This might not actually be the first one, but one of the earliest games I definitely remember actually buying with my own money was Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2. I would have been around 7 or so.

Definitely worth it, great game and the demos on the CD introduced me to Transport Tycoon, and the XCom and Worms franchises - and things kind of snowballed from there!

Cable wasn’t as much as a thing over here except in specific areas, but if you were flush you might have satellite TV. Nothing so bourgeois for me though!

I was born in 89, so remember a good portion of the 90s. It was a much simpler time but obviously we tend to romanticise the fun memories and quietly ignore how vastly more inconvenient daily life was.

Mobile phones were not really a thing yet so getting in touch with your friends required a combination of patience and sheer luck.

The internet was a different place entirely and was experienced in 30 minute chunks of time, just long enough to download a song or two before being kicked off for tying up the landline.

Daily entertainment was 4, maybe 5 analogue TV channels, plus a collection of VHS tapes which are all degrading by being rewatched constantly.

Every piece of life admin that you would normally do online today was instead done with pen and paper.

Honestly, I’m amazed we ever got anything done.

He is the manifestation of the ‘I made this’ meme. Among other things.

You are assuming that they have a personality to begin with.

Or, one (relatively) simple automation.]

I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.

Right now none of the native clients support SSO. It is a frequently requested feature but, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will be implemented any time soon. As with many OSS projects it is probably a case of “you want it, you build it” - but nobody has actually stepped up.

For web access, stick it behind a reverse proxy and use something like Authentik/Authelia/SSO provider of your choice to secure it.

For full access including native clients, set up a VPN.

As a developer myself I’m not sure if I would trust any application to safely handle a configuration that has become invalid due to a breaking change, especially not an app that is still under active development! Better safe than sorry.

Immich has completely replaced Google Photos for me, love it!

My only bugbear is that it is updated very frequently (what a nice problem to have!) which in my case requires a manual once-over of my docker-compose file every time in case there are breaking changes.

I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.