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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

    The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

    Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

    Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!


  • Air-up water bottles. When I bought mine it claimed to be a better water bottle all-around.

    Its primary gimmick of tricking the brain into tasting the scent works well, I did drink a lot more water without needing actual flavouring. The fact that I could (unofficially) 3D print my own reusable flavouring pods to be a little more eco-friendly was a nice surprise and the reason I decided to try it.

    The “better bottle” part is utter horse crap. It leaks when tipped over, even when tightly closed. Their marketing team went as far as adding “sip, don’t tip” to the instructions instead of making the cap properly seal.

    Drinking from it was a chore as there was no water pressure and the constant bubbling (lets be real, its more like wet fart) noises made it impossible to use in silent settings.

    I ended up going back to reusing a disposable bottle until it leaks even though the thought and feeling of something flavourless being in my mouth is revolting (its a sensory thing).



  • I think about a feature or bugfix that I want to work on, then shoehorn it in by any means necessary. Once my code is confirmed working, the planning phase begins and I go through the module(s) I’m working with line-by-line and match the original author’s coding style and usually by that point I pick up a trail or discover a bunch of helper functions/libraries that I can use to replace parts of my code, and continue from there.

    As others have said, configuration files is a great way to learn that. Pick a config option you want to learn about, jump to the config loader, find where the variable gets set, then do a global search for that function. From there it starts to fall into place.

    Sidenote: I also learned rust this way. It took me around 6 months to learn the rgit codebase solely from adding features that I wanted from cgit. Now I’m at the point where rebasing from upstream to my soft-fork doesn’t mess up any of my changes, and am able add or fix things with relative ease. If memory serves, a proper debugger (firedbg is excellent!) was used on several occasions to track down an extremely annoying and ambiguous error message that was due to rust’s trait system being a pain in my ass.








  • I have the same issue and eventually gave up and got whats called a “verfrisser” in Dutch. I suppose it translates to “refresher”? Its a little thing that hangs on the rack that keeps it smelling fresh. One is good for 60 washes, or 2 months. The one I have is made by “finish” and was €2 for 2.

    My apartment also has extremely hard water so I also run it empty at max temperature with a descaling powder once a month. I find the smell is greatly reduced for a few days after descaling. That may be why youre smelling it less when using the vinegar rinse.