Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”

I have three of them, and I’m still struggling!

I can’t do the thing! I’m in middle of doing this other thing! Yeah it sucks that I can’t do the thing, but when the hell am I going to get around to do that thing? “Oh you can do it whenever, it takes so little effort—” No. Shut. Up.

No, can’t have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.

This is a clown car. That’s the most reasonable explanation.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (the Netflix anime) is pretty damn great and well worth the watch.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty decent game too. Not a masterpiece it was originally hyped up to be, and a lot of things in the game just painfully remind me of things that other games do better, but it’s still a pretty damn gripping game with pretty incredible atmosphere and style. Probably pretty high in my best games of the decade list.

This was so long ago that I can’t actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn’t as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn’t exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.

Plot twist: the “wolves” are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

Back in 1997 I was like “Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe.”

(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)

Now? “Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can’t login. I’ll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!”

Shit, we’ve gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that’s not a good sign I don’t know what is.

Debian’s Firefox is Firefox ESR, or Extended Support Release. It’s behind the bleeding edge, but gets security updates.

If you want the bleeding edge Firefox, you can add Mozilla’s own APT repository and install it. Doesn’t even conflict with Debian (firefox-esr vs firefox, it even uses a separate user profile by default). Instructions are on the Firefox download page somewhere.

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”

True! One of the big things that really put me off from reading ebooks was that I used to buy book bundles (e.g. from HumbleBundle) and then just dumped them in my library. I really should have been cataloging each new book bundle, but I didn’t, somehow. I just saw a giant big mess of my own doing in the ebook library and went “nope” and that just became another Big Pile of Stuff I Need To Deal With Later.

Oh wow, FBReader was literally the first Android EPUB reader I used… In 2013 or so. I guess I need to see how it has improved since then.

Also, Calibre and I have a strong frenemies relationship. Once upon a time I wanted to meticulously download, de-DRM, catalog and locally archive all of my ebooks. But while Calibre has the technological chops to do it, usability is a bit quirky. I actually just installed Calibre at my current system and will bring over my old ebook library as soon as I dig up my old laptop. And also bring over about a decade of Kindle purchases (most unread, yeah).

Edit: Wikipedia on FBReader:

In 2015 the software for all platforms became closed-source: the old open-source code hasn’t been updated since. The Android app was split into Free and Premium versions,

Awwwww crap. Hope there’s an actually maintained open source fork.

In 2020 I bought a new tablet just so I could get back to reading books.

99% of time I’ve used it for YouTube.

I’m getting back to reading more ebooks just now, OK?

(A local ebook store said it’s quitting this month. As I was transferring my EPUB purchases to Google Play Books, I realised I hadn’t actually used this app for ages. Despite, you know, it being one of the few ebook readers I like.)

Tests as well.

In most programming languages, yes.

In Ruby? …eeeeeeeehhhhhhhhh.