CSV-teksti asetamine Androidi installitud tabelarvutusprogrammis

See oli redditi-lõngas äppide välja lülitamisest Androidis (Android 14 ja varasemate näitel).

Disable-võimalus tuleb ainult sisse-ehitatud äppidele, ning ka mitte kõigile.

Osad äpid, kui nende uuendused on maha installitud, muutuvad süsteemiäppideks, seega tuleb äpilistis näidata ära ka süsteemiäpid.

Kahjuks pole siis ka äpilistis (lausa Android 14-s) kirjas, et kumb äpp on eraldi installitud ja kumb on süsteemiäpp.

Seda muret on võimalik leevendada:

Ostsin endale hiljuti uue nutitelefoni ja siis tuli vajadus automaatselt genereerida nimekirja äppidest ja nende versioonidest, mis telefonis on.

Abiks tuli AppList, mis on saadaval F-Droid äpipoest või samanimeliselt veebisaidilt. AppList genereerib nimekirja automaatselt, kuid tuleb kolme-nupu menüüst valida "System apps", et saaks täielikuma ülevaate.

Siis eksportida nimekiri, mis sisaldab ka infot selle kohta, kas äpp on süsteemiäpp.

Installisin eelnevalt Markor äpi, kuhu App Listi andmed sain eksportida CSV-kujul.

See on üks väheseid tekstitoimetamise äppe, mille ma olin uuele telefonile installinud, mis võttis eksporditud nimekirja vastu (õieti, mis oli eksporditava teksti sihtrakenduste nimekirjas).

Mis puutub failihaldusse, siis Markorit esialgu väga lihtne kasutada ei ole.

Markoris saab CSV-andmed kõik valida ja kopeerida puhvrisse. Siis asetada mõnda tabelarvutusäppi, nagu Google Sheets, kuigi mul oli lihtsam see asetada AndrOpen Office'isse.

AndrOpen Office on omanduslik port ja haruarendus Apache OpenOffice'ist (varasem OpenOffice.org, millele eelnes StarOffice). Eelis on selles, et mobiili jaoks mõeldud liidese asemel on sellel pigem desktopi-programmiga sarnane liides, mis on tuttav.

AndrOpen Office'is on reklaamid, aga need ei ole mul nähtavad, sest mul on installitud ja enam-vähem okeilt seadistatud DNS66, mis blokeerib äpireklaamid (v.a. YouTube'is ja mõnes suuremas äpis).

AndrOpen Office Calc-is tule kõigepealt valida kogu tööleht ja Format > Cells. Seal tuleb valida "text" (valikuid tuleb kerida), siis ok.

Edasi asetada puhvrisse kopeeeritud tekst Edit > Paste Special käsuga, kus CSV-teksti eraldajana tuleb märkida koma, välistada tühikud ja tabeldusmärk (tab), ning siis tee linnuke "format quoted field as text" juurde ja siis lülita välja "detect special numbers". Vajuta OK.

Tulemus:

Getting to see the analog clock in Windows 10/11

The analogue clock is supposedly no more in Windows 11, and probably also in Windows 10: Only the clock app icon has an analogue face, but that's kinda it for this app.

Downloading an app from Microsoft Store is one option. Installing Linux over Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run something like xclock is yet another option, but would take plenty of storage and a lot of additional RAM memory.

And what if Microsoft Store cannot be accessed for whatever reason, and Linux-over-WSL cannot be installed? Parts of Linux are not always easy for beginners either. Or what if one doesn't want to download an app, in pursuit of a built-in solution native to Windows?

So, there is a thing called the Date and Time Control Panel applet, which does have an analog clock. It has no dark theme, unfortunately.

Over the years, this applet has been reworked a few times, but it has always shown an analog clock since Windows 95. Windows 3.1 and earlier had a dedicated clock program. Between Windows 95 and Windows XP, the applet could usually be accessed by double-clicking the clock in the taskbar.

