fix.

Every month that you leave software on your computer un-patched is time in which hackers may discover the vulnerability and start using it to attack computers. But how on earth can you even figure out which of your programs need updates? Doing that one by one takes forever, and THEN you still have to actually install those updates.

This is where software updaters are essential. On Windows, SUMO used to be among the best programs for the job, but it was discontinued in early 2024. I've been searching for a replacement for a while now, and I finally settled on WinGetUI (soon to be known as UniGetUI). A LOT more detail and some tips are under the readmore!

Details:

Purpose: Provide a unified frontend for multiple package managers on Microsoft Windows to simplify installing and updating software

OS Supported: Windows 10, 11

Installer Size: 76 MB

Country of Origin: Catalonia/Spain

Languages Supported: 16 languages fully, 24 partially

License: Freeware

Download Link: https://www.marticliment.com/wingetui/

A LOT more detail and some tips are under the readmore!

Winget ("WIN-get") is the name of Microsoft Window's new-ish package manager, a program that itself takes care of installing and updating other software for you. Linux and Unix have had built-in package managers for decades, but Windows has been sorely lacking on that front until just recently. Winget provides the ability to install and update software, but it's a command line utility, meaning you have to type text into a command prompt in order to get winget to do anything for you.

WinGetUI is essentially just a nice interface using winget in the background; it shows you which programs you have installed, which ones have updates available, and it will even install the updates for you. That last part was a game changer for me personally as it saves me a lot of time (I have a LOT of programs and libraries installed on my computer).

The best part is the developer has added support for other package managers too. Computer language SDKs often come with their own package managers for downloading the little libraries that you can bundle with code that you write, and WinGetUI now supports most of them: npm, pip, .NET Tool, Chocolatey, scoop, Powershell Gallery, and it can even list software installed from the Steam shop or the Microsoft Store (though it can't update those ones for you). Incidentally, this is why the name is changing from WinGetUI to UniGetUI; it now supports a lot more package managers than just winget.

WinGetUI can even help you migrate software to a new computer. Simply install WinGetUI on your old computer, export a list of all of the software you have installed, then install WinGetUI on your new computer and import that list and then click install. You'll probably have to babysit it for a while because Windows will prompt you to give admin access to the installers that need it, but hey. At least you don't have to write down all the software you have and download and install each one by hand.

I do want to highlight that Microsoft is still working out the kinks in winget. Windows has existed for a long time and provided a lot of freedom in how you could install software. Multiple companies have made their fortunes just by providing custom installer software for Windows (InstallShield and NSIS being prime examples), so Microsoft has their work cut out for them trying to get all the different software manufacturers to list their software in the winget directory AND standardize their installers.

As such, you may run into issues like these:

WinGetUI lists a program you installed manually and tries to update it via winget; the installer succeeds, but because those installation methods are different, you end up with 2 copies of the software installed in different locations

WinGetUI fails to update a program because the hash of the downloaded installer doesn't match the hash that winget says it should have. This is usually a developer error

WinGetUI fails to determine whether some programs have updates available or not

WinGetUI downloads an installer/updater but it fails to run because it detects that the installation methods for that program are different (manual install vs. winget install)

Almost all of these can be resolved by uninstalling the manually installed version and reinstalling it using winget, either from the command line or just from WinGetUI. Once you do that one-time operation, the winget package manager (and by extension WinGetUI) should be able to handle everything from there on out. It will only get better too as winget usage becomes more common among software developers.

[chrisabraham]

TL;DR: Optimize your website for accessibility and SEO by using alt text for images and ensuring compatibility with text-based browsers like Lynx. This helps meet ADA standards, improves user experience for the visually impaired, and boosts your site’s visibility on Google.

