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Frater Mus

@ fratermus @lemmy.sdf.org

Posts
1
Comments
267
Joined
2 yr. ago

Living offgrid in a campervan since 2018 w/ pibble+boxer Muffin.

LIKE dogs, books, thoughtful people of all flavors DISLIKE bullies, sh1tposters, partisans, noise

  • What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

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  • 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. :-(

  • can you help me formulate an answer to a colleague who is not my boss but feels entitled to tell me how I have to work?

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  • "You're not the boss of me" :-)

  • Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color

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  • Agreed. I haven't read the article yet, but my first thought was "how am I going to turn that off"

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  • What's your fave "No thoughts, head empty" music to listen to?

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    Your Coffee Is About to Change, Whether You’re Ready or Not

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  • During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

    ... during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. -- source

  • what does everyone think about piped bot and other bots

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  • What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

    I don't mind them. If I did I'd block them.

  • What is the most advanced chemistry you've done on your own at home or work?

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  • Closest I've come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

    • sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man's autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
    • streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
    • also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt....
    • a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature....

    It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my "autoclave" at one time.

    Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what's in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn't isolate the yeast from other critters.

  • What’s the worst car you’ve ever driven?

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  • I have driven and found joy in many cars: Pinto, beetle, 2CV, original 500s, 1940s Ford tractors, beater pickups including a 1949 International, HMMWV, etc. Mopeds (like 1970s Puch), ratty motorcycles. They all make me giggly.

    I had to think a few minutes about one that was just terrible, no redeeming points I could find: first (north american) gen Hyunda Excel What a soul-sucking turd.

  • Vim prank: alias vim='vim -y'

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  • 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...."

  • what are the advantages and disadvantages of working in a mostly male/female environment?

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  • Main advantage I've found in unmixed workgroups is less (no) fighting over the thermostat

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  • My only hard rule is refrigerated/frozen items together so I can handle that bag first when I put groceries up.

  • Is it a good idea to let a 16 yrs old use an AI assistant .i.e. chatgpt?

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  • Like any other automated tool, I'd want them to master the manual skills first.

    With math and calculators first we show we can do it longhand then get the calc. Show you can search and assess sources first then incorporate AI.

  • What's the black sticker for?

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  • to keep from mixing up pet ash containers

  • What are your top 3 purchases of all time?

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    1. vasectomy
    2. divorce
    3. campervan

  • What do you believe was the best era of the Internet and why?

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  • Remembering multi-tasking in MS-DOS: DESQView

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  • I ran a FidoNet BBS back then on a 386-16 and 2400 baud modem. Woot! It would run WordPerfect 5.1 while people were logged on to the board but compiling brought it to its knees.

  • If you had to change your first name to something uncommon, what would you change it to?

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  • Sebastian

  • The 9 Smallest Linux Distros That Are Super Lightweight

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  • Where, and when, did you start using Linux? Where are you now?

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  • 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.