Notices by Zorin =^o.o^= (zorinlynx@tiggi.es)

This year marks 30 years; three whole decades of my running Linux.

My journey into Linux began around April-May 1995, when I started using an ISP run by a friend of a friend, called Global Information Link. They used Linux on their UNIX shell server, and it was there that I first played with the OS through a telnet session. (No SSH yet!)

In mid-April I discovered FurryMUCK, and the best way to connect to it is TinyFugue, a UNIX MU* client. I ran it in the ISP's shell to log into the MUCK. Eventually I wanted to play with my own MUCK server so I compiled FBMuck on GIL's shell server and fired it up, then invited a bunch of people on FurryMUCK to connect. This eventually became FluffMUCK, which swiftly got too big and the owner of the ISP told me I couldn't run it on the shell server anymore. The MUCK bounced around from host to host until I found a permanent home for it. But that's another story...

Futzing around with all this stuff made me desperately want to install Linux on my own 486 PC, but the problem was I had an old BIOS which didn't support hard drives over 528MB without running special "disk manager" software. I had a 730MB hard drive with said software, and Linux did not support mounting drives configured that way. The drive was also "DoubleSpaced" which, if you are from that era, probably makes you scream in terror at just the thought of it.

I couldn't just reformat the drive because I didn't have another drive to copy all my data to. Hard drives cost a fortune back then; I just had my one drive, with backups of my most precious stuff to floppy disk. It was rough, and Linux was not happening for me without help.

Sometime after August 1995 I finally took the hard drive over to a friend's house; he had just gotten a new drive and this gave me a chance to copy all my stuff off, reformat my drive with DOS/Windows in the first 528MB and Linux in the remaining space, and copy my data back. You see, the BIOS could only access the first 528MB, but Linux didn't use the BIOS for disk access, so could access the remaining space just fine! I was finally running Linux, learning how it all works, and starting on a journey that would define my career for 30 years to come.

Another defining moment was pulling an all nighter learning how to get PPP to work so I could get the brand new Linux install online via dial-up modem. Fun times.

Here's to another 30 years of Linux! <3

#linux #nostalgia

There's a neighborhood near me where the streets are owned by a long-defunct homeowners association from the 80s.

The county property appraisers site still shows them with this ownership. Yet the county maintains the streets as they would for any non-HOA area.

I wonder how this works, legally.

So that's about $450 in cable modems since 2014, over 11 years.

If I had been renting from Comcast, the total bill would have been about $1980.

Buying my own modems has been insanely profitable.

(AT&T doesn't charge a rental for theirs.)

Farewell DOCSIS you served me well!

@colin_mcmillen @DOSBox_Staging When I was a kid in the 80s I loved any excuse to break out the Print Shop floppy disk and get to printing stuff.

One big emotional moment for me was going through mom's stuff after she passed away and finding the folder FULL of Print Shop generated mother's day and birthday cards I'd given her as a kid. She had saved every single one.

I take apart my machine to route the cables better and when I bring it back up, one of the drives is missing.

ARRGH!

Turns out the SATA cable failed. Luckily I had a spare.

I guess it's better that it fail now since it was obviously marginal but I hate the feeling of "Huh? What did I fuck up!?!"

I love ZFS so much. That 37.2MB that was resilvered is whatever was changed on the working drive in the mirror while the other one wasn't available. As soon as I brought the machine up with the drive back in, it wrote just those blocks. So much faster than rebuilding the whole thing!

@feld @LeoBurr Nope, mine was custom-sized and not outrageously priced like that. The sliders too.

Maybe this stuff is more expensive outside of Miami? That would be a shocker though; this city isn't cheap and everything has to be hurricane rated.

@LeoBurr What... How??!

Did they just not want to do the job for some reason and quoted you a "fuck you" price?

My *hurricane rated* french door set was $3K including installation.

HOLY SHIT Apple finally fixed it; AirPods no longer become mono when the microphone is activated!

This is an issue that's plagued most bluetooth headphones for over a decade and Apple is finally resolving it, at least with their own hardware.

Other vendors: GET ON THIS.

I really hate "AI" search results. DESPISE them.

What it is, in the end, is a completely unsourced answer. You're just getting a couple of paragraphs as an answer to your query, with absolutely NO friggin' idea where the information came from.

If you cannot vet information, it is WORSE than useless. It can cause damage if it's wrong. We're already seeing some scary and dangerous "answers" from Google's AI for example.

I much prefer a list of normal Internet search results. Sure, some of them might be COMPLETE bullshit, but at least I can see WHERE the information is coming from, and decide what to trust based on the reputation of the sites in question.

Just... No thanks, Google, Microsoft, etc. Please remove this garbage that's making your services worse.

Damnit I hate GBICs. Two of these fuckers can look identical but one won't work in a specific switch because it's tagged with the wrong vendor or doesn't support some obscure feature the switch vendor stopped supporting.

At work in some of our offices and labs we have remnants of a long forgotten technology past.

I remember the first time I saw these I was surprised to learn there were wall jacks for 10Base-2 (thinnet).

Holy freaking lord.

A guy wearing a hi-viz vest and hardhat just came walking by and smacked the living shit out of a utility pole across the street, a few dozen times from the base up to over his head height.

He then kept walking down the line and did it to the next pole...

Normally I'd think, maybe they're checking the poles for rot, but.... it's a brand new pole that was installed about a year ago.

So I have to ask, WTF!?

I just realized I didn't mention that he was smacking the shit out of the poles with a hammer, not his bare hands like Will Smith.

Anyone else getting Korean notification spam?

@LeoBurr You just did a really good job of describing what made the early Internet so incredibly appealing to me and many others.

When I found FurryMUCK and logged in, it wasn't just fellow people who liked fluffy anthropomorphic beings. It was also fellow nerds, for the most part. People who had the same deep, intense interest in computers, networking, and technology that I did.

I think I talked about Linux, Windows, PCs, Macs, networking, etc. more on FurryMUCK than I did actual “furry” topics in those years. I forged strong connections with people who often shared at least TWO common interests, an affinity for anthropomorphics AND tech.

The simple truth is I've always been a big nerd and I get along with fellow nerds best.

The furry fandom today? Well, still a lot of awesome people but it feels like the proportion of them that are technical nerds like me is a lot lower than before. This is not necessarily a BAD thing, it's just different, and results in less common ground with which to connect.

Like you said, though, Fediverse has brought some of that back. All the nerdy discussion seems to be happening here, whereas other sites like Bluesky have more of the art, silly furry stuff and such. Which is great and why I'm in both places. :)

@LeoBurr Yeah, there's a fringe of people here who still take offense when you join their conversations, but they're few and far between. Sometimes it's downright comical. My favorite was when I basically agreed with someone and got called a "reply-guy”. It was so surreal.

But overall people are chill. Also we seem to have a lot more cat pictures here than Bluesky. Could just be who I follow. :)

Another guy came by door to door trying to sell me on solar installation.

It's like, I really like the idea, but my power bills rarely exceed $140 even in the deep summer. It's just not worth it.

I'd consider it if it were a battery inverter setup as an awesome standby power supply, but they're pretty much ONLY pushing grid-tie systems down here. So you don't even get the benefits of keeping the lights on in a power failure.