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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I’ve been a Windows… Let’s say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while…

    Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don’t do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn’t mounted atm or it didn’t reach them before I Ctrl-c’d that command.) and all was well.

    Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would’ve had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).

    Now I’m running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of “I need a package that’s not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that’s not available as well” or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that’s not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.






  • In one Czech action novel there was a scene where the main character, a vampire running away from pirates who were enslaving vampires to make them the fighters when robbing the ships, needs to get away fast, so he stowaways on a ship that traffics humans. I can’t remember details but I think the sailors were treating the people extra bad and he got angry, fought and killed the sailors and took the captain prisoner.

    The trafficked people wanted to lynch him, but he tells them it would be revenge and it’s wrong

    He then proceeds to interrogate him, get info, money, maps, whatever from him, then he sentences him to death for his crimes and shoots him.

    Revenge - no. Justice - yes.







  • I’m pretty sure I once or twice tried sharpening my nail, but I never went too far.

    On the other hand (pun intended) I once got the end of my fing the pinched between the pneumatic cylinder and the thing it was actuating. There was a bit of a clearance so it didn’t flatten my digit, but it left a good amount of blood under my fingernail, which hurt a lot. A friend advised me to grab a small drill bit and put a hole into the nail so the pressure is relieved, but it didn’t want to go through… Until it bit in and I drove it maybe a millimeter into my flesh. That hurt even more… But after a while it got way better.








  • That reminds me of when some of my former colleagues and I were on a training about programming industrial camera system that judges the quality of produced parts. I’m not really a programmer, just a guy who can troubleshoot and google stuff and occasionally hack together a simple code with heavy help from Google too.

    The guy was a German (we are Czech and we communicated in English) programmer who coded the whole thing in Omron software but he also wrote his own plugin for it. All was well when he was showing us on the big screen, but when he sent us the program file so we could experiment on it (changing parameters, adding steps to the flow…) the app would crash. I finally delved into the app logs and with the help of Google I found it was because he compiled his plugin with debug flags and it worked for him because he had the VS debug DLLs installed but we didn’t.