Tim

I use “PDF Studio” (https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/) and it’s great, no problems at all.

Sadly I have to keep one Windows machine with Acrobat installed because the tax authorities here use hideous Cthulhu-like many-tentacled “Dynamic Forms” documents that automatically transform into XML (ugh) and only work in Adobe/Windows. But other than tax returns, I only use PDF Studio.

Ah damn, I loved that book when I was a kid. I can probably blame it, at least in part, for my career…

(I was a massive nerd and a FidoNet sysop back in the 80s & 90s, and got my first VMS and Unix experience hopping onto academic networks over dialup and X.25 gateways using, err, “unconventially obtained” credentials… This experience helped me convince my interviewer at Imperial College to overlook my less than stellar academic record to admit me to their Computing peogramme.

That book - and the movie WarGames - were definitely inspiring, if not life-changing.)

People don’t just buy food.

I’ve eliminated more or less all US products and suppliers from my life; that was almost zero change to my food or drink purchases (I never did drink stuff like Coke.) But it has meant things like changing toothpaste, laundry conditioner, shower gel…

Kiwix is the easiest way to do it; if you have Docker/Kubernetes, there’s a Docker image at ghcr.io/kiwix/kiwix-serve, and the K8s manifest to deploy is as simple as:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: wikipedia-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: kiwix-server
  ports:
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  clusterIP: None
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: wikipedia-server
  labels:
    app: kiwix-server
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: kiwix-server
  template:
    metadata:
      name: wikipedia-server
      labels:
        app: kiwix-server
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: kiwix-server
        image: kiwix/kiwix-serve:3.8.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        command:
        - /usr/local/bin/kiwix-serve
        - --port=8080
        - --verbose
        - /data/wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
          protocol: TCP
        volumeMounts:
        - name: data
          mountPath: /data
          readOnly: true
          limits:
            memory: "128Mi"
            cpu: "2000m"
      volumes:
      - name: data
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: wikipedia-mirror

Then you just need to download a copy of the mirror file wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim and put it in the appropriate place - wget https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim

Annnnnd that’s why I downloaded a snapshot of Wikipedia a few months ago and host it locally.

Sad that it’s necessary, but with modern AI tooling, we have everything we need to destroy knowledge on an industrial scale.

I gave up with MacOS a couple of years ago (after nearly a lifetime of using them - my first ‘own’ Mac was a Lombard PowerBook G3 - lovely machine,) because it became increasingly apparent that Apple had stopped caring about the desktop operating system and were intent on turning it into a mobile phone with a keyboard and bigger screen.

Annoying desktop bugs - like constantly (and randomly) forgetting the resolution and position of second displays, not powering up external USB drives properly after sleep, and (as a developer) endlessly having to fight with “why is my build suddenly broken? oh, MacOS decided it doesn’t trust the linker again” type problems just wore me out. Every time they released some pointless new UI fluff but ignored the fact that the Finder had been essentially unusable since Mac OS X (because why should you be using the Finder anyway, you should just trust that your files are stored in Magic Apple Cloud Land…) just reminded me they really didn’t care about desktop users, they just want desktops as accessories to their mobile phones.

So, I cut the cord and finally switched to Linux on the desktop. Which is a shame, because they do make some really nice hardware…

(Although now that I’m actively trying to cut all US suppliers out of my life, it’s actually been a blessing.)

This is a very good point - in books/dramas it helps the exposition to have a character you can relay half the plot details to. Similarly in radio dramas, every conversation between characters starts with saying each others names and a full recap of whatever the subject is… But nobody in the real world does or wants to talk like that.

Real people just say “hey, is that thing fixed yet?”, not “hello Chris, you remember yesterday we were discussing the il problem with the Thing, and you proposed Cornfootling it; what happened?”

When I want Alexa to turn on the lights, I want to just say “Alexa, turn on the lights”, not have a goddamned debate. And when I want to search for whatever the hell Cornfootling is, I just want to type “Cornfootling” and hit search.

China’s VPN blocking is actually very, very effective, and the vast majority of people don’t go around it.

And that’s kinda the point - the controls don’t have to be 100%, they just have to cover the majority. And for the few that do circumvent - well, that’s just one more easy crime for the authorities to charge you with if they ever feel the need.