Handwritting fonts bring back warm memories of that one time in school where they said we should write some delphi code with a pen. Good times

!rant
Linux vs Microsoft

Well, this war is certainly one of the oldest. IMO,
Linux - great for automating stuff, free, and customisable.
Windows - user friendly, softwares much more easily available, much easier to use.

Frankly, I have tried using Linux a lot of times, but never liked it one bit. I am a GUI fan and hate to type commands for every little thing. Plus installing Ubuntu wiped out my disk once and I lost all my school memories ( this was in 2008, I didn't know much about backups, was quite young) ,so I am quite vary of it. I just don't feel it to be intuitive. Just to do a simple task, I loathe to learn difficult commands, and just read the syntax.

However, I have no bias against people who use Linux.

It is like religion, live and let live, follow whatever suits you.

On devrant, why's there so much hate for Windows? Because it is paid? Because it has updates? So what!
I never had a problem with it, I update once a month, takes 10 mins. If you set up your active hours correctly, it works great, you can disable updates also. Windows 10 is highly stable. It is paid, but in my country almost all laptops come with windows preinstalled. The OS-less laptops are about $10 cheaper, which is not that much to freak about.

Would love to hear your views and logical arguments.
Please be polite.

When I was about 10 I tried to make a basic midi sequencer/synthesiser using just the python standard library.
The only sound production there was was winsound.beep, which played a sine wave at the frequency given.
I realised that if I put enough really short beeps together I could make some mildly convincing instruments - I remember an electric piano, acoustic guitar, some kind of bass synth, and maybe more?
Then I put them together to make a song. The problem was though that you can't play multiple notes together as winsound.beep was blocking (though I didn't understand that at the time).
I had no knowledge of threading or async so I opened multiple python interpreter instances to play multiple channels. That's how I learnt about command-line arguments!
But I really struggled to get the sounds to be in time because python is not exactly rapid.
I made a kind of note sequencer using a library called easygui, based on tkinter (TCL wrapper), and I remember being told off at school for bringing in a usb stick with the exe of my program that I made with py2exe.
So many old technologies and fond memories...

I just want to share my very first companion. Haha... This is btw my laptop way back 2011, used it to store highschool memories and silly stuff, if you know what I mean. This is the laptop that I first used the labrynth of directories such as A folder contains A to z Folder and again inside one of those contains A to z again lowered and upper. This is also my partner in coding C++ back in the days, I usually write code in paper and when back to school I used our lab's computer. Ohh and I also have my anime addiction started on this too! One time I discovered the side VGA and connected it to our big LCD screen but by the time I plugged it in, it produce explosive sounds, and my grandpa said that that lcd tv is only for 110v not for 220v. I learned the importance of voltages that day. I just went back and open it to backup my highschool memories and stuff to my external hdd. Ahhhhh memories.

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

Bring the fun and curiosity back.

School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.

First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.

There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.

I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.

What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.

Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.

The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".

When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.

Shootout to my 2.5GB Maxtor hard drive, that I heavily used between 1997 and 2001. There were no USB drives, and CD burners were too expensive for consumers. So I used to open my PC case, remove the drive (along with Windows and my software), bring it around at my friend's house and have fun while copying hundreds of mp3s, patiently downloaded from filesharing and 56k modems or ripped from CD audio, in and out.

One time it fell out from my desk, hitting hard floor big time. I thought I lost it forever, and basically my whole PC in it. Then I tried plugging again its IDE and power connectors, and it was still working! ... well, half of it. That badass still continued to work with one of its two platters crashed, and got some more mp3s with it.
Maybe I still have it...

aaah, memories. When I discovered github while doing my school project. Even my lecturer had no idea about, he thought I made it as part of my project 😂 Project was an Ionic app connected to Arduino for home automation. straight As I got... straight As.

I'm out of high school now but one of my 'fondest' memories of being known as the computer geek was that people would always ask me how they could use the inspect element tool to change their grade permanently. I never had the patience to explain lmao

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

One of the best times I had coding was when my friend and I were coding our very first program at University. Both of us had no prior experience with coding and really had nothing to do besides school. So we naturally became friends through coding.

Sometimes just thinking about those sorts of memories can take a great deal of stress of your shoulders, because one can think back to a simpler time.

I remember when I was in elementary school, there was a teacher, who taught me and 3 other kids, how a PC works and how to use it. He booted it up and told us that it would take quite some time before interaction was possible (a few minutes?). He described it as a person that just got up. It would first stretch, get some breakfast, so on and so forth.... those memories😌😁😅
Today I know that the hard drive and the CPU (and the other internals) were just fucking slow...😂

Father bought a computer for the family in 2011. A HCl Dual Core Pentium 4 machine with 21" TFT screen. I was allowed to use it only under someone's presence for at-most 20 minutes each day for the next 6-9 months.

After that we got a network card (plug-and-play internet dongle) for the internet services. That's when I entered the world of internet and made a Facebook account. I was 12 then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After two years or so, we're playing games on it, watching movies and using MS Word for school related stuff. Then my brother entered college, and used it for stuff like coding and image processing on Matlab, while I watched him doing so and getting yelled at for doing what I liked to do, at the same time.

After 5 years or so, I got a personal laptop with decent configuration for college work. The old computer still worked like charm.

Now, the old monk is at rest with old memories, unknown files and lot of bollywood songs.

I found my some documents about my dad on Ancestry and showed them to him because they’re things he’d like to see. His high school yearbook photo. His college yearbook photo. The flight manifest from when his family came over from Puerto Rico.

He was happy to see these. He doesn’t have his yearbooks because they’re not things he would have been able to afford at the time. The flight manifest helped put some memories together because he was a little boy when his family moved.

He did get a little freaked out when I explained why Ancestry had these things. But I think that outweighs the joy of discovery.

I remember I couple years back in school nobody in my class was really tech-savvy except me and friend... Midway through class the teacher was saving a PowerPoint presentation. But when she was editing the name she started to edit the file extension not know what .pptx meant... The look of dismay me and my friend shared as she did this is one of my greatest memories of school.

I've had my share of both good and bad coworkers.

My best memories are definitely from the late 90's, early 2k's. The team I was a part of back then really had the best attitude. I particularly remember one of them, who ended up being a PM. He was always joking around, nothing was ever too serious to make fun of. He was an old school punk, and it did show. Although he was always professional in meetings with customers and when it mattered. If I'm not totally mistaken, he started a punk band in his fifties, where noone knew how to play or sing. Great guy!

In my current job, all the good and nice people are either quitting or bullied out of the company. I miss them. Sigh.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

Soo It is known, that seeing things from your past makes you remember distant memories, feelings, smells etc.

For example, if you play a song on repeat for a week, and then don’t play that song a few years, and then play that song you will then remember in detail the week, that is now associated with the song.

Sooooo does a service exist that allows you to watch past tv shows, in their original time slot, day etc.

I know a lot of streaming services have the whole old shows thing but non like i describe.

I remember growing up in the 90s, and early 2000s every day before school watching the kids game shows, before the news turned on or vise versa.. but it was a solid routine same shows, same times etc.. then on the weekends or after school the same thing...

Sooo if there was a way to stream the original scheduled programming for any given date, and channel that would be awesome, and it may even lead you to understand certain things, make new connections connecting the present to the past etc...

Just late night thoughts