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Bonzi Buddy

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111–120 of 120 posts

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#111

Geeze, that's a blast from the past. You know it's funny- I used to periodically go looking for things to customize my desktop experience. This, those little dogs and cats, Rainmeter, Amiga workbench hacks, etc. etc. Nowadays- I supposed finally burned by enough malware and having become curmudgeonly- I want the most minimal "plain vanilla" setup I can get and pride myself in hardly ever installing _anything_.

I miss that sense of wonder from the early computing days.

Me too. “I wonder if these three pages of BASIC I typed in will run?”

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word: xroach

Sadly xroach appears to be missing from debian. A quick search indicates the source is encumbered somehow. Xeyes is still there though

It’s not in the distribution, but some kind soul updated the source code for modern compilers.

https://github.com/interkosmos/xroach

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#115
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost at least a week when I figured out you could change the WinXP start menu text with a hex editor and went down the rabbit hole from there. Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.

Haha. I wondered what "na85" meant so I looked up Urban Dictionary and it turns out you're the authority on "1337".

[deleted]

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#116
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, who even sees their desktop these days? :D

This is why I think some folks spend so much time on customizing their mechanical keyboards. The need to decorate one's own space.

is there a need for that? I get having a mechanical keyboard hobby, that makes sense, and I don't get that there is a need to customize your stuff for customization's sake only.

there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#117
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you aware that software installations and customizations take you further away from "vanilla", rather than closer to it?

Sometimes, more is less.

sometimes more is less, and sometimes less is more, and neither more nor less are vanilla. this is about "vanilla".

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#119
post #77
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost at least a week when I figured out you could change the WinXP start menu text with a hex editor and went down the rabbit hole from there. Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.

I have a vague memory of being able to change the windows 98 startup screen image ( where it says windows 98 ). I changed a bunch of HS computers to say nindows 88 by "photoshoping" it in ms paint.

Ah, the security of Windows 98 on common-use school computers.

I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.

Re: Bonzi Buddy

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word: xroach

xeyes too

About 10 years ago, I took a background with 2 cats and pinned window-decoration-less xeyes to them. It was hilarious when I paired with people and they would realize the cats were watching us.

Even at the time, most folks had forgotten or never knew about xeyes.

I did use to customize everything in the late 90s/early 2000s. I loved Sawmill/Sawfish for its lispy extensibility. I was constantly flipping between heavy desktop environments and seeing how stripped down I could run.

Nowadays I don't even change the wallpaper on my mac. I don't use any fancy shell prompt (just host$).

I do still have a ~200 line shell rc just to make all my oses consistent (macos, freebsd, redhat, debian/ubuntu) and deal with junk like my ssh-agent. I change a line or two every year or so. And my neovim config is in flux. But most everything else I use is just OOB.

I should say I did fall in love with chezmoi for managing config like this a couple years back and still use it religiously.

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