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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I think large planes “look” like they can’t work because their “relative speed” is really low — that is, their speed relative to their length. We’re used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.

    Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don’t look funny, maybe this is a silly observation…).





  • I mean, vigorous physical exercise is one of the most mentally relaxing activities, in a way (at least for me). Go for a 100km bike ride in hilly terrain, push yourself on the climbs, and just kind of let your mind wander. It’s not edible-and-David-Attenborough relaxing, but it is relaxing in its own way.


  • It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

    That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

    And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).






  • I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.

    We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.

    It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).