Wednesday: It's official. I hate computer programmers.

Mostly because "this is a problem" rarely gets the point across.  For a couple of months now, my window manager decides it can't render a title bar, and that causes the entire thing to call abort.  This is caught, and the window manager relaunched, leading (90% of the time) to an endless cycle of abort/crash/restarts until I get fed up and logout.  Why does this happen?  No clue.  All I can see in the output files is that it's having trouble with a free.  Great.  Wonderful.  So let's google this and see if someone else is having this issue.

As far as I can tell, no.  Why?  Who knows.  Maybe no one else is using this window manager, or didn't update something in some way that the system thinks is fine, but somehow isn't.  I had similar abort issues with gnuplot, but I can't reproduce that right now.

The other fun thing is that the window manager people are equally unhelpful.  "Enlightenment and EFL Debian official packages are outdated. [T]he installation for Debian is done from sources". Oh go fuck yourself.  Why don't you supply packages?  Or, help the maintainers make the packages?  Do you know why packages are helpful?  Because then I don't have to fuck around for an hour compiling shit, and then everyone knows if there's a bug in version X.  It's not an endless search for revisions and shit like that.

In looking at this, I'm also wondering if the fact that closing my laptop has been putting the computer into suspend mode is related to me checking to see if the window manager thing was due to a configuration issue.  Why?  Because (as is the sane way to do things) the window manager has a power management interface that I might not have disabled.  Because obviously that's a thing it should be doing.

And that's the main problem.  "I think this should handle power management."  "I think this should replace simple text logs with an internal binary log instead."  "I think that this should not let you close the windows if you don't save in our own format because I'm an asshole who wants everything to work my way, even though that way is fucking stupid."  "I'm going to package a thing with name blah and xblah, and even though there are decades of precident, blah is not actually going to contain a command line version of blah, but rather a different X11 version of blah."

Because that's super reasonable.

And, specifically, blah is sane, the scanner interface, and kind of the source of tonight's entire rant.  Yesterday I saw a scanner sitting in the free pile at work, and after checking that it worked on my work computer, figured that it might be cool to have.  It's somewhat old, and limited to a max resolution of 1200dpi, but that's far more that I really need for most uses.  My main goal for it will be to take actual physical photos, and digitize them so I can fold them into my photo archive.  I also was wondering if it would help my Drawlloween pictures.

So, as a test, here are two old cell phone versions:

And new clean scanned versions:

So it takes far longer to scan than to just take a picture, but it's generally a better picture.  There's a few spots where I probably need to clean the glass, and scanning from my notebook means there's page curl toward the spine, but still, not bad for something that was free.

One other thing: when I thinking about it last night, I assumed that it wouldn't be difficult to write something for images that would be able to identify multiple photos on the scanner screen, and split them into separate image files automatically.  It turns out that I don't need to think too hard about it, because someone already wrote a thing for imagemagick that does that.

• Pokemon.
• Giovanni.
• Bulbasaur.
• Ditto and Mimikyu.
• Comic book stuff.
• This is fucking stupid.  "Sure, they're the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Earth is in the galaxy!  So they can stay here!  BRILLIANT!"  No.  It's not. Fuck you Brian Michael Bendis.
• This is fucking stupid, too, and I bet after that last link, you can guess who wrote it.  "Let's make all the characters do stupid stuff to make a big angsty story about who the fuck knows, because this is all style with no actual decent substance!"
• I was so angry I sat and googled to find something good.  People should write more comics like Kate Leth.  Here's one panel.  I like everything about this one panel more than everything in those last two links.  It's fun, it's funny, it's not being overdramatic to try and make a point.
• Other stuff.
• Squirrels.
• Damn it, Tuxedo Mask.
• Totally not Elsa.
• I haven't read this, but it was linked in a big twitter chain about interactions between Roman Britain and China and Japan that was super interesting, and tl;dr, I'm now following a new archaeologist blog and twitter.
• Why is this even an issue?  Honestly, are people so fucking stupid that they think taking a lunch away from a kid is a good idea?
• I think this is likely to be my next phone, if I have to get a new phone anytime soon.  It might not be, as my current phone is pretty great still.  Still, this is the next iteration of my phone, but in the "not stupid" version that still has a headphone jack.  I'm a bit disappointed that the color customization stuff got dropped, and that they're spending so much effort on the attachments.