No, I get it. There’s this unspoken understanding that barcodes are strictly utilitarian and unobserved as their nature. In stylizing them, there’s an acknowledgement of being unexpectedly seen by the human consumer and not the intended digital scanning device.

Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.

I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.

As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.

If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.