I’m just a nerd girl.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I always preferred the C64C style keyboard where the graphics characters were in the top of the keycaps. This is my C64G (old breadbin style chassis but with C64C style colouring and keycaps):

    Commodore 64G

    Quick summary: You get the left graphics character with the Commodore key (bottom left corner), and the right character with Shift key. By pressing Commodore+Shift, you swap between upper case + graphics characters mode and the upper case + lower case mode, applying to the entire screen (so you can’t actually use the right graphics characters in that mode).

    Fun thing: To switch to another text colour you press Ctrl + number keys, with 8 colours available there, just as in the VIC-20. However, there’s also another set of colours available with Commodore + number keys, for another 8 colours. I guess with Jack Tramiel’s penny pinching, they didn’t bother to mark those on the keys when making the next gen system.




  • For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

    (Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

    Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.







  • I actually really like the C64 keyboards - not perfect by any means, but they are some of the best keyboards in the 8-bit computers, really.

    Fun thing, I wrote one NaNoWriMo novel on a C64, so I don’t think the typing comfort is too much of an issue. Though for that experiment I actually used my C64C, because the low-profile case makes things a tiny bit more ergonomic. (I don’t use it that C64 specimen much for other purposes, because it has a busted/temperamental SID. The one in the picture is my C64G, which is one of the last models produced, basically C64C guts in a breadbin-style case.)



  • My father had a Brother laser printer. It outlived him. (…Anyway. Have you ever had to do Windows tech support for family? Not always nice. Ever had to do Windows printer tech support? Hoo boy. Ever had to do Windows printer tech support when the printer is hooked through a Centronics-to-USB adapter? Uggh. …though I was kind of surprised that Windows 10 still had built in drivers for the damn thing.)

    Me, I bought a Canon laser which technically has Linux drivers but damn me if I ever got it to print more than the CUPS test page. …actually I’d rather not talk about CUPS. I have too many bad memories about it. (You can’t escape the Printer Madness just by using Linux, oh no.)