Your friendly local programmer, uni student and *nix addict.

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  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I don’t know about dangerous, but case-insensitive Unicode comparison is annoying, expensive and probably prone to footguns compared to a simple byte-for-byte equality check.

    Obviously, it can be done, but I guess Linux devs don’t consider it worthwhile.

    (And yes, all modern filesystems support Unicode. Linux stores them as arbitrary bytes, Apple’s HFS uses… some special bullshit, and Windows uses UTF-16.)









  • Because my university’s network is cringe, I’m unfortunately forced to run everything on a VPS.

    This comes with a financial cost, and I have to carefully ration my computing power, but it does have some upsides - enough that I honestly prefer it now.

    • It keeps my desktop sealed away from the wilds of the open Internet. Obviously the risk isn’t that great, but since every service you run represents a potential security hole… it’s nice to have a “disposable” solution like a VPS.
    • I don’t have to worry about getting a static IP or using a service like Tailscale in order to talk to my services when away. All I have to do is point my Cloudflare DNS records at my VPS.
    • Better uptime. I used to host my blog on my desktop (!) which meant it would go down whenever I rebooted/lost connection/whatever. My VPS restarts once a month to apply updates and is always-on otherwise.