One of the only pleasant side effects of the Covid-19 shutdown of public life is that the tedium of confinement to certain spaces and the disappearance of physical interaction gave people a bunch of time to fill. Many of us just watched everything on Netflix while others built silly and amazing stuff like a DOS subsystem for Linux. The underlying mechanisms are totally bonkers and it’s pretty amazing that it works given the amount of emulation that’s going on.
It’s available from here if you’re looking for something pointless and rewarding to play around with.
Category: Cool As Fuck
The end of the day ended up being busier with more inappropriately complex things on my plate for a Friday. Today was much better in my mind as a slide into the weekend but that was not the case.
1. I was much more surprised to hear that Linux Journal was back from the dead before I read the announcement. Will it actually have new content? It’s alluded to in the announcement but will likely remain preserved remains for a while longer. I’ll admit that the print magazine wasn’t my favorite but it’s also nice to see the resource that it often was preserved and available for the forseeable future.
2. I ended up back in Arch Linux land again via an alternate entrance with Arco Linux. I chose that particular derivative because it’s as close to stock as it can be and still wrapped in a straightforward Calamares installer. That installation isn’t fast and often gives the impression that the installer is stalled or frozen but it’s a lot less fussy than a vanilla Arch install.
I ended up with a ridiculous workstation class laptop with a very new Intel i9, an insane amount of RAM, and not a whole lot to really do with it other than the usual tinkering more than using for anything productive that I typically do with any piece of hardware. I originally threw Debian Testing on it because it’s super easy and straightforward to set up. Unfortunately, Debian isn’t a great distribution for messing around and struggling to get everything working the way you want it.
3. I’d looked at this New Yorker article about the hidden cost of streaming music earlier today and wasn’t astonished by any means but if you think that streamed content just launches of the void then it might be worth your time to read. I can’t really check my work on my initial read since the New Yorker website really, really objects to me not allowing ad tech on my network. Sorry folks but poking holes for something that I was dismissively making fun of isn’t anything I’m budgeting time for today.
4. Because I don’t work at a company that thinks very much about its technology infrastructure like at all, the alleged demolition of knowledge heavy open source solutions in the path of Snowflake doesn’t mean that much to me per se. If the marketing copy sticks to pavement I look forward to another batch of system administrators even more stupid and incapable of troubleshooting further than dialing a toll free that will make me seem comparatively brilliant. Who could argue with the innate craftmanship that accompanies managing platforms that manage things for you. Maybe inexpensive, B string tech bros are the grim future now?
5. I’m not up for throwing cash at preorders these days but this amazingly featureful case for Raspberry Pi has put my wallet on notice once a generation or two has rolled out. They have a bunch of features inexpensively baked into this that are things I want. Damn it.
If you’re tired of looking at your file system in ways that don’t look completely insane, then please check out Eagle Mode. You’ll be stunned by how much fun it is to play with and, despite the somewhat kooky interface, how useful it can be pretty quickly. I was a little worried about it being an insane resource hog but it coexists happily with all of the other crap I’ve got going on at the same time with top barely noticing its existence. The zooming function on a 37″ monitor is kind of intense.
Watch the video for the full effect and then install your very own mad scientist file manager. There’s even a installer for Windows 10 so you can get nuts across platforms:
I’ve been a pretty steady buyer of both Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking keyboards for a very long time and love both the aforementioned products dearly (and dollar-ly) but when maniac on the internet builds a 450 key keyboard I start thinking bigger and noisier. I don’t think my current desk would reasonably host something that large but the idea of doing something ridiculous has definitely lingered in my mind after reading about this project.