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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

    The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

    The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.


  • I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

    I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.





  • They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.

    The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.


  • They’re afraid to be called unfair after he said that they’d be unfair. It’s one of the strategies that us uses to suppress fighting back against his lies and ineptitude.

    First, your preemptively accuse someone of something. Second you do awful things that would normally rightfully get a response, but the authorities have to be careful otherwise you’ll accuse them of doing the thing they should be doing. Third, you get your way even though you broke the rules, or you get to yell about how you knew, just knew! That you’d be treated badly.



  • This is a great list.

    I wear loose athletic pants for long flights. Not bedtime sweatpants, but Adidas style pants. I wear comfy shoes, that I unlace once I start napping.

    I bring a sweatshirt so it becomes a pillow and something to pull over my eyes if it’s needed.

    I also have a couple of airplane blankets and I bring my own. It comes in handy on flights where we cheap seats people don’t get blankets, and in airports when it’s nap time. I roll it up tight and strap it on the bottom of my backpack.

    I also bring Sudoku puzzles. It’s a nice diversion from watching videos the whole way.


  • I don’t know enough about those to comment. I have not been there yet.

    Given how much history and artifacts the Vatican can assemble, they’re likely on the same scale, if on differing topics.

    If you’re looking for religious artifact collections, the Bode in Berlin has a huge collection. It’s very deep for Christian iconography, as well as later paintings and sculpture. They also have some Greek materials. If you want Roman sculpture the Altes Museum (especially the rotunda) is phenomenal.

    Of course the British Museum is just frakkin amazing end to end. When I was trying to navigate there (I was a bit lost) and wondered what the cluster of people were looking at next to me, and it turned out to be THE Rosetta Stone, holy shit. Worth the trip.


  • Build some damn trains! Our cities are sprawling car-infested shitholes compared to more modern city designs around the world.

    A single freeway interchange costs as much as a big light rail network for a medium sized city. It would transformative to build some modern infrastructure for once.

    Combine that with educating city councils on how zoning laws and architectural rules determine how a city’s space is used (usually very inefficiently and with ugly buildings). We’re making a sprawling, bland wasteland out of the beautiful American landscape by sheer ignorance and short sighted greed.




  • At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.

    When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.