One thing that dawned on me… maybe CSD and some of the “new” window management paradigms (tiling, card style, etc.) are symbiotic. If you aren’t using the title bar for manipulating the window on a regular basis, you feel free to ignore or outright scramble it.

It creates a clear heirarchy of information too. The system owns the title bar, so any operations there are system operations.

At one point browsers did something similar for security awareness-- real permission prompts, etc. were set a few pixels over into the main UI to establist that they were “real” and not part of the page content.

Most of the time, we’re not so starved for pixels that we have tp be stealing from the title bar.

Hell, we lived thtough 640x480 desktops without even the cheat of hamburger menus.

I hate that Qt6 dropped the Motif theme. You can get a Kvantum theme that’s vaguely close, but it’s different enough that you can tell the difference (the old one had deeper bevels) and I tend to prioritize Qt5 if I can use it.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

IMO, the real use case for PayPal was really on the seller side.

When it was 2002 and you weren’t a major business but just wanted to sell three old CDs on eBay or offer dog haberdashery online, it was by far the simplest way to accept a credit-card funded transaction.

We’re still not a lot better there in 2025. Even with more modern platforms, you can’t really get from zero to accepting cards directly in 15 minutes.

What problem does CSD solve? I’d think “some apps look and work differently” is a pretty bad tradeoff for “I want to cram custom stuff in the title bar which was more or less universally treated as owned-by-the-system for the first 35 years of GUIs at least?”

GTK/GNOME seem to be making themselves actively hostile towards customization, which seems a great way to lose enthusiasts.

Now I want to see a fully Hexbearified LLM.

Instead of racist conspiracy theories it will divert every topic to beans. And the saucy images will be mostly of cuties from Soviet posters.

Is it pronounced like the blood thinner/rat poison (warfarin)?

If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.

XFCE’s old panel was a distinct mimic of CDE’s. I liked it…

But now CDE is open source and NsCDE gives you the same look with a highly customised fvwm config if you don’t want to stick to the Motif universe.

The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing…

And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.

Keep an eye out at thrift shops-- I’ve seen huge tranches of Star Trek novels.

Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.

Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.

Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.

Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.

Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.

I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.