My family minus me has gone for some skiing (no vacation for me at this moment), and so I had an entire Sunday for myself. Instead of writing a lot, I played around on my computers — what else?
I had a review of Bitmessage and managed to get it running again on my old MacMini (OSX 10.7) and my small VPS (costing about 3 USD/month) as an unattended daemon node to support the network, using the current master commit (8e39f42...) in my fork of the Python sources.
On Android, it did not (yet) work out so well: Abit, which I got directly from its Swiss (yay!) author's website, runs on both my phone and tablet, but it takes ages to synchronize, and seems to work only sporadically. It may be due to my incorrect handling, though.
I also played^W did some job-related work: To make photolithography masks and generate data for electron-beam writers, you need desing programs as used in manufacturing of integrated circuits. At our lab, we have licenses for programs of one of the leading suppliers of the industry, but they cost a sh.tload of money. I hate their user interface, in addition.
Since my postdoc work about ten years ago, I was always using KIC, a small Unix-based
tool, which was sufficient for my needs, and I helped to port it to Debian, with the
agreement of its author. I wanted to improve it still and put
it on my github page, but last week, I noticed its
successor XIC has been published as well on Gitlab as
open source,
after having been commercialized during two decades!
So I tried XIC on my Ubuntu machines (compilation from sources works well),
and also on a small Windows7 machine at work, and it seems to run smoothly.
This is a modern GUI based system, and so I will try to promote it at work, because to me it seems stupid to invest learning time into proprietary stuff which you have to buy/rent continuously, if you want to make use of your knowledge.
And although I still like KIC for it's minimalist feature set and small footprint,
I probably should rather invest time into support for and development of XIC.
I'm tempted to tell daphne You're using gopher!? That's so hot! but #metoo might be one of those creepy nerds, so perhaps better not...
.:.