Windows Vista introduced a very nice analog clock widget, which I think carried over to Windows 7. I don't know if this widget was ever present in Windows 8/8.1.

The applet's filename is timedate.cpl, and it's located in the System32 folder, the typical address being

C:\Windows\System32\timedate.cpl

Getting to access it, or creating a shortcut to it depends on whether one has the necessary access privileges. On most computers at the private/consumer end, this is possible. In business and enterprise settings, a Windows system may be variously restricted per policies set or deployed by the company IT department, usually through group policy.

Open Control Panel, open Date and Time, and the analog clock is there.

For quick access, right-click on the Date and Time item, and click on Create shortcut. This will create a shortcut to the applet on the Windows desktop. The shortcut can then be renamed to whatever you like: "Analog clock", "Date and Time", or something else.

The desktop shortcut can then be copied to the Start menu, but cannot be moved there via drag-and-drop, and cannot be moved or pinned to the taskbar either.

The desktop shortcut can be copied to several locations.

To find out what those are, it's useful to investigate the locations of some of the Start menu shortcuts. Right-click on several to find out which of their context menus offer the Open file location command. This applies to shortcuts of non-UWP apps. Clicking on this command will open the folder where the shortcut is located at.

One of the more common locations is

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

— but copying a shortcut there may require User Account Control (UAC) confirmation.

Copying the shortcut to the Programs folder in the local user profile is more useful, as it has fewer restrictions, and is visible in the All apps section of the logged-on user's Start menu:

C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

Changes made in either folder will reflect in the All apps section of the Start menu. From there, one can right-click on the shortcut to pin it to Start from the context menu.

Installing the Ted word processor in modern Linux

So one day, I'd installed Debian 11 in Windows 11 using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This one is a separate ordeal, and today I discovered, that the install even included LibreOffice, which I didn't think I needed to download and install, as I have the same package on Windows already.

Installing a small word processor program ontop of an installation of Debian running atop WSL in Windows 11 is perhaps a form of overkill in terms of memory and storage requirements, since WordPad itself is still present, and Windows-native small-footprint open source word processors exist, too; one of them being the fabled AbiWord. But Linux in Windows is very much another story.

WSL did make it possible for me to investigate how to install Ted in modern Debian, as a proof of concept. — without having to use a LiveCD/LiveUSB variant of Linux, and without the opportunity to use either. One of the reasons was, that the hardware is a modern notebook computer able to run Windows 11; this laptop does not have an internal optical drive, and I don't have any form of external storage that I could use to run a LiveUSB variant of Linux.

Contents

• About Ted
• Pick your architecture
• Required dependencies for Ted
• Finding out what dependencies to install for old or obscure packages in Debian
• Configuring user interface font sizes
• Screenshot of Ted

About Ted

Ted is a simple Linux-based word processor for RTF documents, and its history goes back to November 1998 or even earlier; version 2.0 of the program was released on 9 November 1998.

Ted is more advanced than any plain text editor, such as Notepad or Nano, very roughly equivalent to — and often more advanced than WordPad, and more basic than AbiWord.

Compared to WordPad, Ted includes more formatting capabilities, spell-checking functionality, and can export files into HTML, EML (HTML mail message), EPUB, PostScript, and PDF formats. It can only open plain text files and RTF files. Ted 2.23 introduced a basic autosave function to help recover files in the event the app suddenly exits.

AbiWord, OTOH, is more advanced, and comparable to the word processing component of Microsoft Works. AbiWord can open, save, and export a greater amount of document formats; it has a proper toolbar, page zoom, and plugin support, spelling and grammar checking, the highlighting of misspelled words; document annotations, revisions, and versioning, and collaboration functionality. The last AbiWord release for Windows is v. 2.9.4 (from 25 November 2012), and remains available for download.

