Comments by "" (@dingokidneys) on "Veronica Explains" channel.

  1. I've written so much documentation and I wasted so many hours going back over stuff, reorganising and restructuring it, re-wordsmithing to adjust the tone: I wish I'd been able to take a good course in technical writing instead of futzing about having to learn from painful experience how to communicate complex concepts to a bunch of people who really didn't want to have to know this stuff. Both my time and the users time would have been better used had I known a bit more about technical writing. You're doing a good thing.
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  2. Very cool. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and didn't know what to use 'fuser' for. I've been using 'lsof' but it's a bit more arcane. From now on 'fuser' will be in my toolbox. Thanks. 😊 Rockin' on with that outro: 🤘😝
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  3. For me this brings back memories of trying to set up custom 'config.sys' and 'autoexec.bat' configurations selected by a furiously customised menuing system to help my kids get games like these working because they'd "borrowed" the installation media from a friend and really needed to have it working so they could discuss the minutiae of how to beat that Boss at school over the following days. I seldom got to play any of these though I remember quite a few late nights of Commander Keen. Oh, and Prince of Persia. That was a favourite. I should try to run some of these up again on something like Lutris.
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  4. That looked like you were having a hoot, which is great. Documentation is difficult and, speaking as someone who has written a lot of documentation, it's a thing that you need a lot of practice and feedback to start getting right. You need to be humble enough to accept when people tell you that it's wrong or difficult or whatever, Having a really good structure to the document that you are writing is also very important as that can make both the writing and the learning much easier.
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  5.  @VeronicaExplains  I also learned this trick for the first time after using xargs for years. I gotta RTFM a bit more. 😁
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  6. I too would love to hear more of Veronica's experiences with the early web. Unfortunately, I was too old to really get into it at the time as I had a wife, two kids and a crushing mortgage to take care of with a job that only allowed me (officially) to work with mundane office computer applications. Networking was "the dark arts" to which I was inexorably drawn.
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  7. When I read 'hit the enter key' and think about some of the people I've had to try to teach these concepts to, I visualise them pulling a hammer out and whacking the hell out of the keyboard. My preferred verb is 'tap' although some people might still go to the bathroom, forcibly remove a faucet, bring it back to the computer and bash it with that. Malicious compliance was a feature of some of the people I've had to deal with.
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  8. You should start with your index finger on the J key . This is the proper 'home row' position and before you build too much muscle memory you need to correct that. Moving left then becomes a left dart with your index finger. I love the idea of the training using the game but the hand position was freaking me a bit as a Vi/Vim user for decades. I love your content so please don't take this as a criticism, just a word of advice from and old guy who's been there. :)
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  9.  @Johan.Molenberghs  I'd think that this would only be necessary if you have really bad security hygiene; dropping your keys onto every machine that you touch. If you manage your keys well I can't see how changing them like you change your underpants actually helps. (1 to 12 months: yes, I'm a dirty old man :)
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  10. That was extremely cool! I used to use x2x for this but I recently tried it again and couldn't get it going. Haven't figured out why and it's probably now moot as I'm going to give Barrier a shot. Still love your music by the way. Oh, and x2x never did Win or Mac.
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  11. Love to see your videos and really happy to see you getting that old iMac back up and running. Keep up the good work. It's always a happier day when there's a new Veronica Explains video.
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  12.  @VeronicaExplains  Tractor feed. They're called "tractor feed". Oh god, the nurses are coming to change my adult diaper.
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  13. When I first got to use a terminal on an actual mini-computer, I thought this was amazing. Previously in year 11 maths, I'd had to prep all my coding on punch cards. Needless to say debugging was difficult via that medium and I got back about a half a box of fan-fold blue stripe paper when I didn't terminate my loop correctly.
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  14. I was old enough to get on-line when the kids and the missus had gone to bed. Too bad about work the next day. :(
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  15.  @VeronicaExplains  I use three little iptables lines which seems to stop brute forcing attempts and cleans up my log files a bit: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
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  16.  @VeronicaExplains  Yes please. A video on networking in different ways on KVM would be great. I can do things like bridge and create local networks on VirtualBox but KVM stumps me. I think that my basic understanding of networking is lacking somewhere. Everything I find seems either too high level or too down in the weeds. You might end up with a whole series on networking and VMs if you tackle this, and I wouldn't object. :)
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  17. AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgh!! Should have been a trigger warning!!!!!! So much dot matrix hell!!! I spent so much time trying to line these things up on the quadruplicate ( yes it's a word ) forms. BTW, I laughed out loud when you showed the Linux boot up output on paper. :o) ... I thought the Centronix was the parallel and the other was a serial. Yes, serial used to use 25 pins. The 9 pin port was all new-fangled and fancy schmancy. And I love the jumper/pullover/whatever Americans call it.
