VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

Bookmarked, thanks!

I bought a Rockchip SBC (Orange Pi 5+), and when it worked it was awesome…but man, the software support (mainly kernel space) is just not there. Exercise in frustration to get everything working at the same time.

Currently running armbian. I don’t think HW acceleration is working, and I don’t think HDMI out is even working, but for my use case it’s a stable config…for now.

But once you got that XFree86 config dialed in, life was awesome.

(Ok looks like Xorg has been around for 21 years, so maybe you were running it instead.)

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

Slack got me through college on an ancient (even at the time) ThinkPad 600e. Good times!

I had a suite of scripts to log in to the university Linux cluster, download the kernel source and out-of-tree modules (required for the PCMCIA WiFi adapter), compile it, and rsync it back to my laptop.

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

I assume you’re referring to the cuckpdate chair.

Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

*Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

You’re right, for new drives it looks like a little more with this 20GB retailing for $230, or $11.50/TB.

For refurbished, I recently got a factory renewed 12TB Seagate for $112 ($9.33/TB), but that price is now up to $199 for the same drive (!).

Official numbers here https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

About 4.4TB, but that’s all architectures and (I believe?) all distributions (stable, testing…).

If you only want source+all+amd64+arm64, and only want stable, it will be smaller of course.

Not nothing, but at $10/TB or so, it’s not much.

And if you’re following 3-2-1, I’m pretty sure the “1” is already handled for you :)

Some would call the former command cat abuse.

In short, unless you want the contents of a file printed to stdout (or multiple files concatenated), the command can probably be written without cat, instead using the filename as an argument (grep pattern file) or IO redirection (cmd < file).

Stylistics and readability are another thing though.

Yabai+sketchybar make tiling+virtual desktops…at least usable on mac.

Of course, I’d take i3 any day of the week.

Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.

Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).