Devices

being a nerd 15 and 30 years ago

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Considering I haven’t learned or come across anything of value to share to you guys, let’s indulge my imagination for a moment. What would my current life look like in previous generations? Hopefully, doing so puts the sheer exponential speed of technological growth into perspective and makes us grateful for the amenities of today.

2008 - A lot would surprisingly be the same.

plastic and aluminum Gateway laptop from 2007 my first laptop - Gateway MT6705 (2007)

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ode to radio

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denpa - the official no illegal emission mascot of Japan

Earlier this week, I completely overlooked time zones when I set out to record online radio using my remote server. My Debian server is set in UTC and I put all of the times in my crontab (scheduler) in local time, therefore missing everything I wanted to hear. I feel like a donut for taking so long to notice, but I might as well take this teaching opportunity to detail a use for computer scheduling that I haven’t seen documented anywhere else and that you could benefit from.

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backup

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Windows blue screen of death sad emoji. AAAAAAAAAA is 20% complete

I need to get my backup situation in order to avoid wasting time.

I ended up nuking my installation of pacman about halfway through the month trying to free up space on my paltry 64 GB drive, and I spent about a week on and off trying to fix it only to give up and nuke my otherwise perfect Arch Linux installation. Luckily, I had my home partition separate from the root partition, so I didn’t have to pointlessly migrate my files to a scratch disk (that I didn’t even have) and back. Thankfully, the problem was fixed, and getting back to a workable environment took only an afternoon.

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dumbsmart phone

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3 military men working on a portable phone switchboard

When I wasn’t off doing real life stuff, how have I filled my time this past month?

For one, I’ve eased off the monke, innawoods mantra and changed back to my 2017 smartphone as my daily driver. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a strange glitch with the Nokia 225 that cut off predictive text halfway through a word if a text was received during typing. As much as I enjoyed flexing on people’s iPhone 47Smax2+funkymode and its tumor growth of cameras, the threshold for this lifestyle meme was always functionality, and I don’t see anyone coping with such a major oversight.

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off grid return to monke - progress

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two slavic boys playing solitaire in the middle of the night on a crt monitor being held above a hole in the ice

What does a lifestyle of not having home internet and using a feature (read: dumb) phone as a daily driver look like?

Pros:

Annoyances followed by solutions/adaptations:

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ham radio 2 - real life edition

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img

Now that I’m back in school and with less time to dedicate to hobbies, what do I take away from having gotten my radio license?

Why did I get the license in the first place? The global pandemic had done away with about 6 months up to that point and I saw no point in signing up for online music classes. Therefore, I had all of this free time to myself that I had determined from the start would be dedicated to getting extra money and pursuing personal projects - the biggest one of course being the acquisition of Japanese. The Dunning-Kruger effect was rearing its ugly head and I hadn’t the patience nor the discipline to spend hours of my day on something I was guaranteed not to use for the foreseeable future (lock down).

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ham radio

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smoking hot wife, adoring kids, dude must be one kickass ham radio operator

I struggle to find a place in my life for HAM radio and my fascination with all things radio. Every job or niche that I can conjure for a radio can be done much cheaper and more conveniently with the internet. Let’s list some:

I’m left with a basic knowledge of morse code, and I almost feel guilty for not having any outlet for the hours I have spent studying the letters. I tested myself two nights ago, and quite predictably, I had retained enough to get by and spring back up, but not enough to be able to show off to other people even as a proof of concept (the same can be said for my japanese and music study oof). At best, I can sneak in an easter egg into some content that 0.01% of any audience will have the tenacity or drive to interpret.

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