rollin with the homies

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2024

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  • After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.

    My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.

    The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.





  • At the bottom in the

    Education, Professional Development, & Credentials

    section

    Something like: Open Source Computer Science Coursework Completed XX hours of coursework through ABCD, EFGH, HIJK Universities Relevant Coursework: Linear Algebra (Princeton); Machine Learning (Stanford); Cryptography (Stanford)

    It would weigh less than my traditional degrees, but if pressed on it (unlikely), I would describe exactly what this is: an effort to liberate CS education in the spirit of the Free Software movement, using synchronous and asynchronous learning methodology in an online learning platform from accredited, reputable universities.

    At this point in my career, it would show continued aptitude for growth and professional development, since it’s been close to two decades since my first degree.

    Also, at this point, I’ve seen people put shit like Strayer U and ITT Tech and Liberty on their resume and get hired for very high paying jobs. Honestly I would take this over that trash.

    Even 15 years ago, most lower level undergrad coursework was 150+ students in a lecture hall where the professor would pull up Blackboard and just load the slideshow. It was only at the 300+ level where class size shrunk down and interpersonal relationships sort of mattered.

    My wife’s graduate degree a few years later but still over a decade ago was almost entirely online; they only met in person to discuss their progress towards the capstone. And she has a nice prestigious degree with a very expensive university name on it, walked across the stage at that University, and nowhere does that diploma read, “Online.”

    I have a lot of beef with the US university system. Change has to start somewhere.





  • I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t played Minecraft.

    We have a family Minetest server runnning Asuna since Summer 2023. Usually based around just crafting different things. Even for a few months we just put on creative mode and built two huge cities about 8,000 blocks apart and sky train connecting them, and then a third underground cave city about 2,000 blocks away.

    We’ve had major upgrades of both Asuna and Minetest within the past few weeks so it’s pretty exciting.



  • Just the successor to pine. It works with IMAP and SMTP.

    I’ve tried elm and mutt many years ago back in the 90s and pine was the easiest. So I guess I just stayed there and it works over my ssh connections too. To be honest, the number of personal emails that I’ve written over the past several years can be counted in the dozens so it’s not that important to change any more.




  • SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlNostalgic Distros?
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    3 months ago
    • ZenWalk was unique and great about 15 years ago as an easy Slackware with minimalist install.
    • Chakra Linux was an Arch+KDEmod distro that kind of went away.
    • Bodhi Linux has its own desktop called Moksha.
    • There is a GNUstep Live CD that comes out every few years, based on Debian. It is a unique setup from a time when the future of computing was promising. I think it is distributed on LinuxQuestions or some other forum.
    • There was a distro called gOS about 15 years ago that used a lot of desktop widgets and Google apps. Their business model was basically, “We are going to re-skin Ubuntu and call it gOS and hope Google buys us.” It did not work out.
    • Darwin was upstream for macOS and for many years, there was a community of users who would port the traditional *NIX stack to it. Xorg, traditional window managers, a ports system, etc.
    • Frugalware Linux was well polished and kind of a spiritual successor to Zenwalk.
    • openSUSE 10.3 had the most beautiful Gnome setup. It was unique in that it had a single panel, a modified Clearlooks theme, and a Vista-style start menu.
    • OpenSolaris likewise had a very unique and beautiful look, with its macOS-inspired Nimbus theme. I think this was the best looking theme of that era.
    • SimplyMEPIS was my first Linux on a T61. I had used FreeBSD for the decade prior. I don’t know what was better about SimplyMEPIS than Debian, nor do I know what SimplyMEPIS meant versus regular MEPIS. It’s kind of like Claws Mail and Sylpheed Claws. Some times we just throw words together and give it an icon and there it is.

    I used all of these at some point.


  • I used to prefer ThinkPads but I’ve moved on. I have had lots of reliability problems with them over the past few years. I had keys fall off a newer ThinkPad keyboard (which wasn’t user replaceable) and another new ThinkPad just die under warranty and the repair person damaged it further when trying to fix it.

    I am on System76 now and have no issues and they do good things like right to repair and Coreboot.

    If I had to choose a single laptop for everything, it would be the Toughbook 40. I have one for work and it has a 1200 nit display. It runs Ubuntu LTS perfectly. It costs several thousand dollars new but has swapable components, multiple batteries, and part availability is measured in decades. You can get an older CF-31 or CF-54 for a few hundred dollars and still find new components for it.


  • People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term – netequitte – that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren’t going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.

    Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.

    Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.

    In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven’t recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn’t have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.

    Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.

    When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people’s minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.

    People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.

    Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.

    Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?

    Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter – showing how many page hits you had.

    There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn’t just like 5 websites.

    I think the Fediverse – Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.



  • I get mistaken for Hispanic and told I look Colombian. My American name is pretty common white guy name but people call me by the Spanish variant.

    But that’s not even the right continent and I have zero Hispanic heritage. All it tells me is that you look at skin color and not features, and you lump me into an “other” category. We don’t all look like KPop idols.

    This is complicated by the fact that my South American wife is light skinned with green eyes, and when she speaks fluent Spanish people assume she is an American girl who learned the language due to me, her “Hispanic” husband.

    Not a bad thing, just annoying, and please stop yelling that I “have to go back” when I’m in the park with my kids.