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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • This time over telnet.

    telnet is an insecure protocol. Ideally you should use ssh instead but most which some modern BBS’s support both. Of course if you want to dial in on legacy “authentic” hardware then SSH isn’t possible.

    💡You can SSH (or telnet) from your phone using Termux and it works pretty well (though admittedly not as good without full ANSI support). It doesn’t use full height of screen but is still usable. BBS’s could be enhanced to support that though.

    Here’s an example of how one looks on my phone:

    ssh NEW@bbs.bottomlessabyss.net -p 2222 -c aes256-cbc

    Screenshot_20231010-174323_Termux









  • That would be more than capable. Retro emulation can run on very low end hardware.

    But here’s an ebay listing for same model that I bought earlier. It doesn’t include an SSD but you can buy M.2 SSDs for very cheap which I also did. Plus they’re much faster and more reliable than micro SD cards.

    It’s very easy to open the machine up which I liked.

    RAM upgrades are cheap too but 8GB is a lot for most cases.

    A lot of corporate environments use these so when they upgrade you can find them used for dirt cheap, if you don’t mind some possible cosmetic defects. Mine are just stacked on a shelf and I just use them as servers for docker and whatnot.


  • While I love Raspberry Pis and have a few older ones, it’s a shame that the latest ones were very hard to come by and far exceeded the $35 price point.

    I was looking to upgrade to a Pi 4 a while back but prices were outrageous or it was sold out completely. I eventually discovered tiny form factor PCs.

    I bought some used Lenovo Tiny ThinkCentres (which are about 10x more powerful than a Pi 4), off eBay for ~ $70. I upgraded the Ram and SSDs and they are quite capable, low power units!

    So to anyone looking for a low power computer to run Linux, consider buying used off eBay. You can get some pretty good deals on used hardware that’s more capable.





  • I’ll admit the hardware on iPhones is excellent but waaayy overkill for iOS.

    Let me install my own third party apps w/o the App store (I know altstore exists, but needing to renew apps every few days is super janky). If I spend my money on a device, I should be allowed to put whatever I want on it, however I want. Let me, the consumer accept the risks of doing so.

    Let me use HDMI out over USB-C to an external monitor and have a full desktop with ability to run desktop class apps. Let me use the full potential of the chipsets to get actual work done and effectively replace a computer.

    Till then, Android it is for me because I can do both these things easily. I know my use cases are more niche, but “Pro” naming on consumer Apple products is just fluff.




  • It helped me break the habit of needing to use arrow keys / mouse for navigating around text. Why is this important? The 1-2 seconds to reach over from home row add up. For example, instead of scrolling the mouse several turns to get to the top of a file, I can just type gg. All without needing to strain my wrist to reach over for the less efficient methods.

    Once you master navigation with just keyboard (sans arrow keys) you really feel like a speed demon and the alternative begins to feel clunky. It may not seem like it at first because you have to retrain the way you interact with text files that goes against the habits you’re used too.

    Apart from that, for any sort of Linux server management, vim or vi are usually installed so it’s a good skill to have if you quickly need to tweak a config for example. Nano works but is less efficient from an editing perspective.

    I work in the terminal a lot and also use tmux with vim keybindings. I love being able to navigate entirely mouse free.

    I use Vim emulation wherever possible. I enjoy using a web browser with vim keybindings to navigate around and reduce mouse usage. Vim is a paradigm that many tools incorporate or have plugins to do so because it is just that useful once you learn it.

    Vim is not meant to be an IDE. Things like intellisense don’t work (as) well from my experience. But I just use vim plugins in my IDEs so I can get best of both.