A-to-Z

Abecedarium of random thoughts.

A

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged was a transformative book for me, defined my views and opinions a lot. It took another ten years and re-reading it one more time to understand what a horrible propaganda rag, written in poor English, the novel is.

C

Cats

Cats are the best. See further here.

Chess

I am exceptionally bad at chess, never liked the game though.

D

Dumb phones

Dumb phones are dumb. Any smartphone, devoid of the soul sucking apps, is the dumb phone. To put it another way, spending resources on a market-tailored device designed to satisfy the “minimalism” trend is dumb.

E

Europe

The subjugation of the words “Europe/European” as a political (i.e. EU) rather than cultural descriptor is not OK.

F

Feminism

I did not understand why it’s such a vocal issue in modern times in the Western world, the rights are here and we are equal. Then I witnessed my wife go through pregnancy, labor, and childcare. Now I am very positive about affirmative and DEI policies.

FreeBSD

I daily drove FreeBSD from October 2024 to October 2025. It was a fun experience and I learned a lot. The OS does not matter — the DE, browser and text processor are the same. However, more often than I expected, even popular packages were broken for weeks. There was too much tinkering too — no more than with any minimal Linux distro, but more than I could afford. Also, as an end user, I see only positives in systemd.

H

Heroes III

Perhaps, the GOAT game. HD+ patch deserves mention as well.

Horror

Horror literature is a very complex genre. To instill suspense into the reader and to frighten him with plain words is difficult.

Horror films are hard too, but most of them are screamers, unfortunately.

M

Macbooks

Mid 2012 13" Macbook Air was the best computer I ever had. Early 2019, I got 2018 13" MBP with a touchbar, that garbage was the last Apple PC I bought for myself. A brittle glass sandwich with crappy broken keyboard, I could not enjoy using it.

I know that the Apple silicon SoCs are good, but I don’t need computation-capable personal laptops.