> Maximizing Website Accessibility and SEO with Alt Text and ADA Compliance

[soup-mother]

very scientifically ranking unix and unix like systems I've recently fiddled with, based on whether i actually successfully got them installed:

arch linux: so easy peasy it put me to sleep, genuinely and not as a joke. absolute breeze

openindiana: real easy and nice tbh. i like open indiana :)

debian: i mean yeah it works out of the box but for some reason in virtualbox it goes straight into gnome (ew) instead of the installer process. had to fiddle to get a different DE but pretty easy (also ew gnome)

fireflybsd: genuinely probably the best text based installation I've ever used. a lot more enjoyable (but more involved) than arch and a good time all around.

freebsd: took fiddling but i got a desktop environment working on it! I'm incredibly proud of that and it felt like a milestone in being able to actually do a computer™. freebsd will forever have a soft spot in my heart <3

bucket of shame 🪣:

void linux: partitioning is a fuck, i am confused woman, 161836281 dead cops (didn't get it working). weirdly wants you to do all the installation in a desktop environment but as a text based installer from the terminal (unless I'm getting things mixed up) xfce is nice tho.

ghostbsd: literally just refused to actually install, idk why. like full on refused to recognise the disk space being allocated to it. weird

openbsd: the one that got away, i literally couldn't understand some of the things it expected me to do no matter how much i read the documentation. I'll get it eventually

idk why i wrote this i just thought it was funny and wanted to talk about computer :)

disk partitioning for void Linux is too confusing for me so I'm going to do a little pout until the disk magically partitions itself for me and i don't have to worry about Linux swap and whatnot

🖥️ ⌨️🖱️ (˵•̀⤙•́˵)ꕤ*.ﾟ(that's me pouting at my computer)

[wretched-mog]

me, in bioinformatics confessional booth: bless me father, for i had named an important file that might have the answer to a problem that’s been hounding me for weeks “test.txt” and neglected to change it...

[ellcrys]

blah blah security hardware end of life support so i got a new laptop for work earlier this week that i’m finally sitting down to set up. it’s going very smoothly so far, bc i know my way around the macos like it’s the back of my hand. sadly, i will not be able to say the same as i set up my new desktop in a couple of weeks once that machine arrives :’)

security is no longer supporting new mac hardware in my office space due to the wifi chip being soldered into the motherboard or something like that, and old macs are hardware end of life SO. they’re forcing all mac users to switch to windows os and i’m going to die.

[waywcrdmemes]

( Coming soon--

--more alt-verse muses! )

[365days365movies]

May 7, 2021: TRON (1982)

Starting to leave lo-fi sci-fi with this one.

Can I just say, I am VERY excited for this one. Mostly because it’s hard to get more ‘80s than this movie, specifically in terms of computers. I’ll explain. Y’know Jurassic Park? Yeah, the same movie I’ve brought up far, FAR too many times this month. Is...is that my favorite sci-fi movie? Shit, it might be? I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the movie COUNTLESS times...I’m pretty sure it is! Huh. Go figure. Anyway, where was I?

Oh, right! Remember the most irritating character in the movie? This is, in my opinion, older sister Lex Murphy. In the book, for the record, she’s a VERY different character. She’s the youngest sibling amongst the two, and she’s a sports nerd who hates dinosaurs. And she’s also the most annoying character in the book, so at least they kept that consistent. However, you may be saying to yourself: “Jesus, this dude really loves Jurassic Park. Even in the intro for Tron, he’s talking about it. Why the hell does he keep bringing it up?”

Well, allow me to explain. When I was 9 years old, I was super into two things: dinosaurs and reading. You may think that I wasn’t very popular in school as a result. And the truth won’t surprise you. Anyway, on January 3rd, 2001, it was a cold morning in the supermarket when

...OK, lemme get to the point. IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM!

See, this moment when Lex hacks into the computer to reactivate the locks (a task given to Tim in the book, but whatever) does two things. One, it makes Lex relevant in a film and story where she’s almost entirely unneeded. And two, it established something in the minds of movie-watchers everywhere: a completely misguided idea of what computer programming is.

And this is just one of MANY examples of Hollywood weirdly representing computers to the public. This was kind of a trend throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, as computers were beginning to become available to the public. Examples are:

WarGames (1983), dir. John Badham

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), dir. James Cameron

Revenge of the Nerds (1984), dir. Jeff Kanew

Weird Science (1985), dir, John Hughes

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), dir. Russo Bros

That last one isn’t a great example, and it’s not even within the right time period. I just love Arnim Zola, and he NEEDS TO RETURN to the MCU. Goddamn it, I want this guy back, complete with his full robot body! COME ON FIEGE, LOOK AT THIS GUY! That last one may or may not be my fanart for the character with my own design NEVERTHEGODDAMNLESS!

