It could be a music server with mpd – then you could configure it to stream over http to other devices. Or you could configure it as a client for a music server you keep somewhere else.

I suspect the real reason they are doing this is to condition the students to accept oppressive and unjust surveillance in future workplaces.

Just ext4 on my Linux things; I got scared away from btrfs because of some file loss horror stories

Nice. Take that, adware installers! Web exploits and phishing are still (minor) risks though, since they’re mostly platform agnostic.

This would have been helpful in, like, 2014, but better late than never I suppose. Interestingly, a recent skeptoid episode covered a similar topic

nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.

I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.

bluesky is not that great. I can’t recommend it.

Oh, no! Billionaires with short term, selfish thinking might lose money! What a tragedy.

It’s pretty great - it has nice tooling and well structured problems to sharpen your programming skill on. One issue I discovered is, if you are studying a less popular language, the difficulty ratings tend to be inaccurate - things that are labeled medium might be super easy, while things labeled easy might be super difficult.

Also, just because something passes in your local doesn’t mean it will pass on exercism - the resources allocated to their cloud servers are skinnier than what you are likely running. This is part of what pushes problems another level up in difficulty.

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Check out exercism.org - it has sequences of projects in increasing difficulty level in 66 languages. It is very user friendly and provides nice structure for getting started, without the pressure and stress that a classroom environment might introduce. As for the language, pick whichever one interests you.