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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don’t particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven’t been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)



  • The Joycons were an absolute disaster and ruined the portable experience. I got 4 of them repaired. When they inevitably broke again, I gave up and bought a pro controller. Precariously balancing the Switch on your lap or setting it on furniture so you can use a pro controller is not a handheld. Still had lots of fun with the games on it, but the experience should have been better. Nintendo has building controllers for decades, you would think they could at least begin to approach competency.













  • I used to litigate patents, and for international searches I have not found an adequate substitute. Depending on why you are searching, searching may be inadvisable anyway, at least in the U.S. if your search uncovers a specific patent (or even arguably should have uncovered a specific patent) and you are later sued by the rights holder for infringement, your actual knowledge of the patent can be used against you to show willful infringement, a damage multiplier. Apparently, companies that know about a patent need to hire competent legal counsel to analyze the patent with respect to their products and give them an opinion on possible infringement. That process can be quite expensive, so it is often better to not search in the first place. I wrote a few opinions over the years, but it was not a common activity. Accusations of willful infringement were pretty common in litigation though, probably about 40% of my cases.

    Just writing this quick summary makes me glad I retired from practicing law.

    Also, you are not my client, this is not legal advice, I might be a fraud, yadda yadda yadda.


  • My first Linux installation was done using Red Hat CDs that I purchased for around $20. Probably around 1996. Patching was difficult. Drivers for many pieces of hardware didn’t exist. Remember Plug and Play was pretty new at that time frame. Lots of manual resolution of things like driver interrupt conflicts (boards had physical jumpers that you could move to change which IRQ they asserted). Looking back on it, I can’t believe any of us were doing it. But the eventual payout was wonderful. I can’t imagine what 1996 me would think about how easy something like the latest Ubuntu is. I would probably be pretty awed because I have a decent understanding of the massive amount of work that has been poured into the ecosystem now to make it what it is today.

    All that said, I will always have a soft spot for Solaris on an Ultraspark. That shit worked great.




  • I had an HP laptop in the early 2000s, the hard drive crashed (my wife set some mail on top of it and the mail had a large advertising magnet in it). I bought a replacement. When I opened it up, the hard drive connector was HP proprietary. A replacement drive from HP was $475 for the same size that I paid $80 for an industry standard drive. I bought a replacement laptop instead and have been warning people against HP for the last 20 years. Many people come to me for IT help (entire extended family), so I am sure I have hurt HP some. Their printer drivers are the biggest bloatware crap too. Absolutely scum company.