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  18. People these days often don't realise that proper capitalisation and punctuation is a massive guide to understanding, given that the pauses and inflections of spoken language are not present in the printed form.
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  19. I get budget level tiling and stacking using Terminator as a terminal emulator. I have a session full screen on one desktop that is split 3 or 4 ways and I manage my RPis from there. But I love Pop!_OS (I think I got the spelling right there). I have it running on an OLD laptop, a 2008 Dell Inspiron 1525 with an SSD and it makes it feel like a new machine. I love the way Pops workspaces work too. You can flick through to what you want really quickly. Keep up the good work. See ya in future vids.
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  20.  @VeronicaExplains  She thinks she's old. Ha ha! You're the age of my kids. I started to code with punch cards on an HP 3000 minicomputer in 1977. I've coded in Fortran but never in COBOL. That's a special kind of pain.
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  21. I loved Perl, particulary Perl4 which I could get on a Windows machine with a single binary.
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  22. Very nice video and I really liked the music. How do you find that people take to Pop_OS! I've set up machines with Linux Mint previously because I thought people would find the interface more familiar than Gnome or Cosmic.
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  23. Very cool. I love the 'find' command. Really useful but I have to admit that I didn't know the '-exec ... +" trick. I'd feed the output to xargs to get the same result but that's not as efficient clearly. I wondered for a moment if the '+' part of exec was a Gnu extension but no, there it is in 'find' on my FreeBSD system. I totally agree about getting to know the stuff that is portable across systems and is part of the reason I don't fill my systems with many of the cool and weird things like 'cd' and 'ls' replacements. I like to learn how to use the basics correctly so I'm not lost on an unfamiliar system. Are you keeping up with the Commodore? (I love your outtro.)
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  24.  @ChrisHarringtonMinneapolis  There's also a remote desktop plug-in for Chrome which functions a bit like Teamviewer. Many people have Chrome and if you need to give someone a hand remotely it might be a solution. I wouldn't necessarily rely on it if security is a top priority however. In that case I'd rather SSH and then use a non-cloud protocol like VNC or RDP.
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  25. I loved the keyboard too and thought maybe I should get one, but then started typing on my Das-Keyboard and realised, it's pretty but I don't need it. Pity.
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  26. I just finished changing all my keys over to ed25519 a couple of days ago. I had no idea they'd be changing the default so this is good news. I always had to either run '--help' or do a quick 'man ssh-keygen' cause I could never remember ed25519 and then because I had an old rsa key still hanging around I'd always have to specify the id file either on the command line or in a config file which was a bit of a drag.
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  27.  @Jossandoval  Man pages are certainly becoming more terrible. I've often heard of a command and gone to the man page to find a mass of arcane detail, hundreds of options and switches but nowhere is it described what the command does and what one might use it for. The name of the command doesn't give the game away either as they are often cute little in-jokes or strange mish-mashes of something else; e.g. 'exa' - wtf is that? Discovering new commands from the man page is becoming impossible.
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  28. I was a corporate accountant since the late 1980's but I used Perl all the time for data manipulation. I built whole systems to handle reporting, data validation, and data conversion using Perl and loved it. Perl4 was a great language for this stuff as it was compact and I could get away with putting it on corporate systems as a single binary.
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  29.  @VeronicaExplains  COBOL has to be the least sexy language to work with these days but it was probably a clever decision to actually learn it. A very rare skill and hopefully you are remunerated appropriately.
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  30. I used Clonezilla to backup a system before doing major repartitioning and setting up dual boot. I'm an irritable old guy so I didn't read the text at each step "Yeah, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Just do it." I got tripped up by the "destination directory" bit and ended up with my files in the wrong place. If there's one thing to take away from this it's take your time and read the text until you've done it enough times to fully grok the process. Also when cloning to the VM, I'm assuming that you passed the USB image store drive through to the VM at some point?
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  31. $ man woman No manual entry for woman This is a fact that men have lamented forever. :)
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  32.  @locnar1701  Never made any sense to me why they needed a 25 pin connector for a one-way serial connection. TxD, Gnd; what more do you need?
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  33. SSH into Windows is like a viewport into hell. I've done it but what from there? I don't know Powershell and without that you're pretty much stuck apart from some minor file fiddling.
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  34.  @VeronicaExplains  I never tried machine language but I did write assembler to build a basic C library for a shareware Small-C compiler I got back in, I think, the early 90's. My crowning achievement was 'printf' with a variable number of parameters. I really felt good when that one worked.
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  35. Loved the screwdriver / power drill analogy. Brilliant!
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  36.  @VeronicaExplains  Yee ha! I request Kashmir!
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  37. Great video and I love your solution to connectivity - the Soarer's dongle thingy. Much more a hacker solution than having to do the same software mod on every machine you want to use the thing on. Do once, use everywhere. My son bought me a DasKeyboard years ago which has the same layout and wonderfully clicky keys - and completely blank keycaps so it's unusable by anyone who is not a touch typist. :) Behold my elitist smugness. I love it and though I'm often tempted by other more compact keyboards I can't give up my DasKeyboard. It's just so good.