Ted is one of the most fitting Unix/Linux word processing programs for really old computers: its storage requirements are small, and its memory footprint low. I remember in 2005, I could launch it relatively quickly in a 120 MHz computer with Debian 3.0 and just 32 MB of RAM.

The installed size of Ted is 9.76 Mb, while the installed size of AbiWord is roughly 25 Mb. Ted is one of the smallest word processing programs for Linux. In terms of size, it would be competing with Pathetic Writer of Siag Office.

There can be instances, when Ted might crash, such as when quickly browsing through different fonts in the fonts dialog, so take care to save your work regularly.

The latest version of Ted is 2.23, dated 4 February 2013, and its installers are available at the Ted homepage.

Pick your architecture

Given the 64-bit nature of Windows 11, Debian over WSL is also 64-bit. The architecture in use is usually called amd64, even if the CPU in a consumer-grade computer was made by Intel or VIA. 64-bit Ted is available as ted-2.23-amd64.deb.

IA-64, aka Itanium, is Intel's own in-house 64-bit architecture, which is incompatible with AMD64. IA-64 should not be confused with Intel 64 or EM64T, as these two are the names of Intel's implementation of the AMD64 architecture. IA-64 has been discontinued. Its chips have always had niche uses, and they're not found in most PCs.

Installers of Ted for other architectures and operating systems, its language packs, and spelling dictionaries are available at the official Ted FTP directory here.

Required dependencies for Ted

The main problem is, that Ted has several old dependencies that are not available in any modern version of Debian, as Ted has not been maintained since 2013. The .deb packages must each be downloaded and installed separately.

Installation goes with dpkg in the command line. For the sake of simplicity, make sure the current folder is the same where the downloaded .deb packages are located.

$ sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb

Install packages in roughly this order:

Package	Download link	Download page	Notes / From
multiarch-support	multiarch-support_2.28-10+deb10u2_amd64.deb	Package page / AMD64 package download page	Install this package before anything else. Debian 10 Update 2 (Buster)
libjpeg8	libjpeg8_8d-1+deb7u1_amd64.deb	Debian archive	Debian 7 Update 1 (Wheezy)
libpng12	libpng12-0_1.2.49-1+deb7u2_amd64.deb	Debian archive	Debian 7 Update 2 (Wheezy)
libtiff4	libtiff4_3.9.4-5+squeeze10_amd64.deb	Debian archive	Debian 6 Squeeze

Then install ted-2.23-amd64.deb.

After installation has completed, the shortcut to Ted should be visible in:

Start Menu > All Apps > Debian > "Ted rtf text processor (Debian)", with a dedicated icon. The shortcut can then be pinned to Start or the taskbar.

Subsequent to that, a spelling dictionary can be installed. Their .deb filenames use this naming format: ted_en_GB-2.23.all.deb. Make sure Ted is closed when installing dictionaries.

Finding out what dependencies to install for old or obscure packages in Debian.

I had actually used dpkg to try to install Ted first, not knowing what the dependencies were, and dpkg had promptly informed me what the required packages were. The installation was not finalised because of the missing packages.

apt-get install required_packagename did not help, as the package list for Debian 11 did not contain the names of those old packages.

The Debian installation also includes the Synaptic package manager front-end. I couldn't activate it through the start menu, but could launch it from the Debian command line:

$ synaptic &

This starts Synaptic without administrative privileges. That's just enough to find out information.

In Synaptic:

1. click on "Status" in the bottom left section > then click on Installed in the top left page.
2. The list to the right shows the list of all installed packages.
3. Click into the list to focus into it.
4. Type ted to search for the package.
5. If the install failed or did not finalise, the package is marked with red.
6. Right-click Ted, select Properties
7. In the Properties window, click on the Dependencies tab.
8. The Dependencies tab is self-explanatory, and lists all the packages required for a program, component, or package to work.
9. Packages listed in italics are missing from the system. This should inform users as to which packages to look for on the web.

