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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Some might say it’s giving finger counting too much thought, others might say it’s a tangent too serious for dad jokes, I say… the efficiency gains seem to come from a change in technique for how a count is stored.

    Base-10 finger counting technique just accumulates, the number of fingers held up is the count.

    Base-12 uses a pointer (your thumb) to point to a value (a knuckles or finger segment).

    Base-2 uses a finger up or down to show a place value as one or zero.

    You could tattoo numbers on your forearm so all five fingers from your other hand could point to a value for up to five more places to point.


  • Someone else who knows how to finger count in base-12 and binary!

    I think the binary one I learned as a joke, show someone they are number four.

    The base-12 was an explanation for how the ancient Sumerians finger counted, using the other hand’s fingers for groups of 12, leading to base 60 (5×12).

    I have the same problem with binary counting practically though, and using a modified Sumerian system (both hands to 12) gets you to 144, which is plenty for anything where finger counting is actually useful.

    One other thing, I use the finger bones rather than the knuckles, little easier but same idea.










  • #1, whatever is default. The main advantage of the terminal is that it’s just a terminal, fundamentally the same terminal since the dawn of computing.

    Having said that, I do sometimes install a non-default terminal. I haven’t seen any of them mentioned:

    cool-retro-term It looks like an OG CRT! What other terminal emulator has this killer feature?

    Byobu Technically a front end for tmux, but it gives some useful status info and multiple windows.


  • First computer was a Commodore Vic-20. Second was a Tandy 1000TX. I remember dialling into BBSes pre-internet, but not on the Vic-20 of course.

    I can still remember the feeling of seeing my first computer in person. Even in the late seventies it was rare to see even things like Atari 2600’s. By the early eighties most of my friends had an Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 400/800, Coleco Adam, Commodore Vic-20/64, Apple II, Tandy Coco, etc. By the late eighties most of the people I knew had PCs of some sort (Tandy 1000TX in my case), Atari ST, or Amiga. Modems were still rare. It was the nineties when modems and BBSes seemed to really explode, quickly displaced by the Internet. Granted I remember connecting to Gopher before I personally connected to BBSes.

    I look back on how things changed from 1980 to 1989, and it seems so much more sweeping than 2010 to 2019.



  • Ubuntu was the distribution that had me switch from dual-booting with Windows as default to dual-booting with Linux as default.

    I also remember ordering an actual Ubuntu disc, with the extra donation to fund the mailing for free program.

    Now years later after lots of distro-hopping I just run Ubuntu LTS, and stay on the very boring LTS branch.