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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

    That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

    And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).







  • Yes. But why is there an absence of light?

    If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)

    So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.

    This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.



  • Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It’s about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly — it’s just euphemisms and insinuation. And it’s hilarious IMHO.

    I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn’t let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.

    (Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I’m just trying to answer the question…)





  • I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.

    We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.

    It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).



  • I just wish we’d have neither inflation nor deflation.

    Some tech has followed this pattern. For example: entry level Mac laptop in ~2000 was the iBook, priced at $1599 ($3k+ in today’s dollars). The current entry level Mac laptop (M4 Air) starts at $999 — cheaper in absolute dollars, and way cheaper in relative dollars.

    (Macs are just an example since Apple doesn’t have a very extensive product list, so there’s only one “entry level” laptop to choose from. And yes it’s fair to ask if the relative specs have just gotten worse, but I think this is also the opposite — the iBook was iirc criticized as being underpowered, whereas the M4 Air is afaik well regarded.)