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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Where I live temperatures can reach -30C in winter and 30C in summer, so storing anything “sensible” in a shed is a very bad idea. Everything has to be stored in a controlled environment or it will quickly get moldy and rusty.

    However, I kept my old 5.25" diskettes in a box where they were a bit squeezed together and they obviously didn’t like that. It could also just be time. Anyways, a few years ago I decided to copy everything on hard drives and some diskettes were now unreadable.

    I waited too long to backup them and now it’s too late for some of them.

    And even stored “properly”, I also have burned CDs from the early 2000 that are also unreadable. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing I can do now, except to learn and remember the lesson.

    I’m always baffled by people that find old computers stored in barns and still working. Where I am I don’t think they would last more than two winters with this kind of temperature and humidity variation.


  • I work with IBM i/AS400 servers and those are not exactly the quickest thing to “reboot” (technically an IPL). Especially the old ones. I have access to the HMC/console but even this sometimes takes several minutes (if not dozens) just to show what’s going on.

    It’s always a bit stressful to see the codes passing one after the other and then it stops on one and seems to get stuck there for a while before continuing the IPL process. Maybe it’s applying PTFs (updates) or something, and you just have to wait while even the console is blank.

    I’ve been monitoring those servers for years and I’m still sometimes wondering if it hanged during the IPL or if it’s just doing its thing, because this part, even with codes, is not very verbose.

    Fortunately it’s also very stable so it pretty much always comes back a few minutes after you start wondering why the hell it’s taking so long.


  • Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

    For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

    I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

    Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.








  • Yeah, I usually start hoping I won’t need it but after hitting a few sticky webs I grab a stick and start waving it in front of me. But then I don’t go low enough or do a bad job and catch a few more with my legs or my head. Sometimes I just kind of forget and start using it as a walking stick only to be reminded why I was carrying it in the first place.

    It works, but its effectiveness varies.




  • pedz@lemmy.catoMemes@sopuli.xyzSave money
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    2 months ago

    Or just a joke. I live in a city with a metro system, I use it, and as much as I’ve never personally seen a fight in the metro itself, they obviously happen. Some users are stabbed a few times a year. I’ve seen people jump over the tracks. I’ve felt a bit threaten by a beggar that I’ve once said I recognized.

    Just a few examples from here:

    https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/two-men-stabbed-during-brawl-at-cartier-metro-in-laval

    https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/man-stabbed-outside-lionel-groulx-metro-1.6834765

    And I’m not living in a very criminal city. I’m not saying the metro isn’t safe, or that you’ll see fights and brawls for the price of a ride, but it could happen. Like, take the metro when bars are closing and there’s probably gonna be higher chances to see a brawl or a fight. I imagine it’s similar in bigger cities with metro/subway systems as well.

    And I want to stress that cities where this can happen are not inherently dangerous. There are much smaller cities that have a highest crime rate than the closest metropolis, but they don’t have the density for a metro/subway system where you can thus see drunk people fight about something they already forgot.


  • It is I that misunderstood the whole thing.

    But since we’re here, I use an SSH server app worth about $3 on my phone to access it from other devices with an SFTP or SSHFS client. The app is literally called “SSH Server”. Once the server is active I can use an app like Solid Explorer (free with ads or paying for a license) on another Android device to connect to my phone on the same Wi-Fi network. Or from Windows I can just map a network drive using the format \\sshfs\user@ip. And on Linux just find the “Connect to server” option in your favorite file explorer to use SSHFS. Or any SFTP client of your choice.

    I’m not familiar with Wi-Fi Direct since I’ve been using SSH for years now, and certainly much more work this way, but it works okay across all my devices.