outofmyshed

Just play the guitar, dude. I haven’t bought an effects pedal since 1995. The ones I got second hand back then for £25 still sound great.

Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were all doing it once we’d figured out the necessary Apache directives. It wasn’t just Flickr, although it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design

ST Writer was freeware and did the job, but Tempus was gold standard, even better than 1st Word Plus.

Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows. Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.

This is terrible advice.

Multi-region architecture is hard, and AWS sure don’t do much to make it easier. Cross-region data transfers are too profitable for them to do that.

Passive PoE getting a lot of stick in the comments, but for one-off point solutions, it’s fine as long as you know what you’re doing.

I have it to run a couple of MikroTik devices in awkward places and not having to run wall warts and flimsy DC cables around the place is very handy.

My next switch upgrade will be a proper PoE+ one, but it’s not justified yet.

If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.

Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.

A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.

Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.

It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.

Well, my employer’s AWS bill is in the region of $20m/year and the additional IPv4 tax is on track for adding an additional $250k to that for no benefit at all.

My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.

Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for general sockets, with a separate one for the kitchen, and usually individual 32A breakers for things like electric ovens and hobs.

Lighting rings are also separate, usually on 6A breakers. We cheap out on cable by not running neutrals to the switches, which causes nerds headaches when they want to install generic smart light switches.

My house is reasonably large (worked hard, all my own money) and has a 20-way distribution board with separate socket and light rings for groups of rooms. It’s handy for isolation purposes.

More recent builds’ rings will be protected by a combination of MCBs and RCDs, or individual RCBOs (now the cost has come down) which combine the two functions and is ultimately the safest option for most situations.

Individually fusing plugs (and in the case of high-draw appliances like washing machines and dryers, protecting with a fused socket) is still a very good idea. And don’t get me started on earthing practices in other countries…