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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Ditched video games years back, partly because of RSI issues, partly because getting in to other things. For a while it was mountain biking, currently is music. Also a move that was sort of RSI related, but brought its own RSI issues which I got over eventually. Music is pretty social which is good, but also bad lol.

    I was into making for a while there, but have faded from that scene since I moved during the pandemic. Now all the makerspaces are 30 mins or more away and that’s kind of a dealbreaker. I don’t have the space or the funds for my own CNC or wood shop, plus not as motivated without the social aspect.

    Other one is skiing which I used to really be into. I’m kinda barely hanging on with that, one or two times a year. The traffic has gotten terrible and the whole thing is super expensive and hassly. I’m bored with local resorts and backcountry is somewhat deadly. It does give me a little motivation for fitness since this years trip will be pretty strenuous.






  • BeOS went under.

    Ed: I was a huge apple fan, bought an apple clone from Power Computing. Then Apple revoked the licensing that allowed all the apple clone companies to exist. That’s when I went to BeOS which would run on my clone, and got a multicore intel machine too. When BeOS went under I tried Suse. Had kind of a sucky UI in my opinion, but I hung in there with linux as an alternative to windows and went Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Nixos and I’m still on nixos now. Its pretty much my exclusive OS since I quit my job that required windows 5 or 6 years ago.










  • I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:

    • Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
    • Packages with dependencies in common still share them (for space savings).
    • Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
    • Can make dev environments that are exactly reproducible across machines, and only exist within a specific shell session. So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.
    • Make your own packages that other people can install using a git repo address.
    • The package language can also describe a machine’s configuration; systemd services, default packages, user accounts, etc.
    • You can build and remotely deploy a machine config in one line.
    • You can cross compile a machine config for another cpu architecture, like ARM.
    • OS upgrades are atomic, and reversible. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to the previous config.
    • No reason to ever reinstall. Recently upgraded a machine that had sat in a closet for 5 years to the newest release. Flawless upgrade.
    • Nixos boasts more packages than any other distro, over 100,000.

    There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.







  • pr06lefs@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlIs there a better way to browse man pages?
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    2 months ago

    Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an ‘man explain’ command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:

    man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepix

    Would give you:

    rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
          --append-verify          --append w/old data in file checksum
          --progress               show progress during transfer
          --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
          --verbose, -v            increase verbosity
          --compress, -z           compress file data during the transfer
          --rsh=COMMAND, -e        specify the remote shell to use 
    

    etc.