Archives for Nostalgia
Me désenchanter, c’est ma vocation éternelle
Ce n'est pas dans mes habitudes d'être (trop) fan d'un homme ou d'un mouvement politique, mais j'ai, ou j'avais mes affinités et des gens que je trouvais plutôt prometteurs. Eh…
Soviet Winter Nostalgia
For someone who lived in a "formerly communist" Eastern European country, hence a victim of the forced "Bolshevization" of a third of Europe, it might seem bizarre (or a sort…
Philippe Charles Jacquet: The Better Maestro of Solitude
My shortlist of depicters of solitude includes names of the magnitudes of Edward Hopper and of Giorgio de Chirico; but here's a French contemporary painter that makes me relate to…
Are you old enough to remember Professor Balthazar?
The good old Professor Balthazar and his marvelous inventing machine were known in the former Yugoslavia, (West) Germany, Romania, Italy, Switzerland (in Italian), the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Portugal,…
Instead of a smartwatch
Some people use their smartphone to check the time. Other people use smart Apple/Samsung/Huawei watches. I preferred to spend about €109 on an automatic Orient TriStar RA-AB0020S19B. 18 days later,…
From Memory’s Vault: My Times With Fedora, as Béranger
For what it's worth, I've been a distro hopper since forever. I'm not sure if there's any single distro that I have used as much as I used Win3·1, Win95,…
Watching “old guys” playing with Linux on YouTube
Since the pandemic, I noticed more and more YouTube channels of people likely to be 50+, 60+, or even older, who rant about Linux (not all the time, but still).…
A Glimpse from the Past
It was early 2008, and XFCE was at version Distros such as Zenwalk, Vector, Wolvix, GoblinX, KateOS, SAM Linux, and Mandriva, were still with us. I just rediscovered an old…
73 Minutes That Define Linux on the Desktop Today—Rather Depressingly
I must be nuts to dedicate a blog post to a videocast by Bryan Lunduke, but there's a good reason for that. For the first time ever, I'm glad YouTube…
Internet Radio, Mon Amour
Listening to dozens of Internet radio streams is my contribution to increasing the carbon footprint. But it's not my fault that everything now is using Internet bandwidth--YouTube videos, Smart TVs,…
Should you live with no sense of smell…
...you'd be missing quite a lot. I happen to be a person to whom the olfactory and the tactile senses are crucial—not that I could imagine myself blind or deaf,…
Nostalgia & Fun With Calculators
Despite having developed a dependency of my ~200 installed Android apps and ~150 installed Windows programs, I still use a hand-held scientific calculator. Most of the time I'm using it…