Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod

One day my MIL’s Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.

They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said “Let’s connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works.”

Dude looked at me like I had two heads. “It doesn’t work like that.”

I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac’s public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.

Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.

Never ask if it’s plugged in. Always ask them to unplug it and plug it in again. That way they don’t feel condescended to.

I’d make up some BS about an old version of the product using brass or copper, and newer versions using aluminum or iron, so knowing the color will help me know how to fix it

Ruby is just happy to be included

No that’s WFH jobs

That kinda makes sense. Putting all the partition sectors together would probably make it easier to resize. But as standard maintenance it’s like changing the oil on an electric car.

Most modern OSeses do defragmentation on the fly and you don’t really need to do it anymore.

Which makes me sad because I have so many memories of watching a disk defragmenter do its thing from my childhood.

I wouldn’t trust it unless I wrote it myself. And even then maybe not.

Pro tip: Defragmenting only works on spinning drives because it puts the data nearer to the spindle so seek times are shorter. Solid-state drives wear out faster if you defragment them, since every write involves a little bit of damage.

And what happens when DNS inevitably falls over and I need to fix it?

And when I’m watching IP addresses scroll by, IPv6 ones are a lot harder to read than v4

“IP address are four sets of numbers with dots in between AND THAT’S HOW I LIKES IT!” - Me, an old network guy

Honestly the fact that I can’t remember or type IPv6 addresses is a big reason I haven’t bothered figuring it out.

Like that time in Ireland when the banks closed to protest a law and life went on just fine without them.

When things go right: “WHAT ARE WE PAYING YOU FOR?!?”

When things go wrong: “WHAT ARE WE PAYING YOU FOR?!?”

good FOSS antiviruses

ClamAV is the Linux antivirus library I’m most familiar with.

Bring back beige boxes!

I’d have a lot of fun trying to get around it. For example, if the phone and the computer were on the same non-Internet-connected wifi network, and you set up an SSH server to send outbound requests through the 4G modem, would they be able to find out you’re using the hotspot?

I have an iPhone and it just sorta does it automatically. If it thinks there’s text it will put yellow corners around it and let me copy it to my clipboard. On my Mac I can just start selecting text and it will figure it out.

I can take a screenshot and then have it automatically OCR the text. Hell, I can take a picture with my phone of my chicken scratch handwriting and have it OCR.

And as someone who remembers buying OCR software from OfficeMax for $40 that barely worked, that’s pretty amazing.

Copy the text to a local clipboard, then paste it into your terminal in the other instance

IDK I only use vim over ssh