Configuring user interface font sizes

Graphical apps installed with Debian over WSL by default have small font sizes, as they don't recognise Windows scaling settings. On my computer, very nearly all display elements are scaled to 150% in Windows, which Debian are unaware of.

Fortunately, there are two configuration programs that can fix that.

One is xfce4-appearance-settings. In Application Finder, it's listed under Settings > Appearance, but fails to launch from there. It does launch from the command line:

$ xfce4-appearance-settings &

There, it's easy to change the look and feel of most graphical programs; the most important would be the font size.

But Ted is an older program, so it requires the installation of gtk-chtheme, which is a front-end to change GTK+ 2.0 themes.

gtk-chtheme can be installed that way from the command line:

$ apt-get-install gtk-chtheme

or by launching Synaptic as sudo from the command line:

$ sudo synaptic
On invoking a command with sudo, you may be prompted to enter a password.

In Synaptic:

1. Click the Search button, enter gtk-chtheme in the Find dialog, click Search or press Enter.
2. gtk-chtheme should be listed in the results >
3. Right-click on the gtk-chtheme package, select "Mark for Installation."
4. Click Apply in the toolbar > review information in the Summary window. It contains details about what packages would be installed. > Click Apply.
5. Once you get the 'Changes applied' window, it should be safe to close it, and quit Synaptic.

Subsequent to the installation, a "Gtk-ChTheme (Debian)" item will appear in the Debian folder in the All apps section of the Windows Start menu, and it can be launched from there. Its user interface is similar to xfce4-appearance-settings. Changing the font size to 14 pixels or greater should improve the legibility of menus and most other user interface items in Ted. Themes can be changed, too, from light to dark.

Ukraine is Europe. Not post-Soviet.

This time, this post won't be about technology. As I'd posted this with my social media username, I decided to repost it here, and not in another blog.

Ukraine is no longer post-Soviet, and it has ceased being that one or two generations ago.

Herein, I'll try to refer to Ukraine in terms of political geography, and not its geographical location. Geographically, Ukraine has always been a part of Europe in general, and Eastern Europe in particular.

For a time, Ukraine was post-Soviet, as were many other countries that gained or regained independence from the very collapsed USSR.

Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and others have always been Eastern Europe, both geographically and politically. But these were part of the Eastern Bloc, and not incorporated into the Soviet Union, whereas Ukraine and the Baltics were.

When all these countries joined the EU and NATO, Ukraine stayed outside, and so, it was not necessarily a part of the integrated Eastern Europe: there was the Eastern Europe within the European Union, and the wider, unintegrated Eastern Europe, some of which Russia erroneously regarded as within its "sphere of influence".

Can't say exactly what the correct cut-off date would be to declare the end of the post-Soviet period in Ukraine, because Ukraine's transition period has been longer than that of the Baltics, and Ukraine has had longer-term problems with regular and political corruption. (Massive political corruption ended in 2014.)

There's a group of formative events, each of which signal a step away from "post-Soviet". These are the Orange Revolution in 2003, then Euromaidan in 2013, which carried over into the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, when the very corrupt pro-Russian president Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Ukraine's slow progression could be attributed to its size; lack of a long-term non-communist independence period before the USSR, the legacy of its Soviet era and the politicians from thence; corruption; and being land-locked in the northern and western directions, sequestered away from Western Europe.

There were other factors, too:

• Ambivalence towards Russia, in the sense of a perception in Ukrainians of them supposedly being able "to deal with both sides amicably" (resp. the West and Russia), and going for neutrality, perhaps in a vain attempt at playing a Switzerland or an Austria (both rich countries, and as declaratively neutral as they can get). For a long time, Ukraine had been wobbling like that between the two;
• pro-Russian sentiment in the east of Ukraine, which was reflected in election results, with the (long-former) Party of the Regions seeing very favourable outcomes, which, during its run, had a view of tilting the political scales not exactly towards Europe, though not decidedly away in the fashion of Belarus. That was before 2013. And
• perhaps either the paucity of Ukrainian-origin culture compared to the massive cultural output from Russia, or the prevalence of Russian-language and Russian-origin culture in Ukraine, especially in its primarily Russian-speaking east. — This is something that Ukrainian comedian Valentyn Mikhienko touched on in a February, 2023 intreview to Serhiy Lyhovyda at the YouTube channel Розмова (in Ukrainian).