Look, all you gotta do is connect the various machinations of Arnim Zola to the foundations of AIM, which is easy given their link in the comics. Zola and his fellow Paperclip scientists helped fund Aldrich Killian’s AIM, and the project to give Zola his sick-ass robot body eventually wound up being a part of the project that would create the hovering robotic chair used by this guy.

THIS IS ALL I’VE EVER WANTED PLEASE

...Ahem.

Anyway, the weird-ass ways that Hollywood’s represented computers, hacking, and all other associated things can be traced back to 1982, when the first film to use mostly computer generated imagery for its setting was created. This was, of course, Disney’s TRON. And while I haven’t seen it before...I’ve see its sequel in theaters?

On a related note, Tron Legacy might be a mediocre film with a mediocre soundtrack, but GODDAMN DO IT LOVE THE FUCKING VISUALS. It’s genuinely my favorite aesthetic. That whole “outlined in light” thing? Goooooooh, BABY, how I love it.

Style over substance, but OH THE FUCKING STYLE

Anyway, despite that, I’m looking forward to seeing where the whole thing came from. I dig that style, too. Is there a name for those aesthetics? Let me know, so I can devote my life to it forever. Anyway, shall we get started?

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap

So, we start this movie off with a BANG, jumping into an arcade where two kids are playing none other than Lightcycle, and jumping into said Lightcycles to meet one of the drivers, Sark (David Warner). A sadistic program, he takes great pleasure in executing programs in Lightcycle races.

One of these programs, in fact, is being brought into imprisonment now, to be set against Sark in a race. The program, Crom (Peter Jurasik), speaks with fellow prisoner Ram (Dan Shor), where we get some idea of the lore of this place. Many programs believe in “the Users”, god-like figures who they believe created them and tell them what to do. However, the mysterious Master Control Program is rounding up the programs that believe in Users, taking over their functions or executing them. Diggin’ the lore so far.

In the real world, we meet Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a computer programmer commanding his own program, Clu (also Bridges), and...look, I’m not sure what they’re doing, but OHHH. IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM, BABY. The beautiful bullshit that this movie uses to denote computer activity and programming, it’s...MMMMMMMMMCHEF’SKISS, it’s so FUCKING GOOD!

Anyway, Clu’s apparently being sent to find some information, but he’s caught by Master Control. Jeff Bridges shows off some pretty over-the-top acting, but it’s charming as hell. Clu’s interrogated by Master Control Program (also Warner), and killed, or “derezzed”. This frustrates Flynn, but why?

Well, we get a clue from MCPs concentration with Ed Dillinger (David Warner), who arrives at his office in the COOLEST FUCKING HELICOPTER I HAVE EVER SEEN. I will never make enough money to have this helicopter, but maybe one day I can do it to a car, holy shit. Anyway, Dillinger lands and enters the ENCOM building, where he speaks with his computer table, which contains MCP.

Is this a thing with computer programmers? Do they, like, physically talk to their programs, and the programs talk back? Is this a thing that happens? Are the conversations interesting? Are IT people literally computer-whisperers? I gotta talk to my friends in computer sciences and IT about this.

Apparently, Flynn’s been snooping around their servers for a specific file, and they’re trying to stop him from getting that file. Meanwhile, in an office in the building, a man named Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is blocked out of the system in an attempt to flush out Flynn’s location. Bradley’s summoned to the office for what seems like a routine interview, but is actually more of an investigation. Doesn’t go anywhere.

On a side note, by the way, it would appear that MCP is somewhat in control of Dillinger. Although, how and why is unknown. In any case, he’s attempting to amass power. Additionally, the fact that he’s directly speaking to one of the Users is...interesting. And on a second side note, Bradley is preparing something, a security program called “Tron”. That might come up later.

