+-----------------------------------------+
| Shopping, Python Distribution           |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
|                                                               |
| Date: 20181118-22:00                                          |
| Author: Sloum                                                 |
| Soundtrack: Invention #4 by James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg |
|                                                               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+----------+

It is the time of year where everywhere you go there are a million cars. I
needed to go to the grocery store....there were people everywhere. Call me a
scrooge, but I just do not get the holiday season. I am an adult with a
job. I can buy mostly anything I need. I am not against gift giving in general,
just as a seemingly mandatory part of a cultural tradition I do not care for.
I buy gifts at the holidays for the kids in the family (three nephews), and
love doing so. But I dont get it between adults. Particularly when gift lists
are involved. If you are just going to get someone something off of a list,
why not just have everybody buy their own things and get together for some
food and family/friends time without all of the capitalism of it all? Why
do people need to flock to stores and feed this system?

I get that it isn't changing anytime soon. But the evidence is mounting that
I just do not fit in very well with the way of life where I am. I seem to
value different things than many of the people around me.

One good thing did come from going out though. I had been given a gift card
for a bookstore 6 months ago. I had forgotten about it, but found it while
cleaning my desk today. While I was out, I went to said bookstore and bought
a graphic novel on a whim. My wife and I have been reading and enjoying
"SAGA", by Brian K Vaughn. I had thought about buying a book on Golang, but
the only one seemed to mostly just duplicate the info they have on the website.
So I got "Paper Girls", also by Brian K Vaughn. It has been really enjoyable
so far. Not quite as good as SAGA, but SAGA has been going for a long while
and I am very attached tot he characters. For any out there that like graphic
novels, I highly recommend either of those two. Even if you do not like
graphic novels you should do yourself a favor and read "Moonshadow" by
J. M. DeMatteis[1].

----

As my gopher browser project nears 1.0 I am struggling with finding ways to
bundle/package it. It is a big ask to have an average user get python3, then
make sure they have pip installed and configured on their system for python3.
Then ahve them get pillow off of pip (which will aparently not work correctly
on the newest OSX version). Then on debian linux users have to get two
packages throughapt. It is just so much. I have been looking through options,
but none of them seem great. I could go the .deb route, I could try using a
makefile and a setup file, I could try to freeze and generate an executable
binary, the list goes on. Python is so nice to write but such a pain to
distribute to non-developers. To make matters worse: I got it to run on my
older Macbook Air, but it looks TERRIBLE. All of my tkinter styling goes out
the window, the images on my buttons do not have trasnparency anymore and they
are super pixelated, the scrollbar looks awful. As a result, I do not consider
OSX a possible target system for this version of the browser. Maybe if I build
it with a different language and a different gui toolkit (gtk?).

Do any of you out there have any advice on bundling python applications for
debian linux? If so, email me[2]!



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshadow_(comics)
[2] [email protected]