Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

You can tell its winter when BMW owners choose to park on the street rather than their driveways for fear of not being able to get out.

 

Ah, here it usually goes so that they park their cars wrapped around streetlight poles as well as random directions to deep snow from roundabouts.

 

My car idles weird when the weather is below freezing. Dunno why.

 

yesterday me and my family was watching tommy boy, and my kitten was on the counter below the tv, looking up, and watching it

 

I'm not sure how your car fuel system was built, but if it is injection model, there can be sticking idle valve thing, it needs cleaning up or replacing. That allows more air to get into intake when cold, if it sticks car is running too rich and idles funny.

 

Booted up my HP Compaq NC8430 and decided to do a little battery test on it, it's been running a while.. but wow i noticed something that i never thought worked before, the laptop has a built in accelerometer which when you move it, the hard-drive LED goes from green to amber and you hear the heads park, pretty damn neat if you ask me!

 

Quite a lot of laptops have this, its predominately used to detect if the laptop is falling and park the HDD to prevent as much damage as possible.

 

Time for a Unix screenshot dump! Here are some pics of me using a custom OpenBSD/i386 setup with the Common Desktop Environment - that rickety old Motif-based desktop from the early 90's.

Spoiler

Here's the bootloader. It has its own command interpreter!



Meltdown? Ah, shit... Luckily, Theo de Raadt and his gang are security experts, and high-performance mitigations for speculative execution attacks are in place - assuming OpenBSD was ever vulnerable to begin with, as this flavor of Unix takes security measures that most others don't in order to rule out entire classes of exploits. Here's hoping the next generation of processors doesn't require lousy workarounds.



This display manager illustrates OpenBSD's focus on simplicity and security - it's just a flat panel, and it works right out of the box, like everything else. Behind that box is some of the strongest cryptography known to the computing world. OpenBSD uses LibreSSL, which is commonly thought to be more secure than the more popular OpenSSL. Simply put, you have no chance of breaking in.



Here's the desktop itself. It should look familiar to anyone who's seen old versions of IBM's OS/2. In fact, IBM designed much of CDE's user interface, so if you've ever used OS/2, or its precursor Microsoft Windows, you should feel right at home. The color scheme here is custom, ripped from DECwindows for OpenVMS.



You can't store files on the desktop like you can in Windows or Mac OS, but you can pin shortcuts to it. Also, the front panel (CDE's equivalent of Windows' taskbar, or Apple's dock) uses customizable tear-off menus, a feature I wish more GUIs adopted.



Shown here are the File and Application Managers. The File Manager is like Windows 95's Explorer, while the Application Manager is conceptually identical to Windows 3.x's Program Manager.



Make no mistake, CDE is a fully-featured desktop environment, as it always has been. Shown here are Firefox, the lovely calendar, and my personal favorite, the extremely versatile calculator. You won't get a calculator like this with GNOME.



For the more technically-inclined, CDE comes with a terminal as well as a basic text editor. Most people like to have more fully-featured editors or IDEs for programming, but I don't mind working with something simpler. Both do what they say on the box, and do it well. You could also install Nedit or Emacs, but I haven't.



For the creative user, CDE offers a paint program... well, really, it's kind of limited (that said, I could imagine bored SCO employees wasting hours of time with this little Paintlet). It is most useful for editing or making X11 pixmap-formatted icons. Again, this is Unix, so there's a lot of other graphics software out there that you could get, most of it for free.



CDE was originally an enterprise program developed and maintained by a coalition of tech giants - IBM, HP and DEC among them - and with enterprise products comes piles of documentation. The manual for this thing is YUUUUGE and everything from daily usage to system administration is covered in good detail. They're an interesting read if you can get them to compile.



There is a nice selection of background patterns, including this one, based on the carpet at YYZ's terminals. As a Rush fan, I approve. (Does anyone know what OS Toronto-Pearson used in the 90's, or recall seeing anything like CDE on their computer screens? I wonder if they actually made this wallpaper with the intention that the airport would use it.)



CDE also comes with a small assortment of basic screensavers, my favorite being this one, titled Swarm of Bees. A swarm of colorful "bees" follow a white dot as it meanders about the screen, all the while gently fading through the visible spectrum. Also pictured here is the unlock panel - you can change the image on the right if you like.



Logging off. Note that there's no shutdown button - you do that from the terminal, or not at all if you're running CDE on a server. This is what you would get with OpenVMS on a VAX or Alpha server, where multi-decade uptimes are common.

All things considered, Common Desktop Environment is pretty nice. Its look and feel is kind of dated, but it still works like new. It's a return to the conservative, usability-first UI design of the 90's and early 2000's. If Windows 10 is a brand-new Lamborghini, CDE is an old Chevy truck. There's nothing particularly flashy or stylish about it, but it's intuitive, and once you get it working, it just... works. Give it a shot if you're bored. I strongly recommend using it on OpenBSD and I will help you set it up by PM if you want. CDE: because the good old days never went away.

If you want the full experience, run it on a 1024x768 CRT monitor and use this color scheme. It makes for a surprisingly cozy workspace.

 

Funny moments.When the increase in gasoline prices


Best beautiful photos:


Yesterday I saw that the new KAMAZ

 

But for that truck, it looks a lot like Alaska!

Flew to Kodiak this morning, came back this evening, no snow on the ground at all except in the mountains. What a difference from Valley/Anchorage where I spend most of my time. Still coming down here.

 

Just bought xiaomi mi 8 lite. Pretty good phone, nothing like overpriced vivo v11. The notch still bugs me but i will probably get used to it.

 

Black ice... Nobody was injured.It's not my truck.

 

just a random question, do you have a dashcam in your truck ?

 

Yes. Oh I forgot the record. The case when I saw that scaina lost control and crashed into a fence. No one was hurt.

 

Banana time

 

Banana helps sleep well, because of Magnesium in it, best taken at evening.

 

put some new shoes on the bike. i'm not won over by them, but they ride good.

I'm using 26x2.25 schwalbe rapid robs in replacement of some old tioga blue dragons.

 

I feel energetic. I’ll see how I sleep tonight.

 

She loves snow