don-code

8 ms·

241.
by don-code 5y ago
I'm looking to recover from two years of pandemic-induced silence. In the years prior, I was a pretty active member of several communities, to the point where I could be attending several a week. Many of these have disbanded entirely;
242.
by don-code 5y ago
Having unified my work and homelab environments on RHEL/CentOS for north of ten years, I took the opportunity to try out some new options. We've begun the process of switching out from CentOS to Amazon Linux at work, and the jump
243.
by don-code 5y ago
My parents thought this as well, but it turns out their new gas stove has a safety feature which prevents this. If there's no electricity, a solenoid doesn't engage when you turn the knob, which in turn doesn't allow any gas
244.
by don-code 5y ago
I know this is a difficult question to ask, but have you considered taking some of those responsibilities on yourself? It may be more sustainable, long term: computers are always changing, and computers are always taking more responsibiliti
245.
by don-code 5y ago
I used Kodi in its very early days as Xbox Media Center. XBMC turned the original-generation Xbox into a cheap and very functional media center PC - I actually didn't stop using mine until I upgraded to HD in the early 2010s. More rece
246.
by don-code 5y ago
I actually have quite the opposite feeling for my 35-year-old car - I've tried to keep it as stock as possible. It's still got the period-accurate radar detector (police probably use bands outside of what it can pick up), tape dec
247.
by don-code 5y ago
Something I've not seen done, but to me seems like it would be much more useful than a shell script (or maybe would have, in these tools' heyday), would have been to use a tool like Chef or Ansible to manage dev dependencies on de
248.
by don-code 5y ago
Older Craftsman tools. I naively bought some of my own Craftsman tools at Sears back in the 2000s - many of which are cheaply made with plastic bodies, or non-durable bits. Basically every Torx screwdriver I bought there is now stripped. Th
249.
by don-code 5y ago
I actually cut my sysadmin teeth on Windows 2000, and found myself wondering how on earth they could `docker exec` a shell. These were, comparatively, the dark ages of Windows administration, and almost all tasks were done through a GUI. Th
250.
by don-code 5y ago
Are there any industries where documenting failure is incentivized? I could easily name a whole litany of things I've tried that didn't work (most recently: trying to use AWS security groups as a bad-actor mitigation technique), b
251.
by don-code 5y ago
These tricks are things that you could still pull off today. The difference is, outside of competitions or the demoscene, nobody _needs_ to pull them off - it greatly decreases your time-to-market to do things in a straightforward way, rath
252.
by don-code 5y ago
It might not have been economically viable. The pace of obsolescence at that point in time was so fast that it might have been cheaper, over the course of two or three years, to just buy a whole new system than to retrofit a Pentium to a 38
253.
by don-code 5y ago
> How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver? I know your question was rhetorical, but when I think about this, it took close to 20 years of Linux maturing on the desktop befor
254.
by don-code 5y ago
I'm impressed with how much foresight this high schooler had in preparing for the prank. My impression is that most high school age kids would out themselves within the first few weeks of planning due to wanting to boast, here they ins
255.
by don-code 5y ago
I'm actually quite thrilled that end users found a way to communicate in spite of "the everyday solution" being down. That gives me some hope that smaller vendors do stand a chance against incumbents, even in Facebook's
256.
by don-code 5y ago
While I generally agree with the author that the userland monoculture isn't helpful for portability, that argument belies the fact that most people I've worked with _want_ those extra features that GNU gives them. I started using
257.
by don-code 5y ago
I highly recommend Andy Jassy's infrastructure keynote from re:Invent 2020. Among many other things, he discusses why Amazon never gives you a single hyperthread (it's mostly about cache coherency, IIRC).
258.
by don-code 5y ago
This is one of the most underappreciated features of Unix's interoperability. Back in college, I carried around a wimpy tablet PC running Linux, but "ran" most of my applications on some random Solaris box in a lab. This was
259.
by don-code 5y ago
That seems accurate. I have a mulberry tree (quite tall!), and if I don't pick mulberries every morning during its 4-week fruiting time, I just end up with purple poo all over my yard instead.
260.
by don-code 5y ago
While I do appreciate the humor here, it's a personal gripe that conversations on Slack tend to optimize towards speed of responses - and when taken to an extreme, they take the form of: > This message > is > sent over a few l
261.
by don-code 5y ago
In a way, it is - I take on an operational overhead of rebuilding an upstream tool, periodically merging my changes with master and rebuilding, etc. This isn't something I budgeted time for, or something I even roadmapped for, which me
262.
by don-code 5y ago
I remember seeing this in practice at a meetup - I believe it was at the Boston AWS meetup at Vistaprint several years ago. Someone was running FORTRAN web services as CGI applications, inside of nginx, inside of a container, running on top
263.
by don-code 5y ago
The Visor was a neat device on account of the Springboard slot. There was an attachment, the VisorPhone, which turned the Visor into what you'd easily recognize today as a smartphone. To boot, PalmOS on the Visor had a working TCP stac
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by don-code 5y ago
Ah, the Crooked Cartridge trick! I haven't heard this mentioned since the 2000s. Zelda: OoT was (and still is) one of my favorite games of all time, and I was devastated to have bricked my cartridge this way - along with my nearly-full
265.
by don-code 5y ago
I got to liquidate a broken stack of these back in the late 2000s. For some reason I couldn't get one of them to power off, so I pulled the power cable and waited. Then I went to class. Four hours later, I came back home, and the thing
266.
by don-code 5y ago
My hope is that the author, 10 years from now, will reflect on _why_ he thought these things, and gain some profound enlightenment from them. I can identify many beliefs about the state of the present (now the past), and the state of the fu
267.
by don-code 5y ago
I do this. I wish I didn't. First of all, building a provider isn't straightforward. The best way I've found to do this is to wrap `terraform init`, and have it `docker run` a build process for a plugin version that never exi
268.
by don-code 5y ago
> UI changes This, but I'd argue it's not limited to Ubuntu, or even to Linux. For the desktop environment, I've been using Cinnamon with my family, since it's ostensibly most similar in the UI metaphor to Windows. Th
269.
by don-code 5y ago
For about 20 years I've been "the IT guy" for my friends and family. I also stopped using Windows during the Windows 7 era, and I've never used Windows 8+ on my own hardware. Reliance happens because you demonstrate both
270.
by don-code 5y ago
This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but the facade is broken as soon as non-technical friends and family come into the p

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