marttt (u/marttt) - Readit News

marttt commented on Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge” mrwint.github.io/winter/w... · Posted by u/alberto-m

marttt · 15 days ago

IIRC, in Winter Challenge's bobsled, you could make the sleigh go really fast and then deliberately crash by letting it "jump" over the outer edge of the track into nothingness. We always did this; lots of fun. I think another way was to simply have the sleigh flip over on one side and then slide until Game Over, or maybe even get it entirely upside down? As wanting-to-be "cool kids", me and my sister always preferred the "jump" though.

Ski jumping was fun, too, and I think I was a horrible shooter in biathlon. Fond memories on a 25MHz 386SX (and of all those other pirated games, in the early Post-Soviet Eastern Europe) for sure!

marttt commented on ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/LorenDB

garciansmith · 23 days ago

I miss the ThinkLight (and the dual-light idea he had sounds great). Useful when working in a dark environment to look at papers and whatnot, or just to provide a nice amount of ambient light to smooth out the contrast between the screen itself and your surroundings. Most modern laptops have backlit keys, but those don't help in those cases; they are pretty much only useful for people who can't touch type.

marttt · 23 days ago

Yeah, it has got me "in the zone" for writing many times. On a side note, I also like the "click" when I close the lid on my T42. Mentally balancing for sure :).

I bought a used P50 for our son, and while it's allright (even the keyboard -- although it doesn't give that particular feel of the T4x era keyboards), it lacks both of those extra-relevant features. No click on closing, and a mere backlit keyboard. But, that's life!

marttt commented on ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/LorenDB

raffael_de · 24 days ago

There is something about the classic Thinkpad design which strikes me as more than just nostalgia. More like a Jungian archetype. Honest, virtuous and sturdy. The ultimate example of form follows function. The Stroke 8 of computers. A masculine counterpart to the femininity of Apple products (nttawwi).

marttt · 23 days ago

> More like a Jungian archetype. Honest, virtuous and sturdy.

+1, comparison of the day for sure!

marttt commented on ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/LorenDB

divbzero · 23 days ago

I still have my 2005 ThinkPad X41 which has both a TrackPoint and a ThinkLight. The laptop has a dead battery, but works as good as new when plugged in.

marttt · 23 days ago

On my trusty T42 (bought ~10 years ago for about 30 euros) the GPU finally died last winter (heavy, unreadable screen flicker during every slightly more intensive task). It has an IPS panel which itself still seems to be in order, though. Luckily, I accidentally saw a similar one (no IPS, though) for 26 euros, so I'm rocking again.

Those 4:3 screens and T4x series keyboards are really hard to let go, and if your activities allow for more text-oriented operating systems (I installed 9front on mine, but used to be a dedicated Tinycore Linux user, and the T42 is also nice with the various open source DOSes we have these days), they're still perfectly capable machines for 90% of relevant tasks. CF cards make very nice poor man's SSDs, so the machine is also very quiet with this setup, so far the fan rarely turns on.

As for my previous T42, I think I really squeezed a lot out of it, including using it to produce (and, on a few occasions, record live) 1-hour radio shows for my country's public broadcasting (honored to contribute to a "landmark" series where high production quality is a must). It was always fun to think that here I am, working on a 30€ 15-year-old machine, whereas other guys are doing their exact same montages on 2000€ Macbooks -- and regarding the resulting production, the radio listener will notice no difference whatsoever. :)

Obviously, though, this is a geek thing, those Macs probably do make a lot of sense for serious audio production.

It's completely crazy, though, how you can get a more or less perfectly working (!) Thinkpad for 25-30 euros, whereas that same brand new machine cost something like 2k in 2007.

marttt commented on Analoguediehard analoguediehard.com/... · Posted by u/gregsadetsky

atoav · a month ago

> Makes me wish I had a hobby and didn't care what others thought lol.

Consider that this isn't about not caring what people think, it is about not caring what certain people think.

As someone who certainly is a nerd but doesn't fit the traditional stereotype (good at sports, improvisational noiserock musician on stage, good with people and groups) my number one lesson for a happy life is: Don't surround yourself with people who dislike people who take an interest in obscure things, doesn't matter how obscure or nerdy it is. People who have no hobbies and are not interested in the intricacies of the world that surrounds them are sad, insecure creatures, especially if the only reason they don't do what they like is the fear of what other such people think. If a topic interests you and your first thought is what others might think if you dive into it too deep, that isn't exactly the sign of a happy, fulfilling existence. And by my book we got only one of those.

For example I don't care much what someone who doesn't understand the type of music I make thinks about it. But I deeply care about the opinion of people who like and understand the stuff I aim to do. This way I got to know many good friends.

See, now you get to choose between what the likes of me think about you not/having a weird hobby and what the afraid closet-nerds or boring normies think other people think they can or can't do. There will always be people who think you're weird, you just have to choose which ones. Be a punk and the business people think you're weird. Drive a lamborghini and the punks think you're an asshole. The difference between good weird and bad weird is whether you're aware of your own weirdness.

marttt · a month ago

> Don't surround yourself with people who dislike people who take an interest in obscure things

Took me about two decades to really understand and accept this -- or, act accordingly in practice. Haters gonna hate, just do your thing.

Your entire post is really good, thanks for sharing these thoughts.

marttt commented on How to Firefox kau.sh/blog/how-to-firefo... · Posted by u/Vinnl

zac23or · a month ago

I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine.

I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.

In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.

I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.

It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.

marttt · a month ago

> Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy.

Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak" Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here, but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I remember feeling really - as in, really - frustrated when I finally had to make the switch.

Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever, 27 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life

marttt commented on I made my VM think it has a CPU fan wbenny.github.io/2025/06/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2 months ago

I haven't bought a computer cooled by a fan in over 13 years.

marttt · 2 months ago

If you don't mind sharing, what's your exact setup? Fanless laptop (having read many of your previous comments - and found them very inspring -, I'm aware of your modest/text-only needs) or something really spartan like a USB-booting OS, etc? Many thanks.

marttt commented on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/m... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

pjio · 2 months ago

Quitting vim isn't about exiting the program, which can easily be done with :!kill -9 $PPID

marttt · 2 months ago

Easy-peasy!

marttt commented on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/m... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

felineflock · 2 months ago

I appreciate the effort that went into writing the article but it conflates different concepts missing some historical context and technical distinctions.

For example, TUI (text user interface) and CLI (command-line interface) are quite different. "CLI Text Editor" sounds more like someone editing a file using ECHO commands.

This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991. At that time, VIM was still very new, so "VIM memes" weren't yet part of the tech landscape.

Before VIM, there was vi. In Usenet posts - about 15 years before Google - people used to add a pithy humorous sentence at the bottom called "tagline" - here is one: "How do you exit vi? Reboot the system."

And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs. We've had EDIT, DR-DOS EDITOR, Brief, WordPad, EditPad, Notepad++, and more.

marttt · 2 months ago

I've long quit using vim on a daily basis, but the "how to exit Vim?" jokes are still somehow funny. A recent encounter was an old tweet by @iamdeveloper: "I've been using Vim for about 2 years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it."

:wq (sorry, I had to).