I’m currently working in data automation.
My job is to take away as much of the monotonous work as possible from skilled workers. In many fields it would probably mean the end of many jobs. For s start-up with much more growth to do, it means that we can hit our goals while still hiring even more skilled workers.
It’s a weird age for my line of work.
I’ve got to go with Sophia Hapgood.
I ran it 2003-2006ish.
Having a package manager that updates online was a game changer for Linux distributions.
I had been using slackware for 6 years prior, and there was no real update path. Best case you’d just get the latest release on CD and install it over your (hopefully) separate root partiton.
Conpiling all your stuff sounded like a good idea in the age of the architecture options at the time. Alpha, Crusoe, PowerPC, SPARC and MIPS were all viable options.
I have two machines running the latest kernels on EndeavourOS. One with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX has no issues.
The other one has a Radeon 6650 XT, which since a week or two ago starts getting kworker threads stuck while throwing errors about fence queues. Load can go up to the hundreds (while there’s no real load, but just blocked threads), until the machine crashes.
As I recall there was an amdgpu firmware update around the time it started happening, but the changelog on the amdgpu kernel driver hints at solving similar issues.
Well… last time I bought a commodore I got the full schematic of the computer in the box. And the user manual taught me programming.
I didn’t know how to operate it when I bought it, but I learned fast.
If you’re coming from a feature phone - it’s great!
If you’re coming from a modern smartphone, you probably won’t be happy with it as a daily driver.
I’m voting with my feet, but carrying two devices.
Maemo on the N900 was close, but MeeGo on the N9 was there. The Ovi store even had the hot apps of the era.
Fuck Microsoft for killing that dream.
I have a Xiaomi Mi A2 that I ran ubuntu touch on. The camera didn’t work, and it was based on ubuntu 16.04. They’ve dropped support for it now. It was not ready to be a daily driver.
I should be getting a poco x3 nfc in the mail tomorrow. It should have excellent support on both postmarketos and ubuntu touch. I don’t expect it to be a daily driver, but I can’t get the idea out of my head. I don’t like where iOS and Android are headed.
They do scan and try all ports.
I have a tiny VPS as reverse proxy with SSL termination for my fiddling. That one has a wireguard network to my hardware at home to which it forwards some hosts.
The tiny VPS is definitely the bottleneck in the equation, and if I were to have loads of traffic I’d probably go with cloudflare or -front in front of it.
He’s all Finnish. His mother tongue just happens to be a (official) minority language.
I had a 4G modem with a web interface many years ago. It was flaky and would often hang. I just had a raspberry pi on my network pinging some known address, if it failed for long enough it’d replay the commands to restart the web interface.
If I’d have the same problem today I’d probably have home assistant power cycle the router with a smart plug.
I set it up during the outage last week.
Easy enough to just pull in the synapse docker container and run it on my home server. I wireguard it to my VPS that acts as a reverse proxy.
Both federation and push notifications work.
OpenSUSE has a 32-bit build.
Running modern web browsers is no fun.
I started 28 years ago with Slackware 3.0, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, took a detour via OS X, then back to Ubuntu, now Arch.
Slackware in 1997.
I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.
It turned me into the man I am today.
Only if you want a visit from the thought police.
My first experience was with two floppy images I found on “So much shareware! Vol.2”.
It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.
A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn’t fry your CRT.
Good times.
Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.
We spent a lot of time on IRC.
MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.
I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.
I have a storagebox at hetzner. My script does:
I can access the storagebox by password, too. So this is my disaster recovery in case my house burns down with all my devices. I’ll just buy another laptop the next day, and me and the Mrs can admire all my code and our wedding videos within a few hours.
I’m not sure I would recommend programming on an actual C64. The keyboard is horrible, and crossplatform toolchains are so much more powerful. I do my development in a modern IDE, crossassemble with tass64, link and load with spindle. Single file programs I might pack with exomizer. The workflow is just so fast to build, pack and run in VICE.
VICE is a powerful emulator if you don’t want to spend money, or just dip your toes.
In the old days we’d write our stuff straight in machine monitors, but that takes a special kind of masochist to learn these days.
I do test on a real device with a turbo chameleon. I’d recomment getting that cartridge even withouth a C64, as it works great as a standalone C64 - great when travelling. And you can flash in machine code monitors if you want to try that out - at least for debugging.
I’ll be getting one of them new commodores from perifractic once I can make sure it doesn’t get delivered while I’m away on extended xmas leave. They have 64 ultimate internals which are on par with my turbo chameleon.