Некоторые последние версии свободного ПО для Windows 98/Me

Изначально постил как комментарий под этим видео, но несколько дней позже, обнаружил, что коммент или не постился, или был устранён:
• самой системой комментарий — если по желанию автора канала комментарии с линками не постятся, а целое имя пакета "OpenOffice.org" автоматически выставился как линк, и я сам не был достаточно осторожным, чтоб заменять обычную точку на какую-то альтернативную орфографическую точку;
• или автором видео — я немного покритиковал конструктивно: "Вообще вместо того, чтоб ставить Microsoft Office, лучше было бы ставить OpenOffice.org."
Ну не судьба, потому, что другой один мой комментарий под тем же видео как раз выжил. Видео из жанра "Выживание под Windows ME в 201x. году".

Итак, переходим к теме поста.

• RetroZilla 2.2 — браузер на базе SeaMonkey. Есть изначальная версия от rn10950, и более новые варианты от Roytam1. Есть поддержка протокола TLS 1.2, но в изначальной версии от rn10950 это надо включить на странице about:config. В версии от Roytam1 TLS 1.2 включена по умолчению. Рекомендую расширение NoScript 1.10 для блокировки скриптов.

• GIMP 2.2.17 — графический пакет. Надобна отдельная инсталляция теки GTK 2.6.
• Чат-программа Pidgin IM 2.6.6 тоже работает с отдельным GTK 2.6.
• Старые версии GTK для Windows доступны в проектах gtk-win и Pidgin IM на сайте Sourceforge; рекомендую GTK 2.6.10 для обеих.
• Gnumeric 1.4.3-rc4 — табличный процессор
• AbiWord 2.5.2 — текстовый процессор

• OpenOffice.org 2.4.3

• Для OpenOffice надобен Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Update 22 или предыдущая J2SE 1.4.

• VLC 0.8.6g. Есть и VLC 0.8.6i, но по своему опыту только 0.8.6g была последней работающей версией. Ила даже 0.8.6d.

(Линки пока не ставлю.)

My thoughts on disclosure

A reply to this post. It's taken me a week or so to think it through, so I've had some pauses in writing it.

> The government has conducted studies

Would like to see abstract of some of these studies, though I'm aware, that several similar ones have been written both by experts and non-experts alike.

Below is my disagreement with those predictions of doom and gloom. It's not a disagreement with you.

> 2: did Jesus also die on dozens (hundreds or thousands) of other planets to save their souls as well?

This would be profound.

> The leap in technology would put certain industries out of business almost immediately.

Disagree with the study results, due to people leaning to use legacy technologies for far longer than estimated.

Petrochemicals would still be in demand, but the money power off that fuel supply would certainly decrease, as would the power (virtual and otherwise) of all the authoritarian countries that produce gas and petrol. Not overnight, certainly.

Arab countries are actively looking to diversify their economies. Whereas Russia, being a grabby civilization that is is, has managed invade parts of Ukraine in a war started in 2014, and made very hot on 24 February 2022.

We have free-energy technologies already (wind, solar, sometimes hydroelectricity), but several nations are unwilling (or unable) to invest in those. Others do and have, but the buildup of infrastructure is insufficient to match the scale of incumbent dirty production.

> the leap in technology

There is no guarantee, that disclosure would bring any leap in technology: the United States, which by some is often complained to be supposedly be in possession of extraterrestrial kit, will never reveal anything to anyone else, so as to prevent authoritarian countries and dictatorships exploiting that tech for their nefarious ends.

