Recent submissions

Comment · 24 days ago
First time I hear of Actual Budget, will have a look.
Comment · 1 month ago
On very old Macs, the files did not actually move! Just a flag on file metadata. IIRC, it was System 7 that introduced the Desktop folder.
Comment · 2 months ago
I know things have become much more complicated, but still remember fondly the good intentions of the original USB spec, which, for instances, forbade any extension cables (ignored, as expected, by many), with the reasoning that users should expect that if a cable connects, it should just work. Longer cables would need to be electrically "better", and extensions would eventually cause issues with electrical paths that were too long.

People still remembered the "black art" involved with, e.g., SCSI cables, where long chains would often had issues, and wanted to avoid that.

Comment · 5 months ago
Not to mention more water resistant, when printing things like envelopes.
Comment · 9 months ago
I'm not the only one then! :-)
Comment · 10 months ago
Yes, but I was replying to the above, using redirection and tail -f.
Comment · 10 months ago
Isn't that what tee is for? Like

$ prog | tee /tmp/log.txt

Comment · 10 months ago
As others have said, it is easy enough for a child in the 80s, with only a BASIC manual to come up with it. Been there, done that. Didn't even had a name for it. Later I read a magazine explaining several algorithms and found the name of what I had implemented.

For the curious, the ZX Spectrum microdrive listed files on the cartridges by order found on tape. I wanted to display it in alphabetical order like the "big" computers did.

Comment · 10 months ago
If cassettes are still around, then the standard icons for 'play', 'rewind', etc will still make sense for a younger generation :-)
Comment · 11 months ago
The Spectrum did feel slightly better, but the most annoying thing of the ZX81 was the lack of autorepeat. Moving the cursor on a long line was real physical exercise :-)
Comment · 11 months ago
There should be a t-shirt for that ;-) I remember paying insane prices that year.
Comment · 11 months ago
Version 1 of Time Machine was great, you could travel to the past and see how your documents looked like! Too bad that they never released version 2. Would have been great to be able to travel into the future and see how your documents would look like.
Comment · 1 year ago
My first email usage was at University, pre-WWW. After that I briefly used some ISP email service, but that was on a time of very limited storage and POP only accounts, so I started hosting my own email even before having an always-on internet connection, using a relay and dynamic DNS to receive email when online. Now a days, I use a small VPS to route and receive email, but final destination and storage is on my home server. Over the years, I had, like others here, to ask Outlook and other providers to unblock my IP or domain, but it has been rare.

I really don’t want to live in a world where only two or three companies run email for the entire world, and this is my little act of resistance.

Comment · 1 year ago
Those wore the days :-) I remember playing on a University lab with half a dozen Unix workstations, sending an email with the path of server1!server2!server3 etc and hearing the email flowing from server to server by the noise of the disks!
Comment · 1 year ago
Ironic that a big telecom does not believe in decentralized protocols. Oh wait….

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