Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Trivia: Did you know that, until 1973, #Unix reset the Epoch every year? The first epoch was 1971-01-01, the second 1972-01-01, & the third 1973-01-01, & time from all three were measured as 60th of a second, guaranteeing an overflow every 2 years. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11573024/when-was-unix-epoch-time-revised-from-1971-to-current-1970-value

The OS I use daily is turning 50, depending on how you define its start. #Unix50

On #Unix's 40th birthday, the IEEE's Spectrum magazine told of its start like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20190228090043/https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of-unix/0

The 50th anniversary of Unix is particularly reminding me of my age because I was born within days of its manual's first edition: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/1stEdman.html

Thankfully, *that* anniversary is still 2 years off. :p

"Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/

Huh. Following the boot splash instructions in the #FreeBSD Handbook https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-splash.html burned me because, for whatever reason, my PC starts up at 1920x1080, not vesa, before the boot menu. I think it kernel-panicked because it kept rebooting.

To boot successfully again, I had to get a loader prompt (option 3) & type:
disable-module vesa
boot

Why does it take me so long to muster the courage to do something as simple as saying hi to someone?

pictured: my computer den
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6yZq6liDeM

ALL skirts and pants should have usable and useful pockets.

Last night, I stayed up entirely too late writing a howto for something pretty neat: How to add site search to a static website.
https://thornton2.com/net/search-howto.html

I tried to cover a few ways and link to good pages on two I think are neat but can't use.

This therapeutic video is 13 years old now. It's still pretty good at calming me down about modern Mac stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWxC8ezE4Dk

#Unix & #Linux: Can kill just about any kind of process & shuts down when you tell it to.

#Windows: Tasks can stop themselves from being ended, especially tasks not responding. But ending them to shut down? No problem, mate! Shutting dow--UPDATE TIEM!

#MacOS: "Hold my beer." (Gives you a spinning beachball.)

I had a customer in today with Apple Mail problems, & when he went to shut down his Macbook (a newer one, Touchbar & all), Mail stopped it & flat-out refused to quit. My customer spent 5 MINUTES just getting the damn thing to turn off.

There's nothing like debugging why a shellscript launched from cron is running multiple copies, driving the load average ever higher, and causing cron to mail me output adding up to 200 *MEGA*bytes per job run.