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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • When it was growing up, the definitions kept changing.

    I was born in 1986, and while in primary school I was told that makes me GenX. So I grew up thinking I was GenX. Then in high school, my teachers said actually anyone born after 1985 is GenY, so we’re definitely GenY.

    Then when year 2000 came around people started talking about a new generation of people who would “never remember the 20th century”, or “never know a world without the internet”, basically people born after 1997 so they grow up completely in the 2000s. They called them Millennials.

    From then on the usage of “millennial” kept growing, starting to see it everywhere. Mostly by boomers complaining about millennials.

    Around 2012 I stated seeing some youtubers around my age referring to themselves as millennials, I thought it was a joke, or a bad understanding. Then people started referring to me as a millennial. Someone who’s whole childhood was in the 90s, how could I be a millennial, it defied the definition.

    So I imagine my shock when I find now they’ve removed all trace of the usage of GenY, and retroactively applied “millennial” to mean anyone born after 1985. So maybe I am a millennial? I remember staying up late to celebrate with my parents and make sure our computer didn’t crash at midnight on new years eve in 1999. I remember wondering why dragonballz wasn’t on TV when the news was showing footage of American skyscrapers in 2001. Are those the things that make me a millennial? If so then what about the original definition? Those born 1997 or later won’t remember those things, so now they’re Zoomers? All this business makes me so confused.







  • We use NoMachine at work too, for WFH users’ remote access to internal servers and virtual desktops. It’s a nice tidy solution, it was forked from NX library from the X2GO project about 10 years ago and went commercial, they used the commercial money to continue to develop the technology.

    Given it was forked from NX/X2GO it definitely works better on Xorg than Wayland, it seems like Wayland support was added as an afterthought bolted on.



  • Sounds like your friend is absolutely not the target audience for a linux-based operating system. If he wants to play Windows games and use software designed for Windows, then he should be using a Windows OS. Anything else would be providing a suboptimal experience for him.

    Personally, I’ve been using various Linux-based systems since 2004, as a software developer I use a lot of command-line utilities, and many tools and applications designed for Linux. If I were using predominantly tools and applications designed for Windows, then I would be using Windows. No need to make life more difficult for yourself and others.



  • When I was around 14, my parents got my sister and I a 2nd hand Xbox (the OG big square Xbox), but we were too poor to buy any games for it. I used to rent the games from blockbuster for three days at a time.

    I was fascinated with electronics, I’d build little radio kits and LED chasers, I was okay with a soldering iron. I was researching mod chips online, to play burned games. The guides on installation emphasised how small all the solder points are, and how fine the wires are, that it’s not a job for a beginner. But I thought it would be fine.

    I tried to order a modchip online, but the site didn’t deliver to Australia. I remember seeing people advertising in the news paper classifieds section modchipping services, so they must be available somehow. I called one of the guys, but he said he only sold them as part of installation, couldn’t sell me just the modchip. I called a couple others, but none wanted to talk to a 14yo kid.

    My parents caught wind of what I was trying to do, and they offered to pay to send it to the guy to get it done. So we just went with that. I was disappointed I didn’t get to do the installation myself.

    The next week, we got our Xbox back, turned it on, and played a couple of burned games, it worked great. But I was curious. Did the guy do a good installation job? What gauge wires did he use? Which brand and model modchip did he use? I was full of questions. So while my parents were out I opened the Xbox up, disassembled it right down to the motherboard. I found the modchip, I was fascinated by how small it was, how fine the wires were, and how tiny the solder points were. It all looked so fragile. It looked like the guy had done a pretty good job.

    I put the Xbox back together, went to play it, but it wouldn’t read any discs, not even genuine discs. Weird, did I forget to plug something back in on reassembly? I opened it up and found the disc drive cable was slightly unplugged. Plugged it in, reassembled, and tried it again. This time it read genuine discs, but it wouldn’t play any burned discs. I tried for a while, and it was like the modchip wasn’t working. That was when my parents got home. I was so angry and frustrated with myself, my mum asked what the matter was, and I started sobbing and crying furiously, I said “why can’t I leave things alone?” and “Why do I always have to take things apart?” and “Why didn’t I just enjoy the games?”.

    A couple days later I had calmed down enough, I opened the Xbox up again, and had another look. I saw the problem immediately. One of the tiny hair-like wires on the modchip had popped off. Maybe because of my previous poking around in there, or maybe it just came off by itself, idk. Luckily it was on the modchip side, not on the motherboard side, so there was a relatively large pad to solder it back onto. Still smaller than anything I’d soldered before, but I gave it a go. It took about an hour, with my oversized non-temperature-controlled soldering iron, but I got it soldered back in place. While was there I resoldered a couple wires alongside it, so they were more secure too. I was shaking with anticipation when I put it all back together yet again, and fired it up. It worked! Played burned games again! I was so happy I was crying. The awful low from days before transformed into an amazing high of achievement, and gratification.

    My parents told me the lesson was to never take things apart, leave well enough alone. But they were wrong.the lesson was far greater. It gave me the self confidence to know I can fix things. Yes I can and will break things, but I can fix them. I somehow absorbed that into my identity. From then on I was always trying to fix things. Phone line died, I repaired it. Computer got a virus, I formatted and reinstalled the OS. Lawn mower wouldn’t start, I cleaned and rebuilt the carburettor, didn’t know what I was doing, but I just did it, because I had the confidence. Then at age 24 I got a jobs as an electronics repair technician, so it worked out for me.








  • Oh, I remember having to use Yocto when I started experimenting with the BeagleBone Black SBC back in 2015. Yes I remember it being very hard to use. I remember I had need to rebuild the kernel to include a disabled kernel module. The cross compilation on my desktop PC didn’t work, so I had to build it on the BeagleBone. That was an awful process, it took about 6 hours.

    For anyone not familiar, the BeagleBone Black was an SBC that came out as competitor to the Raspberry Pi 2. The main difference was the BeagleBone used an open source design, based on a non-NDA CPU unlike the RPI, so it meant they published full kernel sources. But in my experiments I found the BeagleBone CPU was much slower than the RPI, and it’s graphics hardware was almost non-existent compared to RPIs integrated graphics.