stevekemp

In Finland our kids pretty much go to school themselves from the age of six or so, and walk back when they're done for the day - and their afterschool activities are over. So most kids seem to ha…

Interstellar Pig, was an unexpected addition there. I remembered that book immediately from hearing the title! (On that note I remember a book I read at a similar time, some kids took off in a hollow …

There was a TV series back in the 80s which I really enjoyed - I actually checked out the books from the local library after having seen the show at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

There are still people writing new games, games that are playable upon the same Infocom interpreter that was used to run Zork! I wrote a CP/M emulator specifically so that I could play a trivial …

A toy golang one you can embed, and a tutorial for how it was written here: https://github.com/skx/foth You can see it embedded to provide a turtle-like graphics thing in this re…

I've added that now, thanks!

I guess these kinda toy scripts/utilities get written a lot as they're not really super-common and there's no well-known standard. I wrote my own version too, a while back, because it s…

Back in the day I used libpam-tmpdir for that purpose - it covered SSH and other services that used PAM.

Like those users who start with Linux, and later move to Solaris only to learn "killall" does something different there.. In my defense I only did it the once.

I recently had to copy a secret which was available in a CI-job to a new repository, but the system was smart enough to filter it if echoed literally. So "echo $API_TOKEN" failed, but gettin…

My memory is that PCI regulations require password rotation every 90 days - also that the minimum password length should be seven characters, not the eight I always answer when quizzed.

I find stuck pixels gradually build up and kill kindles for me, after 4-5 years. I'm on my third device now, and I have a couple of them which just won't clear. Not the end of the world but…

I've always suspected that most people learn forth by implementing one, rather than by picking an existing implemntation and using it for something real/significant.

Nice job. You can see this post for the start of a guide in implementing something very similar "Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go": https://notes.eatonphil.com/datab…

The Z-machine could run under 64k or RAM, or less, back in the day. 1GB is probably more than you'd need to store all the Infocom releases!

Similar here in Helsinki, there are a bunch of bins inside a communically accessible room - paper, glass, metal, mixed, plastic, and biological rubbish. There's some fancy schedule for when the v…

I went to the transport office and got a map of all the local tram routes - we hung it on the wall, and my child and I rode every tram from one end to the other. Took a few weeks to ride all the trams…

For clarity Finland is a full member of NATO, as of 4 April 2023. Perhaps that's what you meant, but Ally makes it sound like they're friendly with NATO rather than an actual member.

Binding to ports under 1024 traditionally requires root privileges. (These days of course that isn't quite as true as it used to be.)

FlexLM is a name from the past! I remember cracking their protection with back in 99 or so, I remember it with the Highland name.

The day-fine system is kinda interesting, because it recognizes that the impact of paying a $500 fine is very different based on your income. I was surprised to learn that the UK experimented with it,…

I wonder how many of the features which other operating systems got much later, such as the unified buffer cache, were due to worries of software patents?

Buckets are default deny, now. But for many many years they were not, and the defaults almost certainly changed due to the many many examples of "accidental exposure".

Indeed, disabling SELinux is like following instructions for PHP applications and running "chmod -R 777 /var/www". I used to work at a payment provider and we had to deal with lots…

If you visit https://www.tindie.com/ you can search for either "Z80" or "CP/M" and find a lot of single-board computers that are available as kits. RC2014 is …

I've had a lot of fun with Turbo Pascal over recent years. Simple single-board computers are easily available from tindie, etc, and even without that there are a lot of CP/M emulators out t…

There are better versions out there, for example: https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-intervie... …