Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Imagine, if you will, the person who is wise to the effect on a floppy disk, but uses a CD instead (Or DVD). They use it a few times but then it too stops working. Why?

    Answer:

    Repeated clamping between the fridge and the magnet scratches or destroys enough of the metal layer, which is on the label side, to the point that the disc becomes unreadable.

    There’s also that leaving a disc out in daylight for long enough can destroy its readability, especially if it’s a user-written (burned) disc.


  • Note for second (or more) language speakers of English (and maybe a few first language folks as well): The plural ‘s’ is omitted when a sentence fragment is turned into an adjective. It’s supposed to have hyphens in it as well, though these are often left out.

    So, for example, “My PC is ten years old and runs Linux” becomes “My ten-year-old PC runs Linux”.

    In the case of this meme, it should be “My 10-year-old PC”.


  • You had me concerned for a second, but “mists of time” shows up on Wiktionary (easier to be wrong), Merriam Webster’s site (likely to be right) or the Oxford English Dictionary (practically canonical), whereas “midst(s) of time” does not.

    Collins Dictionary and Dictionary.com don’t list either, but the existence of the former in other places would seem to suggest that that’s the right one.



  • You like cursed?

    Way back in the mists of time I got a 32MB (not a typo) upgrade for an 8MB computer. In total: 40MB.

    Since I knew it ran fine with just the 8MB, I set up a RAM disk of 32MB and put the Windows swap file in it. Windows absolutely insisted (and maybe still does) that there be a swap file, so why not put that back in RAM?

    It worked perfectly, but that memory was better used for other things, so the cursed setup didn’t last all that long.

    Edits: Typo city baby.








  • If the day ever comes that I end up in possession of a healthy late 20th century laptop, I’d genuinely consider putting FreeDOS on it. Not least because I threw away my customised MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 floppies years ago (a regrettable decision).

    For later hardware, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

    For a middle ground, I seem to remember Puppy Linux, which is designed to run on more limited hardware, runs most things as root. (Though maybe they’ve changed that in the intervening years. Correction welcome).




  • Actually, Minecraft 26 comes out this year. They dropped the “1.” and bumped the sub-version from 21 to 26 to match the year. They’ve also changed the way the new second tier works to be related to the quarter-year.

    26.1 is due next month.

    So yeah, there’ll never be a Minecraft 2.0. The versioning no longer allows for it.

    (This doesn’t rule out a game called “Minecraft II” with its own set of unrelated but identical version numbers. Minecraft II 36.1 drops in ten years. Maybe. But probably not.)