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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • My take: Ride as is if you can stand it, but there’s no wrong answer.

    I powder-coated a Motobecane of similar age and I don’t regret it. The original paint job with hand-painted details must have been great, but decades of sun, rain, and neglect obliterated it. Restoration would have been starting over from scratch so I sandblasted and turned it into an electric blue beast of burden.

    Somebody else can restore the original paint job 50 years from now. I’m just keeping the frame safe for them until they’re done being born and growing up somewhere. It’ll be waiting for them when they’re ready.




  • I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

    I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.



  • Steven Erikson makes a lot of bold choices throughout the series that go beyond plot structure and character deaths. If you don’t like something about any particular book, it will probably be absent in the next book.

    There are several times where (after 1000+ pages of build-up) he shifts to an entirely different set of characters on a different continent. You get thrown into the deep end and have to start over with no immediate clues about where you are, when you are, who the people are, and what it has to do with what you read before. A book or two later threads start to intersect.

    A later book has Kruppe as the narrator, which is fantastic if you love Kruppe as much as Kruppe loves Kruppe.







  • I agree.

    A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

    Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.


  • I always assumed that a lot of this boils down to semantics and trademark law.

    OpenIndiana is a direct code-line descendant of Unix System V through OpenSolaris via Solaris. Thank you for that, Sun Microsystems. I understand (but haven’t looked) that a lot of code these days is simply ported over from BSD or Linux. If you compare the source code to an old copy of the Lions book, you’re probably not going to see any line-by-line overlap. Thank goodness - we shouldn’t be literally running old operating systems from the '80s. I don’t think that OpenIndiana is Unix-certified by the Open Group (Trademark).

    The BSDs started out as a sort of ‘Ship of Theseus’ rebuild of an academic-licensed copy of Unix around the time that AT&T was getting litigious and corporate Unixes (Unices?) were starting to Balkanize.

    GNU/Linux started out as a work-alike (functions the same but with totally different code) inspired by MINIX, which in turn was an education-licensed Unix work-alike designed to show basic operating system principles to students. I think that one or more linux-based operating systems have obtained UNIX certification from the Open Group, just like Apple did for MacOS (paying money and passing some tests). It doesn’t seem like any of them are still paying to keep up the certification. Does it matter if they did at one point?

    Going back to proprietary corporate Unixes, I believe that IBM AIX and HP-UX still exist as products. They started out as UNIX and have been developed continuously since then. They are both Certified Unix. By now, their codebases probably diverge substantially both from one another and from all of the Unix-likes. IBM also has a mainframe OS with a fascinating history that has nothing to do with UNIX. It is Certified Unix because it passes the right tests and IBM paid for certification. It is not UNIX code and doesn’t descend from UNIX code.

    Simple as.






  • I didn’t, but only because my solution wasn’t novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a ‘primary’ computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.

    I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.