The KGB, the Computer, and Me
Last night, I re-watched The KGB, the Computer, and Me, a 1990 episode of NOVΛ chronicling Cliff Stoll's efforts to catch a West German hacker who was using the Lawrence Berkeley Labs' computer systems to hack into military computers in the late 1980s.
I say re-watched, because I …
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FOSS Games, Part II
I got a lot of wonderful feedback on my original FOSS Games are actually pretty good! article, and I wanted to share with you all the information that was so kindly shared with me.
Here are some FOSS games highly recommended by the community, although I have not personally played …
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FOSS Games are actually pretty good!
There's a lot of talk about gaming in Linux these days, and that's exciting, because it's drawing attention to Linux's capabilities. While the games being spoken of are mostly proprietary (and pretty awful, from a software-freedom perspective), it's good to see people getting interested in Linux, even when for only …
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LLMs are Perfect
LLMs (Large Language Models, colloquially referred to as "A.I.") are perfect...
Perfect exemplars and the very embodiment of the brain-rot of our society.
Much like so many loud voices in society today, the LLM is incapable of discerning reliable from unreliable sources, identifying the origin and validity of a …
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Web 1.0 is (unironically) going great
I resolved never to put a web browser on this machine, which is a Thinkpad X200t from early 2010 with the Libreboot firmware flashed to it, and the wifi card replaced with a FOSS-driver-loving atheros-based card. Ever since I got it in early 2019, it's been my "writing machine …
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On the Fediverse and FediFriends
You may have seen me mention The Fediverse or "FediFriends" in previous posts. Now, I anticipate that 100% of my readers are already in the Fediverse (or within a rounding error of 100% 😄), but just in case someone doesn't know, the following is a succinct description and discussion of the …
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Using `cal` and plain text to track things, Part II
Back in September, I posted about using the output of cal
and plain text to track things. Here is the example of that format I listed in the post:
August 2023
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
. 2 3 . 5
. 7 . . . . .
. . . 16 . . .
. . . . . 25 .
. . . 30 .
2023/08/02 326 45 …
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*Don't* use what works for you
I was watching a youtuber I rather like, and he closed out his video talking about his pragmatic approach to operating systems. He said he used multiple OSes (some FOSS and some non-FOSS), and he summed up his approach with "Use what works for you."
This is not a polemic …
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UNIX is "dead," Part II
I was re-reading my original UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX article, and I realized something that helped me better classify the various types of UNIX OSes:
I see OSes like the BSDs as UNIXes, while I view MacOS and many Linux distros (particularly the Gnome-oriented ones, more about that …
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UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX
I remember once watching a video of presenter at a Linux conference boldly proclaim, "UNIX is dead."
As someone who worked on UNIX systems for over a decade, and who's played with UNIX variants off and on for three decades, that is a pretty incendiary statement.
With apologies to Sophocles …
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