Magnus Åhall

We have had the opposite problem in the past. A cert provider requiring us to exist in certain international directories of companies took weeks of waiting around on bureaucratic red tape.

Then they didn’t even call us to verify our existance, place of business or anything (yeah, this was one of the big certificate providers a long time ago).

Their website was horrible, and their support wasn’t better.

LetsEncrypt though hasn’t failed me once since it was setup, and that is over hundreds of domains with thousands of renewals.

First thing I do on a new laptop is remapping a key I won’t be using much to Insert, which I use all the time :)

Big bucks for big trucks?

In Sweden we have had a version of self checkout for 20 years in the largest stores, and here it seems to work fine.

Instead of having to scan everything at a station, each product is scanned with a handscanner when walking through the store, and put directly into shopping bags. Then only the payment and possibly a randomly occuring verification is left before leaving the store.

The random testing is usually just an employee scanning three to five items from your bags, and occurs like once every four months (as long as you’re not actually stealing and caught).

Last 25 years I have been using a couple of different tiling window managers. My main workstations usually have four monitors, accessed by AltGr+number.

I heavily base my workflow on virtual desktops, accessed by Ctrl+number.

Each virtual desktop have a specific type of programs on it:

1. Development
2. Terminals
3. Browsers
4. Communication / documentation
5. Multimedia
6. Graphics
7. SQL
8. Debugging
9. Email
10. Virtual machines / monitoring

So with this I can access nearly every program with AltGr+number, Ctrl+number which is quite quick. As long as I remember the monitor I placed it on, I always know which virtual desktop.

I use chained keyboard shortcuts for window manager shortcuts, here: https://files.ahall.se/images/i3-keybindings.svg (old one, this has grown a bit…)

The chaining allows me to easier remember shortcuts with mnemonics, and they are fast enough, especially considering the amount of shortcuts I can scale it to.

• Alt+T to start the chain, L for Layout, R for Resize.
• Alt+T, R for Run, I for Inkscape.
• Alt+T, A for Audio, N for Next.

There are some exceptions for the most used focus- and window moving operations, as well as for managing a clipboard buffer system. There are too many times when one goes back and forth to copy something, paste it somewhere else and going back for the previous one. So I can copy something, press Ctrl+Shift+3 to put in buffer 3. After a few other copy/pastes, I bring it into clipboard again with Ctrl+Alt+3. This also allows me to for example reload a page I’m working on and login with user/pass easily accessible in buffer 1 and 2, or login to four different network devices again and again without going to a text file and copying one of four passwords each and every time.

I wrote a special session manager via socket for i3 to be able to press Ctrl+number and go to a certain predefined desktop on the current monitor I’m at.

We also had fun playing through Leisure Suit Larry 1 a couple of weeks ago :)

Built an arcade machine running MAME. We have been playing a lot of Boogie Wings and Windjammers.

Can only agree on Mikrotik routers. All are using RouterOS, which works the same on all their devices, from routers to switches and access points.

They are relatively cheap for the capabilites you’re getting. They have their own scripting language, two APIs (their new one is REST-based).

GUI (winbox is recommended, and plays nice with wine. Wouldn’t recommend web interface, just cumbersome) and CLI exists.

They have a lot of builtin functionality, like DHCP server, DNS server with static configuration, and even file sharing. Some models are powerful enough to run Docker images on (yes, that’s builtin…).

We’re running a couple of hundred and don’t have much problem with them.