Many humans on Earth would choose to avoid using demonstrably alien "non-Earth" tech entirely.

After the initial possible shock/euphoria, there would be entire communities, perhaps even several countries, who would still push to develop native Earth kit despite the presence of alien tech — not just because of the "not-invented-here" idea, but because we as a species and a civilization want to demonstrate our own ability and capabilities in doing great things.

Several decades after a possible speculative disclosure, there would be countries and communities like the Amish now, living only under a certain standard of development, using only Earth-based technologies, and avoiding alien tech as much as possible. I wouldn't blame them.

There would be an entire "alien tech divide", like now the digital divide and other such divisions:

* Some countries would become incredibly advanced, would progress at a break-neck speed, but would also be burdened with the responsibility of defending Earth.
* Other countries and nations would continue to only to use and develop Earth-based technologies, and would be fine just as well. People from the more advanced countries would come to visit those "we use only Earth tech"-countries, and would enjoy the environment as museum pieces.
* Of course, even now, there are countries and nations that are almost literally stuck in the past: Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Russia.

Their common denominator is total or near-total isolation: The Afghan society has been forced again to live in the medieval past, North Korea still relives the Korean War and is societally stuck in the year of 1953, Iran is somewhere in 1979, and Cuba remains famous for its old American cars.

Russia is the most technologically-advanced of that bunch, but is likely to stagnate due to it pouring money into its hot war of aggression against Ukraine and its people, and the resulting sanctions that it (Russia) has incurred. (Avoidance of this topic is not easy for me, as I'm very moved by both the unnecessary suffering of Ukrainians, and the bravery of the Ukrainian people in defending their land.)

It's true, that Cuba, North Korea, and Iran each have some developments and advancements, but they're not enough to offset the steep levels of underdevelopment, of which Russia also has plenty.

> Millions of jobs would be lost, the stock market would crash, leading to unrest etc.

As with the emergence of any new technology, new jobs meant to run and maintain these new technologies will crop up, as always.

Millions of jobs have been lost during COVID-19 and previous and other crises, stock markets have crashed and rebounded before, unrest always happens somewhere even without disclosure.

Therefore I do not submit to this non-pretty picture of events as doom and gloom, as described in the report.

It is true, that such reports of possible outcomes ought to be written and studied, so as to prepare contingencies for world leaders, and what decisions they should make to prepare their countries in particular, and humanity in general.

In many ways, doom-and-gloom prognostications appeal to the mass psychosis effect of populations, while not paying enough attention to the fact, that each individual has more immediate individual concerns: work, family, children, food, etc.

Disclosure is not necessarily something that would cause social unrest, thought it has non-zero potential, simply because it brings the unknown to the fore.

Instead, very earthly things can bring out large amounts of people, especially, if day-to-day living is disrupted on a large scale.

In some countries, people come to protest simply because a state wants to raise the pension age in order to have a more balanced budget.

How a nation will present itself to itself in a crisis plays a major role in forming its future.

The masses might make their move, or they might not, depending on how confident a population is.

Much depends on the cohesiveness of the society and the social compact within:

1. One nation can be confident, that things will be all right, and its people will cooperate and be closer together, despite all the hardships (see: Ukraine in 2004, 2013/2014, and 2022−present). Most democracies have processes ready to handle crises, and in these, the social compact of a people is usually strong.

2. The body of a people in some other nation might not be particularly confident, perhaps out of fear due to systemic repression. Such dissembling of a people leads to remoteness wrt one's leader's, inaction, abdication of responsibility ("we're not interested in politics"), and/or mistakes, and that in turn leads to a failed state and an eventual unenviable state of being at the mercy of proto-feudal leaders and/or warlords. Venezuela is there already, and Russia is slowly creeping there.

