Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Thinking about how people did advanced math before computers reminded me that there's a team of people trying to build the ultimate steampunk computer, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: http://plan28.org/

There are two working & correct Difference Engines, proving his designs sound, but an Analytical Engine would dwarf both of them together & can't be hand-cranked.

I've been so out of it that I didn't see last boost until now, from anyone here or birdsite, and in spite of having a politics/rant account on birdsite.

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).

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.

LB: Furries ruin everything.

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

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.