Thoughts on Computing
07 Mar, 2023
I read a lot of tech history. Just this year I’ve wrapped up the founding of Compaq, microcomputers in 80’s Britain and am about through a very thorough history of Commodore.
Writings, links, observations, musings, etc. All opinions, for better or worse, are mine. You can subscribe to my blog via RSS with your favorite reader.
07 Mar, 2023
I read a lot of tech history. Just this year I’ve wrapped up the founding of Compaq, microcomputers in 80’s Britain and am about through a very thorough history of Commodore.
19 Jan, 2023
I recently came across the qutebrowser while searching for alternatives to surf on my Raspberry Pi and am enjoying it so much I’ve installed on my MacBook Air and Dell XPS.
18 Jan, 2023
via The Register
Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we’ve felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn’t support AIX – already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX is the last proprietary Unix which was in active development, and constitutes four of the 10 entries in the official Open Group list. … Which means that the last officially trademarked commercial UNIX™ is Apple’s macOS 13, which underneath the proprietary GUI layer is mostly an open source OS called Darwin anyway. The kernel, XNU, is based on Mach with an in-kernel “Unix server” derived from FreeBSD.
So, as of 2023, open source really has won. There are more Unix-like OSes than ever, and some very un-Unix-like OSes which are highly compatible with it, but the official line is, to all intents and purposes, dead and gone. All the proprietary, commercial Unixes are now on life support: they will get essential bug fixes and security updates, but we won’t be seeing any major new releases.
See also the The Open Group official register of UNIX Certified Products.
08 Jan, 2023
UPDATE: I’ve since ceased using Linkding and have moved all of my writing, note taking, link capturing to an amazing application called Logseq. I still think Linkding is an awesome self-hosted bookmarking solution to consider, however I was needing more context around my link capturing than just tags. Perhaps I’ll do a write-up at some point.
05 Jan, 2023
Transparency is a disaster for brands trying to hide the negative side effects of their product or service. It can also be one of the most transformative forces in a traditional market economy. At least, we think so.
Only available here in Sweden and only would the Swedish produce something like this. Especially if you know anything about the country’s alcohol monopoly.
15 Dec, 2022
Last night I found myself going down a rabbit hole of old HyperCard Stacks on the Internet Archive.
01 Dec, 2022
UPDATE: I’ve since ditched Plex for the Jellyfin project.
Being “too cool” for streaming, I instead pay for music via Bandcamp, CD’s, vinyl, secondhand media and iTunes (when I’m desperate).
30 Nov, 2022
If you want to get in on some deep (and often over my head) UNIX history and conversation, join the Unix Heritage Society mailing list.
[TUHS] Re: Four windowing systems on SunOS
My favorite SunView story was the day I was working in the Pentagon (I was [email redacted] for a while). One of the Sun workstations had a Sunview screen lock running and the guy I was visiting was on the phone. I told him I’d just unlock the thing myself. I promptly set forth to do so and got it open. He quickly said, “I have to hang up and go check on something,” and came over and asked how I’d done that.
The screen lock was just a very large window forced to the top of everything on the screen. If you hit the hot key to iconify it, you had a fraction of a second to interact before it reasserted itself. So you keep hitting iconify and maybe getting a letter or two typed into one of the one terminal windows at a time. You run ps, find the pid of the screen lock process, and kill it.