MEANWHILE, elsewhere in the building, a group of scientists are conducting an experiment to digitize solid matter and transport it into computers. It succeeds with an orange, much to their delight and celebration. One of these scientists is Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), Flynn’s ex-girlfriend and Alan’s current girlfriend. They go to the arcade to reconvene with Flynn, much to Alan’s irritation.

Flynn not only owns the place, he’s also a game whiz, brilliant computer programmer, and recently fired ex-employee of ENCOM. He’s also been sneaking into the ENCOM system, and he details exactly why he’s moving against them. While working for ENCOM, he had started writing programs for some very complex video games, which could’ve have made him quite a bit of money. But Dillinger stole his files, and uses it to climb up the ranks to Senior Executive of ENCOM, while Flynn lounges in relative poverty. He’s planning on getting into the system to get evidence of Dillinger’s wrongdoing.

The trio plots to take down Dillinger and get the evidence together, breaking into ENCOM that night. Meanwhile, Dillinger’s meeting with Walter Gibbs (Barnard Hughes), a co-founder of the company, and one of the other scientists who made the digitizing machine. Dillinger says YOUR TIME IS OVER OLD MAN, and brushes off his concerns about he’s handing the company.

He’s not the only one with issues, as MCP decides to take over FOR Dillinger. Apparently, Dillinger’s talents are stealing data and creating Cybernet/HAL 9000. Good job, buddy. But that may end, when Alan goes to finish and install his program, Tron, which will hopefully take MCP down. Meanwhile, Lora and Flynn go to the basement with the digitizing machine. At the computer terminal, MCP decides to stop Flynn by...well, you know where this is headed.

Yup! Flynn’s brought into the computer by Lora’s machine, and is digitized and put into the game grid. And since we’ll be spending a lot of time there, I think I need to acknowledge something: I really love how this movie looks. The CGI is rudimentary, but it’s used surprisingly well. Consider that this is also made in an era where this is the kind of imagery that computers could literally generate at the time, and you’ve got a pretty great movie in-context.

Flynn, now in those spiffy program duds, is sent by the MCP to compete in the Game Grid, under Sark’s supervision and tutelage. He’s thrown into the brig with the other imprisoned programs, where he learns more about this world. Once brought into the throes of the Game Grid, he’s told that those who believe in the Users are to be trained poorly, ensuring their inevitable death. Meanwhile, those who renounce their belief will be spared. And of all the programs who still believe in the Users, there is none quite as powerful...as Tron (Bruce Boxleitner again).

We see Tron’s badass skills in Ultimate Frisbee. And OK, it’s not Ultimate Frisbee, but you throw discs that contain all of your essence and all of the things you’ve learned in your time there. You basically pour your entire essence and being into the disc as you throw it. So, really, it is Ultimate Frisbee, according to that one dude who’s REALLY into Ultimate Frisbee.

Flynn is commanded to play one of these games, and he winds fairly easily. However, when he defeats his opponent, he’s almost about to die. However, Flynn refuses to finish him off, leading Sark to do so instead. And Sark is tempted to kill Flynn as well, but he holds off at the last moment.

Flynn finally gets to meet Tron, where he feigns being a program that knows of his User, Alan. Of course, Tron looks exactly like Alan, which is why Flynn blurts out his name. But as they’re discussing this, Flynn, Tron, and fellow prisoner Ram are sent to compete in the Lightcycles. And, yes, I’m now looking for a game like this on my phone, because GODDAMN to I love Lightcycles. Can’t WAIT for the Disney World ride, oh my GOOOOD. 

So, our guys get in the Lightcycles, and they outmaneuver Sark’s guys. They’re actually able to escape the arena and the Game Grid, making it outside the citadel. They encounter a, uh, bitstream, and soak up some energy before moving on. On the way, though, they’re nearly killed by Sark’s guys in tanks, and Tron is separated from Flynn an the unconscious Ram.

Flynn and Ram finds a place to rest and hide, and Flynn discovers that, as a User, he actually has the ability to somewhat manipulate the reality within the computer, and he makes a version of MCPs ships, the Recognizers, which resemble the villains in Flynn’s game that Dillinger stole. Now realizing that Flynn is a user, Ram asks him to help Tron, before dying and disappearing into pure code. Whoof.