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  38. I put Crunchbang linux, which was a Debian derivative, on the machine I'm using now in 2013 when I got it. I've been meaning to try out a different daily driver for years but even with Crunchbang dying as a distro and having to swap over to Debian mainstream (repointed repos and dist-upgrade, manually patch a few things) and then upgrading from, I think it was, Squeeze through to Bullseye (again repointing repos and dist-upgrade) this system has been pretty much rock solid. I did want a more up-to-date browser than was on offer from the standard repos, so I installed Brave which updates from it's own repo. I've broken it a few times, like when I first installed the NVidia proprietary driver and lost X11, and I've had a few hard drives die but that was not much problem given I use a mirrored RAID array for my /home partition. Root is on an SSD. I also upgraded the GPU as my old one aged out of support from Debian. I still want to try out a different daily driver - I love Pop!-OS on my laptop - but this installation is almost 'vintage' now and I'd feel bad about wiping it out for new shiny.
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  39. I'm still unsure about the whole RHEL thing. I've always thought that bug-for-bug RHEL compatible distros were not necessarily in the full spirit of libre software as they didn't seem to add anything of their own to the distro; just take de-branded software, re-brand and re-package it (identically to the upstream) and then distribute that. While the software is unequivocally open source, the distribution also results from the selection, testing and integration of all the disparate packages that make the distro up, obtaining certifications for government and other work, and working with major software vendors to ensure proper support of their offerings. I'm not saying that what Red Hat is doing is right or fully justified; just saying I'm not sure that I understand all the factors and I'm not sure that there isn't some justification there.
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  40.  @VeronicaExplains  Wireshark will show the bad of telnet. Nobody needs telnet (unless you do of course.)
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  41. Very cool. Seeing your approach to debugging the issues you hit was instructive too. Some of those would probably have stopped me in my tracks. Nice to learn from a real sysadmin.
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  42. If I'm just after the local IP address on a linux box I use the -br (brief) flag to the ip command; e.g. : $ ip -br a You get output one line per network connection and if you have many, you can just pipe to 'grep UP' to find the ones which are presently functional. Also, I liked your "Super key icon" on the Windows panel. :)
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  43.  @VeronicaExplains  You don't need to give me a shout out. I actually just read the 'man' page a couple of months ago and thought what a dufus I was for not reading it sooner. :) I keep popping this little tip into as many Linux YT comment chains as I can when it's appropriate because it seems that it's not widely known and it makes it so much easier for people, especially when they don't know what all the other stuff is that's thrown up by the unadorned command. I look forward to whatever topics you're going to cover in future as you seem to have a slightly different take on teaching about tech which I find refreshing.
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  44. If you want to do everything by hand with 'dd' you certainly can but a tool like this can save time and heartache if you fail to do one of the manual steps to create/restore an image. There's also 'ddrescue' which does 'dd' type stuff but again handles stuff automatically that you'd otherwise have to do manually and can save a lot of time when trying to save data from a dying drive. Choose the right tool for the job.
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  45. I knew of column but I'm not sure it had all these options at the time it would have been useful to me. Instead I used AWK and Perl. They are very powerful and not all that difficult to use when you get your head around the basics. Oh yeah, and I was working with Windows systems (ugh) for which I had small compact ports of AWK and Perl but not column. Still column seems like a pretty cool tool these days. Love your work on these videos. I always jump right onto them when they pop up.
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  46. I've been playing with Pop!_OS and its tiling interface for some time on a REALLY old laptop (2008) but the upgrade to 22.04 seemed to break the wifi support; I have an ancient Broadcom wifi adapter. So I switched back to LinuxMint. I really missed the tiling interface 'cause keyboard stuff is so much faster than trying to mouse around on a laptop. Consequently, I re-did a clean install of Pop!_OS 22.04 and re-loaded the wifi driver I needed and it worked beautifully. Must have just been a glitch in the upgrade. i3 and some other tiling WMs that I've tried seem a bit too hard-core for me but Pop!_OS seems to have just enough of that secret sauce to make things really snappy without going full Spartan. I really hope they get the full Cosmic desktop done and made available in other Linux distro's because I'd love to try it on a stripped back Arch install.
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  47. I'd like to see one on firewalls too; iptables or nft if that's the better interface to learn.
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  48. Don't save that .ogg!! Love your work. Always fun and informational.
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  49. It's like a viewport into hell. I've done it and it ain't pretty. :) However, if you're a Powershell wrangler it could be useful. Me, I ain't and it ain't.
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  50. We used to dream of 56K modems! My first modem was a Netcomm 14400 baud (14K) modem and I was lucky to get that. The naughty pictures came down really slowly in those days!
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