tronium

Why is the captcha on this site asking me to copy paste some giant command to my Terminal and hit enter?

Macs released from 2002-2005 shipped with Marble Blast Gold on them. Playing it is one of my earliest memories (I was 5 at the time), especially taking absolutely forever to figure out the two Escher's Maze levels.

Great game :)

I went through the applications folder on my mac and opened every single one up to figure out what they did. That's how I learned to navigate the file system and discovered the Terminal app.

Read a "Linux for Dummies" at the library for a few minutes, that got me some basic commands. I would spend hours using "cd" and "ls" to look at files, and then I would try to run them... 99% of the time nothing would happen. When I made it to /bin, I discovered a lot of things I could run.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of a 13 year old with no social media, no internet, friends he sees for a few hours 1-2x per week, and a fairly limitless amount of homework/chores to do. Whenever people weren't watching, I'd do anything to not be working on homework at the computer. That meant hundreds of hours to mess around.

Telehack changed my life, quite significantly.

I was homeschooled in a heavily locked down home. Internet was effectively not allowed, and when used, only whitelisted sites permitted. Everything was tracked.

Our home work/life was strenuous. Both parents holding advanced degrees and living on a hobby farm led to ~10h a day of homework, and another ~3-4h per day of taking care of the place. Very little room for socializing/free time, and even when there was, it would usually be filled with more homework/chores.

I was around 13 the time (this would be 2010), and I'd discovered the Terminal app on the Macs we used. Toying around with it when nobody was in the room had led to some discoveries. I'd spend hours looking through the file system, when I discovered "man" and started reading the manuals for them.

This led me down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about the world inside the command prompt, and even opening up telnet ports on other macs throughout the house and connecting to them.

Eventually, (and unfortunately I cannot remember how), I discovered that I could connect to Telehack, a BBS with real other people on it, and our internet tracking software didn't discover it.

Whenever I had any longer than a minute alone, I'd connect and talk with the people there. I learned things about the old internet, got sent places I could FTP to download books (The Cuckoo's Egg being one of them), found friends and joined their "ssh server" (where we set up custom ways of more live-chat), and I learned basic programming in Bash, Python, Ruby, and other languages. I always had to disconnect (Apple+Q) as soon as I heard footsteps.

Now I'm double the age I was then (26) and have worked full-time as a software engineer for 4 years.

Telehack changed how I talked with people, learned, and my entire career path. Thx <3

Is there a reason the magnifying glass is always on the USA to make changes? I'm no climate expert, but last I checked China/India/the rest of SEA and the largest ships generate a large majority of non-natural carbon emissions. Wouldn't it be far more practical to make changes to the couple hundred of large ships running cruises/containers than changing the entire automotive industry?

Question: Is a lot of the backend supposed to be available through going directly to the wp-content? If you go to uniloc.com/wp-content/, there's backups, images, plugins, and even a .sql file...

Interestingly, the login button doesn't even work at uniloc.com, and if you look in the source, there's a ton of commented-out paragraphs that say stuff like "<h2>The spirit of innovation is alive and well at Uniloc.</h2>".

I highly recommend this. I've been a heavy user for two weeks, and it's been working fantastic, I don't regret it.