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I'm trying to think of the most evil thing to set someone's default editor to, and I'm not able to do much worse than making it this shellscript:

#!/bin/sh
cat $1 - > $1

I can't help but think that, if we were to attempt terraforming Mars or any other planet, the first thing we'd have to do is find a way to generate an Earth-like geomagnetic field to stop the solar wind from stripping away atmospheric water & oxygen (or in the case of low-grav planets like Mars, virtually the entire atmosphere altogether).

Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills. 

New challenge already. I just found out that restore(8) works with a ZFS filesystem & UFS dump image, but dump(8) doesn't like ZFS filesystems at all.

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important: there exists an SD card with Wi-Fi which you can write LUA programs for

but that’s beside the point, because this SD card has a mascot with a doujinshi (more or less like a zine) series, and she’s *wonderful*

When it comes to UX design, Windows 95 is a landmark in the history of that field

Windows 95 took millions of dollars, almost 5 years, and plenty of man-hours to create; UX research was turned into a science with meticulous research and strong testing

and it paid off for Microsoft; Windows 95 flew off the shelves

socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/

Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills. 

And _without_ a pressing or terrifying need to make a backup before anything crashed for the final time. :computerfairies:

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Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills. 

Over the last few days, I used FreeBSD dump(8) & restore(8) to back up a live system onto a USB spinning platter (once fully & twice differentially), restore it onto a new system for testing, and completed basic self-training today by plucking a single file from the backup I had originally intended to scp over to a third system.

It was quicker than rsync & more reliable than tar (which doesn't like files changing content from underneath it).

From `man 8 restore`:

-v Normally restore does its work silently. The -v (verbose) flag causes it to type the name of each file it treats preceded by its file type.

Whoops, that would be why. :blobupsidedown:

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@kibi I think the closest you'll get are PETSCII, ATASCII, and IBM/MS-DOS Code Page 437.

I'm practicing a backup using dump(8) & restore(8). dump gave me progress reports including eta, but after an hour restore is giving nothing.

mild vent 

My home's 'Net service is randomly disconnecting again, and now Mastodon is freezing & crashing. I guess I should be thankful it isn't eating enough load to overheat my CPU like TweetDeck does.

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mild vent 

I've been irritable all day, & I have no idea why. It wasn't just programmer news, but that didn't help. I think most of it was seeing a brand new error during a support call, on site in a hot room. It was so hot that stepping outside into the Summer sun actually cooled me down.

@softgoat Sounds like just X crashed, but I can't see how an almost-drained battery would cause that.

BRB, making illegal copies of the software sheriff. (wrt lb)

@squirrel Sounds like the state of typewriters: When the instructions become separated, locked away, or lost, collective knowledge of how to use them is forgotten.

iliana's linux pro tips 

put a directory named aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa in /home that just has 250000 empty inodes in it

that way, when you accidentally run "rm -rf *" in your home directory, you have a chance to ctrl-C it before it deletes anything important

Microsoft announces first new feature to be added to github after their acquisition

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!