well, I don’t care anymore. I just unsubscribe and run sieve filters to get rid of junk mail. That’s something I hate with a passion!

I used to maintain a zero unread mailbox. At some point I stopped. Email is just a public global todo list, than any one can write to. It’s okay not to read them all.

solid advice.

Another book on the history of unix is UNIX: A History and a Memoir from Kernighan. It was a joy to read.

Cool. I noticed I have seen the author’s name in TUHS mailing list. He’s still posting there sometimes.

Around 25 years ago I had read about this Linux thingy in a computer magazine somewhere in the middle east. We had a Windows 95/98 PC. I got my hands on some Red Hat CDs (or floppies) and managed to install it on the PC. It booted into a prompt, but I had zero knowledge of Linux or any Unix-like OSes and had absolutely no idea of man pages. Didn’t manage to start the graphical environment. I took my case and rode my motorcycle to some computer engineering student (the most knowledgeable person I had access too, we had no Internet) and asked him for help. He told me it’s my graphics card (some old ISA VGA card), but couldn’t help more. In the computer market no one knew about Linux either. So my first try to switch to Linux failed.

Fast forward 25 years… I’m surrounded with Linux and computers in general. Desktops, laptops, single board computers, virtual machines, local or remote. I started with Ubuntu (free CDs posted to my poor country…) with Gnome and later gnome shell, tried Debian, Mint, Parsix, and finally Arch Linux. Moved from graphical to command line and started absorbing the Unix philosophy of simplicity and robustness. Nowadays I use sway and KDE on Arch Linux for work and pleasure, and follow very old Unix mailing lists looking for hidden internet gems.

P.S.: forgot to mention Libreelec (kodi) as my media server and OpenSUSE Leap on laptop which I chose to enjoy some automated install with encryption and btrfs which worked surprisingly well. If I live long enough, I might start thinkering with BSDs (openbsd probably, because of the picture at the bottom of their homepage). I already use pfsense which is based on FreeBSD.

Anyone interested in awk make sure to check the just published awk book second revision by original authors. Kernigan’s writings are a joy to read.

deleted by creator

tocc: https://github.com/aidin36/tocc

You’ll be missed Bram. RIP.