Fun DD story time, I guess.

I, back when I was a very young and very dumb kid doing sysadmin things I shouldn’t have been doing, broke a production DNS server with it.

I needed a boot floppy to install on another system, and the DNS box was RIGHT THERE, with a floppy drive.

No big deal, just a simple dd command:

dd if=redhat-boot.img of=/dev/hda

Okay cool I have a boot floppy, wait it didn’t work? Weird. DNS is down? Also weird.

In conclusion, lol.

Been trying to go through the several hundred free games Epic has given out that I’ve never played.

Mostly spent this week on Redout II, which is good if not great. But it’s also the closest I’ve played to a modern F-Zero or WipEout, so it might even not end up uninstalled when I’m done with it.

I didn’t even bother to look since, well, I just moved to compose files sitting in a folder instead but uh, $150? Seriously?

That’d be the most expensive bit of all of my stacks, including hosting and power costs.

I mean, if it were 1994 I’d agree that maybe we shouldn’t hop on this newfangled email thing, but uh, a bit’s happened in the last 30 years y’know?

Though I’d take paid-for school and universal health care and a social safety net over being able to get an email from my doctor so, uh, tradeoffs I guess?

90’s Linux gaming was a lot of Freeciv, Doom, Quake 3, and Tux Racer.

Wine really didn’t work for shit for AT LEAST another decade, and even then, didn’t really really work for a further decade after that. It took a very very long time for Wine to get to where it is now with Proton and playing basically everything that doesn’t need a rootkit to run.

As for finding Linux games, I could just go to Microcenter. They had a whole shelf full of Linux software ranging from distros, to games, to commercial office suites, to just random shit that looked like it was boxed up in some guy’s garage and contained just… stuff. I miss being able to buy software in big shiny boxes, though :(

Ah yes, the (in?)famous mWave cards come to mind here.

So shitty they not only didn’t work in Linux, they ALSO never fucking worked right in Windows, either, and got IBM sued over what utter trash they were.

You can also install modern Linux on an old piece of hardware too! https://www.adelielinux.org/ is pretty shockingly compatible, back to a Pentium-class system. (A P166 was the oldest I’ve personally installed it on).

I wouldn’t uh, say it was all that useful, but it’s still sitting on the retro computer pile doing retro computer stuff.

Oh neat. I use their password manager but totally somehow missed them releasing a separate 2fa app.

Nah, was mostly just making a joke about the other old tech that Japan was notorious for still using.

Also, I’m really confused WHY eFax is fine but email isn’t? I mean, once you lose the verifiability of the phone logs that say your doctor called you at 2:15pm and send 3 pages of shit, uh, you might as well just email a PDF. (Note: I’m in the US and the ‘verifiable transmission’ thing was why/how we did it for a long time, but that died in about 10 seconds when someone figured out that email was cheaper.)

If all you need is for it to go ‘I turned on the light’, they’re fine. I wouldn’t expect to use them for anything more detailed or music-oriented.

I played with a couple and went with searxng, because I was happiest with the results I was getting back from it compared to the other ones (or, for that matter, a normal Google or Bing search).

I’ve accomplished this with the Atom Echo and they work… fine?

The speaker is essentially inaudible, but the mic works well enough for me to just yell at HomeAssistant to do things.

And hey, can’t beat the size/price/power footprint and the deployment with ESPHome takes like, 30 seconds.

Did they send everyone a fax to let them know that floppies are no longer used?

I’ve recently moved drives between m2 slots and usb-c enclosures and everything worked, but that’s also why I used the word ‘should’ a lot.

I’ve had zero issues in the past few years moving drives around (even between different systems!) and my experience has been nothing but ‘shit just works’, but yeah, I know that there’s probably edge cases where that’s not true.

For what they’re doing, though, it should be fine, since there’s a relatively low amount of complexity and grub really doesn’t care where the drive is as long as it has the UUID at this point.

Because I don’t sit down at my Linux destop and feel like the product. There’s no ads or suggestions or popups or apps installing themselves or shit copying my files around in ways I didn’t really want or AI bullshit or anything even remotely suggesting I buy more shit, just… whatever the fuck it is I was intending to do.

The value in not having my computer act like a damn slot machine trying to get me to insert more quarters is, frankly, immense.

As a side note: the grub and root filesystem issues are mostly an issue of the past. If you’re on a modern distro (and haven’t mucked with things) they no longer use device names, but rather rely on UUIDs, which is good: those don’t change even if you move the drives around.

As long as grub is in the boot sector and you’re using UUIDs in your grub.conf and fstab, you should almost never have any issues moving drives around the same system.

What confuses me is even a half-competent audit and pentest would absolutely have found an api endpoint that’s going to absolutely leak customer data, so the assumption I have to make is that, yet again, a “security” company can’t be fucked to do the bare minimum to ensure their security shit is you know, secure.

I have watchtower configured to update most, but not all containers.

It runs after the nightly backup of everything runs, so if something explodes, I’ve got a backup that’s recent and revertible. I also don’t update certain types of containers (databases, critical infrastructure, etc.) automatically so that the blast radius of a bad update when I’m not there doing it is limited.

In the last ~3 years I’ve had exactly zero instances of ‘oops shit’s fucked!’, but I also don’t run anything that’s in a massive state of flux and constantly having breaking changes (see: immich).

I was doing english lit stuff in that era so what showed up on the tech side was a little different. Ended up spending my entire career actually in IT (25 years now ugh I’m old) because it turns out uh, there’s not any money in a english degree.