Using a large shell history (currently at 57283 entries) along with readline (and sometimes fzf) has served me well over the past few yeas when trying to remember past commands.

Exactly. That’s the first picture that came to my mind immediately. I describe it rather peaceful.

Everything I use is encrypted as hell. What do I have inside? To be honest nothing. Just your usual stuff. But why the heck should I let someone to get into my fucking harddrive? No, let’s make it as difficult as possible for those assholes.

Having said that, I’m stuck multiple times by my own encryption. Lost the keys, etc. And in case something happens to me, no one can access my legacy or docs. That’s my only doubts. Moreover, I’m aware that it only protects my data at rest, while the PC is on, there are probably a zillion zero-days I’m not aware of.

And finally, after suing everyone, sue the almighty himself, who dared to bring all these pirates into existence.

Internet is a utility and should be treated as such.

solid advice.

Another book on the history of unix is UNIX: A History and a Memoir from Kernighan. It was a joy to read.

Cool. I noticed I have seen the author’s name in TUHS mailing list. He’s still posting there sometimes.

Around 25 years ago I had read about this Linux thingy in a computer magazine somewhere in the middle east. We had a Windows 95/98 PC. I got my hands on some Red Hat CDs (or floppies) and managed to install it on the PC. It booted into a prompt, but I had zero knowledge of Linux or any Unix-like OSes and had absolutely no idea of man pages. Didn’t manage to start the graphical environment. I took my case and rode my motorcycle to some computer engineering student (the most knowledgeable person I had access too, we had no Internet) and asked him for help. He told me it’s my graphics card (some old ISA VGA card), but couldn’t help more. In the computer market no one knew about Linux either. So my first try to switch to Linux failed.

Fast forward 25 years… I’m surrounded with Linux and computers in general. Desktops, laptops, single board computers, virtual machines, local or remote. I started with Ubuntu (free CDs posted to my poor country…) with Gnome and later gnome shell, tried Debian, Mint, Parsix, and finally Arch Linux. Moved from graphical to command line and started absorbing the Unix philosophy of simplicity and robustness. Nowadays I use sway and KDE on Arch Linux for work and pleasure, and follow very old Unix mailing lists looking for hidden internet gems.

P.S.: forgot to mention Libreelec (kodi) as my media server and OpenSUSE Leap on laptop which I chose to enjoy some automated install with encryption and btrfs which worked surprisingly well. If I live long enough, I might start thinkering with BSDs (openbsd probably, because of the picture at the bottom of their homepage). I already use pfsense which is based on FreeBSD.

Anyone interested in awk make sure to check the just published awk book second revision by original authors. Kernigan’s writings are a joy to read.

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Great move. I did this last year after a decade of gnome and can’t be happier. I use sway for work and KDE for pleasure.

tocc: https://github.com/aidin36/tocc

Use different user accounts. That provides you with very stronger isolation and separation of concerns, with the bonus that you won’t be exposed to their crap.

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There is an abundance of stupid quotes from people of all kind on this planet.

These quotes are handpicked to hate, not to initiate discourse .

You’ll be missed Bram. RIP.

I’m sorry for your loss. My dad passed away ten years ago from Alzheimer’s and I was not there for him (and he could not recognize me). You’ve done a fantastic job.

This is my thought literally every time.

It’s a big lie that piracy has caused any drops in sale. I guess those who make such hollow claims, consider the whole planet earth population their potential paid customers.