Viewing profile — outofmyshed

Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were a…

ST Writer was freeware and did the job, but Tempus was gold standard, even better than 1st Word Plus.

Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Del…

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly.…

This is terrible advice. Multi-region architecture is hard, and AWS sure don’t do much to make it easier. Cross-region data transfers are too profitable for them to do that.

Passive PoE getting a lot of stick in the comments, but for one-off point solutions, it’s fine as long as you know what you’re doing. I have it to run a couple of MikroTik devices …

If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.

Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few …

Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and po…

Well, my employer’s AWS bill is in the region of $20m/year and the additional IPv4 tax is on track for adding an additional $250k to that for no benefit at all.

My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY…

Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for gene…

The existence of Elite and Driller running on such limited hardware at all is a product of true genius. Anyone decrying the Speccy doesn’t understand the impact of the price differ…

Anyone going “just use low TTLs all the time” doesn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with. I have a commit of ~15bn queries/month with my DNS provider ATM, and if just one busy reco…

I only answer the phone - and that includes FaceTime and all other audio calls - to my wife and my mum. Everyone else - particularly cold-call sales droids - can do one.

Sounds like the author just needed to set a non-default network key. Powerlines suck, but when you have no other option, they suck a little less than no connectivity at all. If you…

I looked into MoCA as I have some coax runs in my house that I don’t use, but when I saw how much power the adapters drew 247, I ditched that idea quickly. Instead I used the old c…

If REST APIs are the worst, how does that account for their immense utility and popularity? I wrangled XML-RPC and SOAP back in the day. It was bad enough when you had exactly the …

Move to the UK. There’s no other way.

nslookup and host both exist. It’s interesting that the author went straight into a programming challenge rather than looking for another program that may already exist on their sy…

I tinker with some of this stuff, but almost never deploy it to production. The author, and others who practice this sort of purism, clearly have the luxury of time to dedicate to …

If a company is worth working for, they won’t be hung up on a candidate having a specific degree if they can show equivalent experience and aptitude, through OSS or similar. In the…