[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Yup, doesn’t surprise me.

I also have a NAS box that’s out of support. Turned off all of the nifty services and firewalled the shit out of it so it won’t be visible outside the LAN even by accident. Will replace it with a FreeBSD box as soon as I get a new hard drive.

Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack

Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)

But it would have been great for a Shakespearian minor joke character bit.

GUARD: “See, milord, how in this year’s almanack the booba hath been veil’d, compared to last year’s edition.”

KING: “Greatly?”

GUARD: “Yes, greatly indeed! Two inches of cloth more!”

KING: “Thou art a nutter and I ought to throw thee in the madhouse.”

GUARD: “But you wouldn’t dare, sire? Tales of your treachery and oppression already circle widely.”

KING: “Thou shouldst consider thee lucky that we have to get the Hell onward with our plot.”

Most recent time I was awestruck by a thunderstorm in a game? Forza Horizon 5. One of the early missions involved heading out in the jungle during a massive thunderstorm and it was just legendary. Visuals, audio, everything.

I watched that one CK2 series by Many a True Nerd. The proper title is “Cocking Mercia”.

As I’ve probably said: Without the transgender people (and other queer folk), the autistic people, and the furries, literally none of the modern Internet infrastructure would have gotten built.

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.

It’s more like a turtle and its shell.

Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!

Plot twist: the “wolves” are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

About 10 years ago I was like “FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn’t enough to avoid swapping hell, I’ll get 1 GB of extra memory.” …and that was that!

These days I’m like “4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that’s fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who’s going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? …oh I’ve done it a lot of times and it’s… fine.”

The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.

And that’s basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can’t do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn’t work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.