Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.

In my country that would cost me 20 dollars

The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

Could my 10 year old SDF account still exist?

Mine does. I finally remembered to log back in and there she is…

Caveat: the hostname had changed; I signed up at lonestar.sdf.org IIRC (no longer extant) and now it is on freeshell.org

I found my notes from ten years ago so I know what my username was

Another caveat: I think usernames were truncated to 8 chars in that time period. Don’t know if that’s the case now or not, or if extra chars are thrown away anyhow.

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

warning: some non-linux included below

• minix
• slackware
• early Debian
• FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
• Debian
• Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
• Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
• DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
• **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
• various debian-based distros on RPI

I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)

I’d rather mods who don’t want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.

Agreed. Niche communities can get hammered with downvotes and “I don’t want to read this” comments from readers of ALL.

It’s confounding: “show me everything”, then “I don’t like the content in your niche community”. WTF?

the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.

It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

“You’re not the boss of me” :-)

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”

genmai cha, as is

ambient

Examples from Eno, the OG: 1/1, An Ending (Ascent)

During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

… during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. – source

What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

I don’t mind them. If I did I’d block them.

Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

• sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
• streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
• also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
• a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…

It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.

Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.

I have driven and found joy in many cars: Pinto, beetle, 2CV, original 500s, 1940s Ford tractors, beater pickups including a 1949 International, HMMWV, etc. Mopeds (like 1970s Puch), ratty motorcycles. They all make me giggly.

I had to think a few minutes about one that was just terrible, no redeeming points I could find: first (north american) gen Hyunda Excel What a soul-sucking turd.

Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”