I was thinking the photolithography process might be almost as important as the transistor itself. Without the ability to miniaturize transistors and create integrated circuits, we wouldn't have anywhere near the level of technology we can build now. A computer made of discrete transistors would be way more efficient, reliable, and cheaper than one made with vacuum tubes, but would still be very limited. There are things you fundamentally couldn't do with even thousands of discrete transistors that became possible once we were able to scale to millions and now billions.

My first VPS was for a Minecraft server so I named it cobblestone. I've kept using Minecraft related names for all my machines since then, and I try to pick ones that are at least vaguely related to the function or appearance of the machine. For example my cluster has brute for the master and piglin01-piglin04 for the workers, but those are the only ones I've numbered.

The exception is my two Klipper RPi's, one is octopi since that's what it originally ran, and the other is named after the model of the printer. For some reason I never named my printers.

I probably wouldn't use a naming scheme like this for production servers though - I'd either go with functional hostnames or something like the periodic table which you can pick from arbitrarily. My home servers and clients aren't cattle though, so I like having a little personality to the names there.

They definitely sell DRM'd books, it might even be the majority of books on the store. I think it depends on the publisher. I have managed to find some DRM-free books there though.

Careful though, not every Humble Bundle is DRM-free. I just got one recently not realizing it was locked to the Kobo app. I have an Android e-reader so I'm still able to read them, but I'm pretty annoyed given that DRM-free used to be one of the major selling points of Humble Bundle.

SponsorBlock is essential now. I switched from iPad to an Android tablet largely so I could use YouTube ReVanced. And on Android TV there's SmartTube Next.

I get that creators gotta eat, but I pay for YouTube Premium already. If they would stop accepting sponsorships from scam companies I might even stop blocking those.

Carbon Black. As a software developer, running unknown/untrusted binaries is kind of a big part of my job. We also had a MITM SSL-intercepting proxy which made my life miserable, especially when dealing with Docker containers. I actually ended up patching Docker to automatically inject the certificates and proxy environment variables.

On the plus side I learned a lot about certificate errors which has made me the go-to guy for any SSL issues in my current job.

+1 to this! I bought the same chair from them a couple years ago, and as a remote worker it's been worth every cent. Oddly enough I had the Leap v1 as a previous job and hated it, but the v2 has been great for me. I found the armrests a bit uncomfortable but some cheap memory foam covers solved that.

I use Debian on my servers, Arch on my laptop and desktop. Different tools for different jobs. I tried Debian on my laptop a few years ago but it wasn't a good fit for me - my hardware was too new for the stable kernel, and the Wayland/wlroots stuff was too far behind. As a server though, especially since I'm mostly running Podman containers, stable and slow-updating is great! I use unattended-upgrades and haven't had a problem yet.

I haven't spent much time with Fedora but I'd probably like it as a desktop OS - fairly fast updates, and sticks pretty close to upstream without a ton of custom theming for example. I would miss the AUR, but Flatpak covers a lot of what I need, and Distrobox could handle anything else.

Someone found a way to crash the kernel, which may or may not lead to an exploit, which would be just the first step in a long process of developing a jailbreak. I wouldn't get too excited yet. Even if one does get released, Apple can just patch the exploit, and it could easily be years before a new jailbreakable exploit is found.

No, I just printed the case files from the GitHub repo.

Not sure about swipe typing specifically, but there's been some pretty interesting and weird attempts to invent better touchscreen input methods since at least the Palm Pilot era, probably on the Newton too even before that. There's also some crazy stuff from the world of wearable computing that's even more niche.

There are some similar boards with 3x6 layouts - ffkb and vulpes majora, both by fingerpunch, support 3x6 with a center trackball. I do miss the extra keys a bit with 3x5 layouts - when I eventually design my own board I think I'm going to do a 40 key layout.

There's less finger movement needed (for any alternative layout) compared to QWERTY so in theory it could be faster. In reality it seems to not make that much difference - typing speed records are still mostly set with QWERTY, and personally I think I'm about the same speed as I was with QWERTY, or a bit slower.

It's noticeably more comfortable though. I'm not sure there's any actual ergonomic benefit, but it just feels really nice to type on. I don't regret learning it but I don't exactly recommend it either - it was a lot of effort for a small benefit.

If you're deep enough into the ergo keyboard hobby that learning an alternate layout sounds fun to you though, then I say go for it, it's an interesting challenge.

I've only been using it for a day so I'm still figuring that out. Something about it feels a bit 'off' compared to my Elecom Deft Pro but I'm not sure if that's a hardware or software issue - could just be a smaller ball is harder to get the same accuracy, could be the cheap BTUs I'm using. I'll probably try printing a different trackball holder that uses static bearings to see if I prefer that.

Colemak-DH? I switched using the Tarmak series of layouts, which change a few keys at a time from QWERTY until you eventually get to Colemak(-DH). Took about 5 weeks to do the gradual switch, then a couple months before I got speed back up to around where I was with QWERTY. But with that method I stayed at a good enough WPM the whole time to not lose any productivity at work.

I'm not either (besides Minecraft and such) so my personal experience with Linux gaming has been pretty good. There's some jank with needing to pick the right Proton version and adding command line options, but I'm not sure it's any worse than Windows - I've had to reinstall my graphics drivers way too many times. But there's a large portion of gamers that almost exclusively play the big multiplayer games, and Linux is definitely not ready for that group.

It's pretty good for single player games on Steam but a lot of multiplayer games use anti-cheat that doesn't work on Linux, and some launchers don't work well. And of course if you use Game Pass for PC you're out of luck entirely. Most VR headsets also won't work on Linux.

So it really depends what kind of games you play. It's kind of similar to the Adobe situation. I suspect most gamers will have at least one deal-breaker that forces them to keep at least a dual-boot around. But many people could use Linux most of the time, including for games, and that's already pretty exciting for Linux fans.

Weird esoteric issues happen on Windows too. I had a bug where I couldn’t create a new folder from Windows Explorer, which I never figured out and didn’t resolve itself with reboots or even Windows updates. I probably could have spent a half day tracking it down and fixing it, but someone less tech savvy would probably have had to reinstall Windows. Instead I just popped a terminal and used mkdir whenever I needed a new folder until I upgraded to Windows 11 and that resolved it.

Point is, computers just suck sometimes regardless of what software they run. Or I’m just a magnet for ridiculous arcane bugs, you decide.

This might come across as Linux fanboyism but I currently have Linux, Windows, macOS, iPadOS, Android, and FreeBSD all running on various devices around my house and they all suck in their own unique ways.

This put a minus on Debian because updates are slow but didn’t have one on Devuan or RHEL. I would not take these results too seriously. There is also no reason to rank Devuan and Artix as high as it did when I said I don’t care about systemd. The only reason to pick those over the upstream distros is for the init system.

It did recommend Arch as my top choice though which is what I’ve been daily driving for years.

Yeah, I have a 5W diode laser. It’s not ideal for wood but with enough time it will cut through 1/4 inch ply or MDF. It’s a nice tool to have but make sure you do your research - a lot of the stuff on the market is wildly unsafe, even shipping with counterfeit safety glasses.