Onno (VK6FLAB)

Are you turning it the right way?

I’m asking because I’ve seen circumstances where everyone was convinced that it needed to go one way, but many expensive hours later were proven to be wrong.

Also, is there something jammed in the pipe, like say roots or a snake?

I have been there.

It’s not a fun place.

In my experience the thing that gets everything else going is going for a walk. Start small. Walk to your front door and open it. Next time do it again. Perhaps take a step outside. Do it again. Then two steps, closing the door behind you - bring your keys!

The idea is to do something slightly bigger than before, but not so much that you are exhausted or afraid to try again.

The only one who is going to change anything is you, harness your energy and have a crack. Nobody is watching so no need to be ashamed.

Have at it.

For anyone reading this.

From personal experience, have a shower daily, go for a walk, even if it’s only to the end of your garden or street and drink plenty of water. Sleep if you need to.

This won’t fix things, but it will give you an opportunity to give yourself a break.

In my experience, beating yourself up about everything you suck at is the single biggest thing that made it worse for me.

Finally, talk to someone, anyone. In the street, at the bus, at work, friends, family, online, anyone.

This too will pass.

Presumably there’s a record of the medication, given that someone had to pay for it.

I absolutely love the question and I’m going to attempt to answer it in a way that is not a reminiscing by an “old” internet citizen, rather some of the magic and wonder that I have been fortunate enough to experience.

My first time really connecting to the Internet was in 1990. I didn’t have my own account, so with permission I used the account that belonged to my boss at the time, Brian Murphy. He was a statistician and wine maker who had employed me to convert a statistics program (NANOVA) he wrote for a mainframe into something that could run on a desktop spreadsheet program that was new and exciting at the time, Wingz.

At the time the way “the Internet” worked was much more fragmented than the almost integrated experience we have today. Protocols (ways of getting information) like “telnet”[1], “ftp”[2] and “finger”[3] were how you got around, using programs that only knew how to do one thing. All of it was text-only. If you’ve heard of “gopher”[4], it didn’t exist yet. The “Wide Area Information Server”[5] (WAIS), had only just been invented but hadn’t made it to my desk.

You used text only email much like today, but addressing required that you knew how to get your message from your system to the recipient, using a so-called bang path [6] addressing scheme. This was not fun, but it got the job done. You could use tools like “finger” to determine how to get email to a person, which was a great help, but still was non-trivial. It’s like putting an address on an envelope that says, send this message from Perth, to Kalgoorlie, then to Adelaide, then to Sydney, then to Ultimo, then to Harris Street, then to number 500.

Much simpler was to use “Usenet News”[7], a global messaging system where you connected to your local news server, participated in discussion, whilst behind the scenes your messages would be shared with other news servers which were doing the same.

So, I’m sitting at my desk in Brian’s office with a brand new Apple Macintosh SE/30. This is leading edge hardware. I have a text-window open that is emulating a terminal (probably a VT220[8]), using telnet I’m connected to the local VAX cluster[9] that is running (among other things) our local news server.

I am not certain, but I think that this is my first ever message. It’s 4 September 1990 and I’m having an issue with MPW Pascal and the piles of paper documentation surrounding me had no answers. There is no “Google” or anything like it at this point, so I had to find answers elsewhere.

I found the message in one of the “comp” groups[10], “comp.sys.mac.programmer”, as opposed to an “alt” group[11] like alt.best.of.internet. These names are how you navigated the massive hierarchy of information that Usenet represents. Just like with domain names today, you specify the name by adding more dot names.

In today’s terms this could be expressed as a Lemmy community or a Reddit sub. And just like with those today, each Usenet group was a community with its “in” jokes, people who knew what they were talking about and those who didn’t, the whole enchilada.

Anyway, I posted to the group and asked a question about how to achieve the thing I wanted to fix. I went home and the next day I had a reply … from Brazil, where they too had discovered this issue and had found a solution.

It … blew … my … mind.

This started me on the journey I’m still on today. There is plenty more to tell to cover the 34 years since then. Perhaps a story for another day.

I debated providing links to some of the things I mention, but given that links didn’t exist in 1990, finding information was HARD, I thought it would be a nice ‘meta’ joke to include them.

Today I am going to do something much more mundane, set-up a backup job for a virtual server that was cloned from an older system, running a web-site and database on a cloud provider platform that I can use and access as-if it’s sitting on my desk while it is thousands of kilometres away. If my fingers were small enough, I could do this from my mobile phone.

So, yeah, things have changed.

o

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy

As it happens it’s already on my radar.

That said, I’m not convinced that the YouTube video version is worthy of being transmitted on SSTV, given that it’s a waterfall display of the audio.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

I re-read it and loved the: “Always fasten your seatbelt on the Information Highway”, but I’m fairly certain that Malinda McColl wrote it (as part of the mini FAQ on which I expanded with her blessing).

That’s very kind.

