Frater Mus

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.

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

What’s on your “Everyday Carry” USB stick?

• scans of my DL and other licenses
• scan of my DD214
• system rescue ISO
• a TEMP dir with random things I need in the short term
• portable apps versions of putty, WinSCP, etc.

Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

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! :-)

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. :-)

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. :-(

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

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…”

any idea why distrowatch periodically goes down for days before returning.

My guess is it’s run as a hobby by A Guy “on his own time and his own dime”.

I mainly use it to find out if some distros have updates to their ISOs but I find it very annoying that quite frequently it’s down completely.

You might follow the RSS feed. Your feedreader would catch new posts whenever they are available.

the site is still up, at least.

In the early 90s I was running a BBS on DesqView over DOS and was annoyed by the limitations. My older hardware didn’t have grunt or RAM (SIPP at $50/MB) to run OS/2 like the big dogs. I also had nearly no money (grad student).

I started experimenting with MINIX, and from there to linux. IIRC I started with Slackware, flirted with Red Hat, then found Debian and it was true lurve. Since that time I’ve generally run servers on Debian stable and workstations on Debian testing.

Title says plugged in and body says plugged in at 100%; these can be separate concepts if one has fine control over the charging voltage.

Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?

Plenty of academic research out there showing that pegging Li to 100% SoC reduces cycle counts to EOL (by electrolyte degradation and other processes), especially at higher voltages/temps. You didn’t mention capacity reduction associated with charging at freezing temps so I assume that is a non-issue in your use case.

It seems to me that if leaving it plugged in is an option you have shore/mains/grid power. So I’d

• charge to middling SoC and unplug the powerstation (according to the manual); and
• run the loads off the wall socket

Am I missing something here?

offgrid with LiFePO4

I live offgrid with Li on a very limited budget, so performance and maximal cycle life is a practical matter for me. Based on my own reading and experimentation I charge my 4S LiFePO4 to 13.8v (3.45Vpc) until Absorption falls to 0.10C then quasi-float at 13.31v (3.3275Vpc). I warm them to 50F and charge at ≤0.4C.

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads or RAM?

First stick I bought was 1MB of SIPP, used, for $50.

“When I was a boy we had to load HIMEM and EMM386 uphill in the snow”

H Jon Benjamin is a national treasure

PSA: Coach McGuirk in [Home Movies(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197159/) is peak H Jon Benjamin