Beej Jorgensen

I’m a teacher at university and I run Arch, BTW. 😁

I definitely use them a lot, but I think “very” is too strong a word. It’s pretty easy to get confident, contradictory information from them. They’re a good place to start and brainstorm, but all the information has to be verified either by running and testing the code, or by finding a human source.

I hate to do this, but AI chatbots are typically pretty good at giving examples for things like this and you can learn from it.

The one thing that would drive my parents over the edge is ads in Windows. They already use Firefox and Libreoffice.

Unix has been my favorite dev platform since I first used it 30 years ago. I’m typing this on a Mac, which also does just fine. But I’m happiest on my Linux box. Even WSL was OK, but the bloat of Windows overpowers the hardware. My Linux daily driver is a 9-year-old laptop that couldn’t handle Windows any longer.

Since I moved my stuff off Google Drive, Libreoffice has been super useful. Great work.

Related: Internet Archive hosts zillions of abandoned games. Publishers are currently trying to sue it out of existence. They accept donations.

The double-edged sword of isolation.

On the one hand, poor communication between apps and waste of storage.

On the other, relative safety from malicious applications, or from otherwise-safe applications built on top of a thousand libraries none of which have been audited by the dev.

I don’t know how it’s going to go down, but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

Hadn’t tried it before, but went through the tutorial. Seems like a good editor; only modal editors for me, you know? :) I’ll probably stick with Vim for now, but it seems like something to watch.

No, they’re inside my home directory, alas.

This is the fun way. I have a ton of configuration files in git and I symlink to them from various places with an install script. And zshrc has enough brains to determine the OS it’s running under and the hostname. Between those two, I can have it do all the Right Things no matter what system it’s on. So far, it deploys to my personal Mac, my work Mac, my personal Linux box, my SDF account, and my Android phone with tmux.

Basically I clone the repo into .local/share/beejsys and then run the install script and everything just works. And I don’t typically have to rerun the install script after a pull.

Use the right tool for the job, I say.

I made a decent chunk of change with capitalism. I have a modest house and am well positioned for a middle-class retirement.

Now I work for the government in a field for which I find the capitalist options wanting.

I give away my programming guides for free online with no ads, but sell paper copies of the books for profit.

Could I make more money by charging for the online versions? Sure. But some things are worth more than money.

The quest for money doesn’t ruin everything, but it sure ruins a lot of things.

Bell Labs of yore would be my dream company to work for.