Mastodon and the Wandering Shop So, there’s a social network called Mastodon. It’s basically the only one that I’m active on these days. Mastodon is a federated social network, which means that individuals and groups of folks get together to build and pay for a server that runs the Mastodon software. Each server is called an instance. The Mastodon instance that I joined is a server that is loosely organized with members who are interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy....

TL;DR Is there a way to support display of U+X? How many character blocks will it take to display U+X? Will U+X be displayed in independent multicolor? Introduction I’ve been on a bit of a research kick in Unicode lately, and I’ve long been a C language user, since before UTF-8 became the “winning” encoding for Unicode. I’ve also long been a bit of an enthusiast for Virtual Terminals, especially as I started programming before fully integrated development environments for every language were the default....

Corporate Use Restrictions There seems to be a growing trend in Open Source software of adding Terms of Use of a download service to exclude use by businesses (usually defining this as some number of employees, some amount of revenue or both), so that the software itself remains free and open source, but making sure that businesses must pay for the privilage of using the product. These span a wide swath of methods from very obvious paywalls to deeply obfuscated Terms of Use clauses, and they are dangerous for businesses specifically because some programmer who uses one of these technologies at home on an open source project often won’t think twice about installing the same on a business supplied computer to get their job’s work done…...

Introduction At this point, there are hundreds of graphical terminal emulators out there. Every single one that I have run into pretends like it is some varient of a hardware terminal made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from their Video Terminal (VT) line of products, from 1978’s VT100 through 1993’s VT525. A reader might chime in here and say, no MY TERMINAL thinks it is an xterm, but alas xterm pretends to be a VT420 (xterm can actually pretend it is many different terminals, so even if you DO use THE xterm software I doubt your computer is actually set up to most efficiently talk to it, I’ll talk about that later )....