Monocultures Considered Harmful or: Why Linux Nerds Should Give BSD and Other "Weird" OSes a Try
In yesterdays's article, I described the benefit of having a large supply of physical hardware to try different OSes on. Now I would like to talk about why it's important to run more than just various Linux distros (although just trying different distros is a great way to start broadening …
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Why You Need A Stack of Thinkpads
Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/
A lot of people experience vendor lock-in and outright "ecosystem captivity" because they've plunked down several grand towards pricey and shiny laptops from Apple, Microsoft (*snicker*), Samsung, or whomever. Such a …
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Random updates
Ironically, this isn't intended to be a "filler" post, but more of a fill-you-in post, as I've actually decided to stop trying to do "100 Days to Offload" this year.
I still technically have enough time left in the year to do it, but then I'd just be slamming the …
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A Time-Traveler's Guide to Affordable Computing
Greetings! If you are reading this, it means you were selected by TODD (the Temporal Observation Directorate Division) for a temporal excursion. Since you're a member of the Computing Sciences History Reading Room, you will no doubt want to brush up on how to procure computing resources in your assigned …
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Speedrunning life with a Rube Goldberg brain
There's a scene in The King's Speech at the end where he's finally giving his big, inspiring speech, and while you hear is the speech, what you see is the scribbled crib notes and the incredible mental gymnastics he has to go through to get each word and phrase out …
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Device mini-review: One by Wacom
Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄).
For those of you not familiar with digitizers, think of …
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A Toast to the Prolific ones
I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.
Prolific blogger — Rubenerd
Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024:
~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …
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Used laptops are wonderful... except when you need batteries
When I was a kid, a new computer cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money, and a five year old computer was basically a dinosaur.
Nowadays you can get a brand new computer for $200 or less, and a ten-year-old computer can still be a viable daily-driver. You …
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I Miss RC
I was on a Signal video chat with my siblings today, and when I mentioned something about RC flight as an analogy for a person's health (being "three mistakes high"), my brother looked confused and then amused when I explained what I was talking about.
Oh, quick explainer, I'm not …
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Why I love Markdown
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Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!
Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......
The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …
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