Cool. I’ve been using croc lately to move files around, but this differs in that they are supplying temporary off-site storage so that the host doesn’t have to remain online.

That’s pretty sad when you have to pirate a game just to make it playable. I probably shouldn’t admit to having cracked games in the past for this reason. Yarrr!

This is actually the first I’ve heard of Denuvo, but if Wikipedia’s page on it is any indication, it sounds pretty awful! Anyway, I’ve checked the dealbreaker box on the survey.

I find as I get older and my vision is not what it once was, I need bigger screens with good contrast but don’t care so much about resolution. I think it was on the show Corner Gas where they were talking about how big a screen you should get and concluded the size in inches should match your age. That made me laugh but I have to confess now there may be some truth in that…

I haven’t done so personally. A lot of my old activity had to do with helping people with programming questions, so if it’s still useful to someone on occasion, I don’t feel inclined to remove it.

I left reddit a little over a year ago now, and I don’t really care about what goes on over there. I made my statement of displeasure by simply ending all activity on the platform. I figure whatever legacy I left will eventually descend into irrelevance without my having to physically delete it all. At this point, that just sounds like work.

The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There’s an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.

Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren’t super standardized in their format I guess, so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. I like to use Python’s argparse when rolling out scripts myself, and its --help format is pretty rigid given that it’s algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into the argparse.ArgumentParser class itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn’t expose public APIs for that. Oh well…

This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.

The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word commando (presumably a portmanteau of “command” and “window”) and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok’d the window, it would generate the command line for you.

I’m rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what’s possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.

But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.

I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.