Bitmessage, Photomask Design, Lesbian Gophers

   My family minus me has gone for some skiing (no vacation for me at this
   moment), and so I had an entire Sunday for myself. Instead of writing a
   lot, I played around on my computers -- what else?

   I had a review of [1]Bitmessage and managed to get it running again on
   my old MacMini (OSX 10.7) and my small VPS (costing about 3 USD/month)
   as an unattended daemon node to support the network, using the current
   master commit (8e39f42...) in [2]my fork of the Python sources.

   On Android, it did not (yet) work out so well: Abit, which I got
   directly from its Swiss (yay!) [3]author's website, runs on both my
   phone and tablet, but it takes ages to synchronize, and seems to work
   only sporadically. It may be due to my incorrect handling, though.
     __________________________________________________________________

   I also played^W did some job-related work: To make photolithography
   masks and generate data for electron-beam writers, you need desing
   programs as used in manufacturing of integrated circuits. At our lab,
   we have licenses for programs of one of the leading suppliers of the
   industry, but they cost a sh.tload of money. I hate their user
   interface, in addition.

   Since my postdoc work about ten years ago, I was always using KIC, a
   small Unix-based tool, which was sufficient for my needs, and I helped
   to port it to Debian, with the agreement of its [4]author. I wanted to
   improve it still and put it on [5]my github page, but last week, I
   noticed its successor XIC has been published as well on Gitlab as
   [6]open source, after having been commercialized during two decades!

   So I tried XIC on my Ubuntu machines (compilation from sources works
   well), and also on a small Windows7 machine at work, and it seems to
   run smoothly.

   This is a modern GUI based system, and so I will try to promote it at
   work, because to me it seems stupid to invest learning time into
   proprietary stuff which you have to buy/rent continuously, if you want
   to make use of your knowledge.

   And although I still like KIC for it's minimalist feature set and small
   footprint, I probably should rather invest time into support for and
   development of XIC.
     __________________________________________________________________

   I'm tempted to tell [7]daphne _You're using gopher!? That's so hot!_
   but #metoo might be one of those creepy nerds, so perhaps better not...

   .:.

References

   1. https://bitmessage.org/
   2. https://github.com/hb9kns/PyBitmessage
   3. https://dissem.ch/
   4. http://wrcad.com/
   5. https://github.com/hb9kns/kic
   6. https://github.com/wrcad
   7. gopher://sdf.org/0/users/daphne/2018/29.01