Rant

I’ve mentioned before that I ‘suffer’ from xkcd 386. I’m trying to improve, and maybe writing this post will help me. If it helps you, that’s awesome too. Let’s work on this together. 🤝

There’s a strong prevalence among some in the Linux community for people correcting others. Specifically correcting pronunciation. I have been guilty of this in the past, but I’m trying to be the change I want to be. It’s a struggle!

I originally titled this post “Don’t be afraid of the command line”, but decided “Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery” was more fun. Is the command line really scary? It doesn’t feel like that to me, but I grew up with an interface which looks like this on first boot.

Not exactly friendly, but I was 9 at the time, and this was normal. Typing things using the keyboard was pretty much a daily activity. I used books like this one, to learn how to program and understand the computer better.

Here’s a fun blog post where I get possibly irrationally annoyed by people who use a web page incorrectly. Let me get this off my chest and then move on to better topics tomorrow.

Distrowatch is a popular website among Linux enthusiasts. The main page consists of reverse-chronological news articles of interest to Linux users. Often this consists of new stable and development release announcements, reviews and weekly roundups.

In addition, there are boxes surrounding the content highlighting the latest Linux distributions, podcasts, software packages and some advertising. Much of the non-advertising content is also served via RSS feeds so enthusiasts can keep up to date with the content. Finally there’s a large “Page Hit Ranking” on the right-side of the main content. This is the main focus of this blog post.

Bit of a rant, sorry. I’m trying to download my data from Twitter. I login via the web page, find the place to do this, note its says I’ll get an “archive of your data we think is most important to you”. Uh-huh, you think. Then click the button.

It takes a day to build that archive, and you’re not allowed to ask for it again for 30 days. Next day I get a notification so I can download it.