• 3 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Because a well designed game does not include drudgery. “Work-simulators” focus on results and progress and gloss over many of the hours of outright boredom or physical exertion to get there.

    For example, truck driving simulator does not include the pain in the ass and boring part of loading or unloading the truck. Farming simulator does not include the painstaking process of removing rocks from the field.

    While I grew up on a farm, my first proper career was something called OBC seismic. What it is isn’t as important as the fact that it involved placing a 6km long sensor cable on the seabed with a winch and position it properly. To do this right requires practice, and as the principle is farly easy I wrote a small simulator that our trainees could try out. At first they found it interesting, and even the seniors from other departments enjoyed toying with it. The biggest lack of realism was that it didn’t involve doing it for 12 hours straight, only stopping to unscrew 25 meter sections and replacing them. Barring drudgery and repetitive boredom could’ve probably made it an interesting game similar to other work simulators.







  • Norway - Similar to many European countries, owning a gun requires a certifiable reason to do so, which basically means hunting or target shooting. Loads of guns here, as there’s a lot of moose and deer. Obtaining and owning a hunting rifle requires skill tests and a theoretical exam, and you need to be part of a hunting group.

    ARs are banned for obvious reasons. The only exception is for people who are army reservists who are (were?) allowed to store their service weapon at home, if they have proper secure storage options available. This may have changed since I was a reservist myself, but those were the rules in 2007 at least.

    Pistols are legal for target shooting, but with strict background checks and so forth. Plus you have to be part of a target shooting club. Getting a pistol is generally harder than a rifle, as a means of preventing pistols from ending up on the streets. Gun voilence happens, but it is extremely rare, and mostly tied to gangs and/or organized crime. Except from this asshole in 2011.

    Carrying permit for guns is pretty much none existent. To/from hunting or shooting range.

    Self defense is not a valid reason for obtaining and carrying a gun. You don’t really need it either. The only exception is Svalbard where is is possible due to polar bears. And even then, you can’t be an idiot about it; a few years ago this dumbass got permanently banned from the Svalbard territory after intentionally provoking a polar bear, then shooting it, claiming self defense.






  • Not very practical, but good for understanding the OS: Everything is a file. Even your filesystem and harddrive is represented by a file (devicenode).

    Back in the day, before things such as pulseaudio and equivalents became the norm, there was also such a file (it might still exist, idk) for your soundcard. By shoving the contents of a wav file directly into /dev/dsp, you could hear it as if it was played normally.

    Unrelates to the above, in a terminal context it’s very handy to learn the concepts of STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR, and how to manipulate these. I won’t go into it here, but whenever you see a bunch of commands strung together with redirects, < > | >>, that’s usually for sending the output (STDOUT) of one command somewhere else, such as to the input STDIN to another command.






  • I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.

    I miss an /etc structure that wasn’t a complete mess.

    I miss UFS and its soft updates.

    I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.

    I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.

    And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.

    The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I’ve only needed to use fBSD once professionally.