Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

I had an…interesting…take home exam in college. The max score was 100, but the test had 200 points. So, if confident, you could answer half the exam and still get the highest score; if not confident in answers, you could answer more questions and rely on partial credit

It was a week long take home, “open everything” (book/Internet, but no discussions online or IRL). In some ways the hardest exam I ever took, but I learned a lot, and some of the questions were specifically meant to introduce new subjects.

I would probably add “transmit power” in there somewhere, but I guess if you’re assuming regulatory limits then it’s not a big variable.

Global Outbreak World Response Outreach Network, perhaps?

Not sure how serious your comment is, but I could certainly imagine Microsoft introducing new dependencies/hooks/all-executables-must-support-copilot, etc., that break compatibility faster than Wine can keep up. Glad to hear that’s not the case!

For old stuff though…yeah, I’d hope it’s not moving backwards :)

my pro tip.

I see what you did there.

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

200MWh is about 1/100 of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Compressed air can get out all at once given the right circumstances.

Storing energy in a way that can go boom is something I’d be a little scared of, were I a nearby resident. I’m sure thermal batteries can have gnarly failure mechanisms but I would way rather live near one of those than a giant compressed air cylinder.

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Right now the only thing I genuinely feel is missing that would increase my happiness, is an exercise routine.

I’ll put in a plug for cycling. You can nerd out over the latest bike gear, restore vintage bikes, or just pay the nice folks at your local bike shop to set you up and focus on the riding, it’s up to you!

You can also ride “unplugged,” or you can measure speed, cadence, heart rate, even power output (if you spend $$$)—again, something for everyone!

Good luck!

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

Carnauba wax would like a word…

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.