Tron, meanwhile, ends up finding an input/output program named Yori (Cindy Morgan), who helps him in his escape. She takes him through the city, where we see some interesting designs for control programs, almost like a Hunger Games Panem sort of deal.

Flynn has trouble driving his ship, as he meets a “bit”, a small bit of data that only answers in yes or no. He, too, ends up in the city, and you start to notice that this film has a really heavy influence in our cyberpunk concepts and fashions today. Honestly, I really dig this whole thing. Kevin uses his programming powers to disguise himself as one of Sark’s guards, while Yori and Tron find their way through the main citadel of the guards.

They make their way through to the access tower, where they ask the program Dumont (Barnard Hughes again) to let them access the interface that will allow them to speak with the Users, specifically Alan. Reluctantly, Dumont agrees to let Tron through, where he goes to the access port. Which, for the record, looks awesome. He goes to speak with Alan, and he does that one pose. Y’know, the famous Tron pose that’s on the poster?

Yeah, that’s the good stuff. Anyway, he gets information written onto his disc that’ll allow him to kill MCP. Neat. And unfortunately, that’s exactly when Sark and his guys show up, taking Dumont away as Tron and Yori escape. Yori gets them onto a Solar Sailer, a device that will transport them to the central computer. Tron fends off some of Sark’s guys with video game noise kicks, and the Solar Sailer arrives to take them away.

Sark chases after them, but the pair manage to outrun his very cool-looking ship. MCP threatens to destroy Sark for his failure, but he promises that he’ll be able to get them. On the ship, Tron looks down at the side to see Flynn hanging on. Turns out that he was one of the guards that attacked the two. Tron pulls him up onto the ship, and Flynn reveals that he is, in fact, a user. He also reveals that Users aren’t exactly the gods that programs believe them to be.

Anyway, how’s Dumont doing?

Ah.

Well, the Recognizers find Tron, Yori, and Flynn, and chase after them on the light beam the Solar Sailer is on. However, with his User powers, Flynn manages to get the Sailer onto a different beam, while pulses on the original beam destroy the Recognizers.

Doesn’t end up mattering much, though, as Sark finally catches up and intercepts the group. The Solar Sailer is destroyed, and Yori and Flynn are thrown in the brig with Dumont, who’s still alive! Can’t say quite as much for Tron, apparently. But, again, I can only assume that Ton is still alive. We’ll see, though. Sark denies Flynn’s identity as a User for some reason (I mean, MCP told you who he was, but OK), and he sentences them all to death. Outside the ship, of course, is Tron, who’s hiding and waiting for the right time to strike. And that is when we finally see him.

Glorious. Absolutely goddamn glorious. MCP is taking the remaining programs that believe in Users, Dumont included, and incorporating them into his mass. Meanwhile, Sark has found Tron, and the two are fighting with a classic game of Ultimate Frisbee. Tron nearly defeats Sark entirely, but MCP revives him, and gives him the power to take out Tron. He grows gigantic, and it looks genuinely really convincing.

Flynn prepares to take out MCP once and for all, and kisses Yori just beforehand, which is weird as shit. He jumps into the program, and controls it just long enough for Tron to throw his disc at it and land the finishing blow. And with that, MCP is ended, and the threat of take over is gone! The I/O towers light up, and the Video Warriors have won! Don’t ask me what that means, I study birds.

And with ALL OF THAT DONE, Flynn gets the proof he needs from a print-out that, to be honest, I feel like he could’ve just typed up himself. It doesn’t look like that much. But, still, MCP is gone, Dillinger’s screwed, and Flynn now gets a cool-looking helicopter of his own, as the new CEO of ENCOM. And from there, he will become a deadbeat dad that abandons his kid to live in computers forever. Or something like that, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Tron Legacy.

And that’s Tron, a goofy movie of its time, but one that’s a lot of fun all the same. And with some effects that, to be honest...I actually really liked! But more on that...IN THE REVIEW! See you there!