You can hear my voice any time. [1]

[1] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

That said, I have stood on stage many times and if I could come up with a topic worthy of the TED talk platform I’d be game.

Thank you for your kind words.

I have been writing for most of my life. You can for example read (a copy of) the Alt.Best.Of.Internet FAQ I wrote in 1994. [1]

[1] https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/aboi-faq

I tend to write how I speak and attempt to create enough context so a casual reader on the topic can come away with something whilst still discussing the complexity for someone more versed in the subject.

I have written articles about identity theft, authentication over the phone, as well as other technology issues relevant to the public at large. [2]

[3] https://github.com/ITmaze/articles

I also write a weekly article about the hobby of amateur radio and have done so for over 13 years. It’s published as an audio podcast, with email, video and Morse code versions. [4]

[4] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

As for the suggestion of a TED talk, I’ve considered it, but haven’t found a topic worthy of the platform.

As a radio amateur I publish using my callsign, VK6FLAB, as an IT professional, it’s under my company, ITmaze.

Some other articles:

• https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles

The business model to require paid credits in order to interact with bots is in my opinion a thing of sheer bastardry.

Apparently, this is how it works: (*)

Women were on the site for free, men were required to pay for and use credits in order to interact with women.

It appears that there weren’t anywhere near the numbers of women claimed by the company. Instead bots would communicate with men, using their credits in the process.

(*) I say works, because apparently the company still exists today and I’m not aware if they ever admitted to using bots, let alone discontinuing their use. The Netflix series goes into detail, which is where I got this understanding from.

Disclaimer: I’m not a customer, have never been one and my comments are based on a single source as described above.

I’m going to answer your points below. Not because I want to tell you to move to Linux, but because the information you state is incorrect. Linux is not for everybody. It works for millions of people and it works for me, but that doesn’t mean it will be what you’re looking for.

In order:

1. There are no .exe files. Neither are there any on MacOS, iOS, Android, or anything else that isn’t Windows/DOS. To start software requires that it’s on the search path in exactly the same way that Windows requires. You can see what that is with the command: echo $PATH. Most Linux distributions have a graphical user interface which features icons and menus, but if you don’t want that, you don’t need to install it.

2. You absolutely can, but it doesn’t work the same way as Windows, because it’s not Windows. You can for example login to Linux because the login manager started at system startup. You see a desktop after logging in because there’s a startup system for your account. The printer works because the software driving the print queue is started.

3. Wine is a tool. It’s not a replacement for Windows. It’s not intended to be. It’s intended to help users and developers make Windows software work better on Linux.

4. LibreOffice is one of many office suites. I have been using it as my productivity software for 25 years in my company and I’m not at all disappointed to have escaped the Microsoft Clippy, Ribbons, Office365 abominations.

5. I have used Libre Calc for most of my numerical analysis processes. I used real tools like R and gnuplot when I was analyzing terabytes of data.

6. The terminal is a tool. I use it daily. At any time there’s a dozen of them open. Not everyone needs a terminal, but there are plenty of things that you can only do in a terminal. A random example, list all the files in your account, group them by extension, then add up how much space each extension takes. In case you’re wondering:

find ~ -type f | egrep -o "\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$" | sort -u | LC_ALL=C xargs -I '%' find . -type f -name "*%" -exec du -ch {} + -exec echo % \; | egrep "^\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$|total$" | uniq | paste - -

Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/457241

Linux is not Windows. It never was and it never will be, neither is any other operating system. The community around Linux is helpful, the ecosystem is vibrant and it’s free. If you want to pay for support, you can. If you don’t, there’s plenty of opportunity to do your own thing.

If you want it to be like Windows, you’re going to be very disappointed.

Also, the word you’re looking for is: “headless”, as in, “headless install”

The traditional way is to use a serial console from another device.

What is it specifically about Linux that doesn’t work for you?

I’m asking because I’ve been using it for almost a quarter of a century as my main desktop.

You need to make an effort to put yourself in places where you can meet people. Often this takes the form of finding a community with a common interest. This could be a hobby, a lecture, a course, book club, gardening, etc.

Other places where you meet people can be a workplace, a volunteering effort, social gatherings like listening to a band, orchestra or a play.

You can go to the local coffee shop and spend time there watching people. If you do this regularly, you’re likely to meet people whom you can talk to and interact with.

If you already know people, acquaintances, then organise or participate in activities with them.

Social media is an add-on to life, not life itself.

The way to make friends is essentially finding ways to interact with other humans, preferably in places where you like to enjoy yourself.

Back propagation happens during the creation of the model, not after it’s deployed.

It doesn’t. I recall an experiment a few decades ago where they turned the world upside down. Didn’t take participants long to “normalise” the image.

When they removed the experiment, took even shorter to flip back.

I seem to recall it being done in a train carriage, as art, but I’m not sure.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/89k-chatgpt-conversations

You used to be able to run Apple Music on Android. I used it for a while. Not sure if it still exists.