Disclosure would be likely to lead to first contact sooner, and that would certainly have the potential for the [Colombian exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_exchange), and the scenario of the plight of American First Nations due to the extreme inequality between First Nations' and colonialist levels of offensive/defensive technology. There might just as well be extraterrestrials with the "white saviour" syndrome.

A more localised danger would be the further emergence of religious or quasi-religious cults based on the existence of aliens, in addition to those that we have already. What if some off-worlders begin to exploit that?

A danger to culture would be some form of religious adherence to any ideology that some extraterrestrials themselves adhere to, with a view, as if one's own, human, culture were supposedly inferior.

This cultural in inferiority complex towards the best of human culture is based on a false assumption, that aliens' way of life is supposedly superior to ours, — based solely on their technological advancement.

We don't know what hardships were endured, what crimes and sacrifices were made by some of the non-Earth cultures to achieve faster-than-light travel and other improvements in technology.

There is never any guarantee, that their level of advancement and their practical methods of reaching that would be an advantage to us. After contact, we can learn from their history, and maybe avoid some of the mistakes they did.

If (a big 'if') a great number of extraterrestrial/extrasolar societies, per stories, do not use money, then that doesn't mean as if the use of market economies here on Earth would be supposedly wrong. It's just a way to manage resource distribution and moderate it in the even of limited supply.

Well-regulated market economies are a natural evolution of bare capitalism, just like Lutheranism is an evolution away from Catholicism, which had become corrupt by Martin Luther's time.

Either they have resolved energy and production bottlenecks, and have formed sustainable means of living in abundance, or they also have their haves and have-nots despite these solutions and high technology: A traveling crew or away team from a non-moneyed society might be very well-off and privileged, but an industrial worker or miner of valuable resources of that same species and society might still not be.

To somehow have the sufficient time to prepare for the eventual first contact, our human civilization cannot stop development.

Neither should we wait for the arrival of the proverbial "white ship" — an Estonian term representing the imagined ultimate "savior" vessel that was supposed to bring people to better shores, but never arrived.

In the real-life Estonian "white ship" story, the swindler who initially proposed and advertised that idea, got his money, and then scrammed, leaving the people who'd 'invested' their money to that idea of traveling away to better shores, waiting somewhere on the coast of no man's land for a ship to come, until most everyone finally realised, that the ship never arrived. Even then, some of the group had remained believers in that idea, trying to rationalize, that maybe the ship had sunk.

For many humans, believing in and waiting for disclosure has become almost like a religious experience; it's like waiting for the second coming of Jesus and expecting total salvation. Many 'believers' ardently imagine, that then all the world's material and even spiritual problems would supposedly be resolved. They will not be.

My own take would be finding a balance between increased awareness and preparedness (that, if clandestinely), and pushing the date of official disclosure farther away from the current moment. Too early disclosure would likely damage society and contaminate our culture even further. Too late preparedness would leave us more vulnerable to all that is out there.

A little bit about fonts

Posted as a comment reply here, too, as AC.

• Arial at 10pt/13.5px is the best reading font so far -- this at 150% scale with a 1920x1080 display resolution. It is the most optimal font to absorb long texts on screen, but is relatively tiny on paper, where I'd enjoy Times New Roman. Apple Garamond and the 80% condensed Garamond would be luxury.

• Chicago (found in early/classic Apple Macs) has great readability and the necessary compact size on early Mac display resolutions that are now smallish. To this day, it remains stylish and sufficiently futuristic, but not in the gaudy style of futurism that was envisioned with Westminster and Data 70, which were prominent in the 1970s and 1980s sci-fi flicks.

• Verdana at 9pt is the best for even smaller-sized text without losing legibility.

My favourite tall sans-serif font is Abadi MT Condensed Light. It's similar to News Gothic, but is taller and thinner.

Of open-source fonts:

In terms of readability, Helvetica is one of the best sans-serif fonts on Linux. Linux Libertine G is good, and Linux Libertine Display G takes the cake, but with 1.15 pt line height, bugs and all.