I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

I haven't posted here in ages, but I thought I would come on and gush to perhaps the only community that might have people in it who would care: Insomnia allows syncing with git repos to backup your collections! For me, that means that I now have a bunch of repos in my forgejo instance for insomnia collections.

Even if I was a subscriber, I would still much rather sync between desktops this way.

Anyway, I hope everybody's doing well.

Anybody have their Steam Deck yet? If so, what do you think of it? The page says mine will come in the July-September tranche. I reserved about three hours into the initial period, last July.

Day of days! Insomnia supports environment variables! And has for a long time! I just missed it is all!

tmux new -d -s 'fuck putin'
for i in 80 443; do tmux new-window -t 'fuck putin' -n $i "while :; do nmap mil.ru -p $i & done"; done
while :; do killall -9 nmap; sleep 2; done

!dev

Do any Russians believe Putin?

Holy shit! Why is it so hard to find a JSON viewer for android that doesn't absolutely suck ass?

I want a viewer that:
-reads json from the clipboard
-queries json for strings in context
-allows copying of values, not the key and the value put together

Major bonus points:
-JSONPath querying
-Free/pay version without ads

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

Bleh, the game awards winners are a bunch of console hand-me-downs, or console exclusives. Fuck AAA games.

Eat shit, Bobby Kotick. I hope you get fined into bankruptcy and go to prison for your crimes.

I've had a lot of jobs, and they've all employed some form of single sign-on. But all of them have required enough individual logins for various services that I had to maintain a full category for that employer in my keepass. Until now.

This company has, by far, the most comprehensive SSO I have ever seen. Perhaps it should not be surprising that it works so well, as it is 100% made in-house. But for a company of this size, that's an amazing achievement. It speaks to excellent planning, it seems to me.

Anybody else ever worked for a large company that had a truly unified SSO?

Sometimes when I get stuck and have programmer's writer's block, I just take a deep breath and type ^x^l. After that everything's fine.

If someone who wants Linux to be the future of gaming was able to control the thoughts and actions of the decision makers at Microsoft, Windows 11 is exactly what they would make them release. I can think of no better way to prompt game developers to move their focus away from Windows.

Arch has a great default package manager, and it's the basis for why I love Arch as much as I do.

A completed install is pretty minimal, and as a user who knows what apps I want, that's perfect for me. When I've used any other major distro of late, my post-install activity mostly consisted of removing software, changing defaults, and otherwise swimming upstream against the intent of the distro's maintainers.

With Arch, I start with a more or less blank slate, and then add the components I want to it. It's so intensely satisfying to have a system that is composed almost entirely of software I explicitly wanted to have.

The result is a system that behaves pretty much exactly the way I want.

Any other Arch users want to weigh in on what they like about it?

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

417G of that is Chrome.

I know I'm late to the party with GPU passthrough, but holy crap is it great! I first tried to set it up with an old GeForce 1050 ti, but damned if nvidia isn't completely worthy of that middle finger Linus gave them. I switched to an older Radeon(rx570) and it worked PERFECTLY. I have a fully accelerated windows desktop running as a VM now that I can connect to via parsec.

Big fan.

Somebody tell me why I shouldn't use systemd timers, as opposed to crontab entries. Because I've been very impressed with them, so far.

If I hear a project manager say, "one-stop shop" again, I'm gonna divide and conquer their face.

I initially chose System Administration simply because it was attractive to me to be the HMFIC, and generally above the law as corporate policy is concerned, as said law for the most part applied to people with less comprehensive knowledge about how any given system or technology works.

Since then though, I've learned that there's basically no better way to become a jack of all trades than being a sysadmin. There's no other position in the tech field that more easily and gracefully parlays into other specialties.

I write automation and aggregation software now, but I still consider myself a sysadmin by trade, as automation is just another function of system administration. I write everything in vim, and almost entirely in perl, because I am concerned above most other concerns about performance. I could learn C or Go or Rust or some other low-level compiled language, and I'm sure I could create even more performant software that way, but that would take me farther away from my passion: System Administration.

It took me eleven months of working from home to investigate renting a coworking space. Eleven wasted months! The coworking office is TOTALLY worth every USD.

What's your favorite terminal font? I'm on the lookout. I've gone through Ubuntu mono, fira code and fira mono, and I'm currently on jetbrains mono. They're all lovely, but I know there's a universe of fonts out there, and I'd like to know what others are using.

I don't downvote much, but I definitely do when someone replies to an, "I'm back" post with, "LoL WhO tF r U?"

Don't be an asshole.

IBM is taking a shit in our mouths. I suppose we should have seen this coming, but almost our entire environment runs on CentOS. Not only will we have to find a new distro (which will probably be CoreOS with kube, bleh) but we'll have to get everyday trained up on it.

I pay for Youtube, because I'm a Google music (now youtube music, and much worse than it was) subscriber. Youtube pisses me off because if I curiously watch some video, their algo swoops in and starts recommending videos from r/youseeingthisshit or Craig ferguson clips, or fox news, or pbs kids or some other bullshit I don't want in my feed. The only way to disable algo, as far as I know, is to browse "incognito," which then forces ads on me.

Has newpipe been broken for everybody else for a while too?

I've been away from devrant because I was completely consumed by Crosscode.

Assmaster.

Love the username. Hate the automated spam.

Expert: "The core problem with passwords is that they reside on a server."

I suppose that's true, but only if you're a complete moron. Store a hash of a password, and users can authenticate against it with a password that doesn't get logged. This is technology that's been around for over fifty years. If you're storing passwords on a server, you deserve whatever trouble you get.

Copy editors are essential. This is what happens when you lay them off.

Turns out the only thing that was keeping me from using alacritty was the lack of keyboard-based text selection. About a month ago they released version 0.5.0, which added the ability to toggle "vi mode," which allows built-in, simple navigation of the current buffer using common vi keys. Consider me hooked and converted from urxvt, which works well, but lacks a lot of modern features, and is a bit clunky to configure.