This past week I’ve had what I would call a ‘hybrid vacation.’ Working in the morning and kayaking after lunch (if the weather permitted, which it did.)
Not only that. I’ve also picked up my dSLR camera, charged the batteries and started toying with light and shadows again. Still missing live models, but I’ll have a lot of inanimate objects around me. Like this piece of paper, telling yet another story of my activities: Practicing my handwriting.
This is the first attempt copying some guy on the internet. I’m still making tweaks to find my own style. I also have to produce three extra letters from the Norwegian alphabet. You would think a guy like me, working with computers all day, would prefer keyboard. But no. More and more I am drawn to the pen and paper. Away from the screen.
Talking about being away from the screen: Here are three images I took on a recent walk around sunset.
That’s it. My attempt at making blogging personal again. Oof, that doesn’t sound too good. That orange joke from USA has ruined “make … again” expression completely.
And by “My Year in Books” I obviously mean 2022, the year we just left behind.
Three of the books I read in 2022.
In 2022 I started the year with a goal to read 36 books; I ended up reading 31. There are several reasons why I didn’t reach my goal, but the main one is that I simply didn’t read enough.
This year my goal will be (at least) 40 books. I selected that goal because a) based on last year’s reading habit, it is ambitious but still realistic, and b) I may or may not turn 40 this year.
To be able to reach this goal I have realized that I must read more fiction in between the “heavy stuff” of self-help, biographies, technical books and what not. Some books are just easier to digest than others. Barack Obamas brick, A Promised Land, is not one of them, and that’s why I still haven’t finished it. Sorry Barack, but I preferred your wife’s writing.
Back to fiction, the best book I read last year: Project Hail Mary. I cannot stress how good this book was. It is a book I want to read again, and again. It is just so darn good.
I can also recommend “The Storyteller” by Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighter himself. I’m currently reading (among other books) “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. So far Dave Grohl has been more captivating in his storytelling, but I’ve just started “running”, maybe it will change once I get a bit further into the book.
To see the whole list of books I read, you can roam around in my Goodreads profile.
2021 started of well. Very well indeed. Life was good and I was happy. That did not last. None of this had anything to do with Covid-19 or any other illnesses, except for anxiety, I guess. Anyways, now that I have completed the seasonal greetings of the new year, I want to write a bit about my reading.
Some of the books I read in 2021
In 2020 I hade a goal of reading 12 books in a year. Since it was my first year setting such a goal, I figured one book per month was as good as any. By the end of the year, I reached 15.
In 2021 I decided to double that goal, 24 books in 12 months. A hairy target, giving my taste in books (mostly memoirs, biographies, and other non-fiction literature), but goals should be aspirational, but also within reach. At the end I managed 30 books. I really managed to push through at the end of the year. Also, I tend to read more than one book at a time. More about that in a bit.
Now this year — the year 2022 in case you missed it — the goal is to read 36 books. Combined with slightly faster reading speed, and a solid reading habit each day, I think that should be doable. There, I have said it: 36 books by the end of the year.
The goal to read 36 books is not just about reading as many books as possible. That would be a waste of time. The goal is to absorb the books. To enjoy them and to learn. Most of the books I read, as said earlier, is memoirs, biographies, and other non-fiction work. This generally takes more time to digest then pure fiction.
My reading strategy now is to read more than one book at a time. Typically, this means one biography/memoir, one other non-fiction book and one pure fictional book to seek refugee in when my brain needs a time off from all the facts and figures in the other books. Also, to my benefit, I can read both Norwegian and English books, which gives me yet another dimension in my reading. I do not have any issues reading a biography in English and another in Norwegian at the same time.
Usually, I read a mix of physical books and digital on my Kindle. I love books on paper, but the Kindle is so much more versatile when traveling (not happening much in Covid times) or in bed. I rather swipe on my Kindle than on my phone — the Kindle is so much better for the eyes.
I remember it like it was yesterday. The thrill. Wandering away from the safe and boring, and into the unknown. Yes, I’m talking about my first installation of Linux, Slackware 4.0 – which places my first contact around mid 1999, since this year also saw the 7.0 release.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the guy who introduced me, or his handle on the internet. It was at the local computer club, and in a short evening he showed me the ropes, helped me install Slackware and recommended using Enlightenment (E16) instead of Gnome or KDE.
The Librarian
Before this point, I’ve already read skimmed through at least one book on Linux, which is almost a short story in itself. I got curious about this whole Unix thing a few years earlier and took a trip down to my local library to see what they had on the topic. I asked the lady at the desk, but she didn’t know what I was talking about, however, the guy with the “stuffed penguin doll” certainly did.
Yet another guy I don’t remember the name of, but who made a lasting impression. “You don’t want Unix, you want Linux. Take this book, it will answer all your questions and make you wise” – well, the first part of that sentence is true anyway. So, it turns out that one of the librarians was a Linux geek! And when he spoke about his weekend Linux adventures at work, no one understood a damn thing. But I got it. I understood. At least I understood the core concept, I did not understand how much work it was to save a RAID gone bad. That would come later.
Got root?
So, I mentioned the thrill earlier, and in hindsight this might seem silly, but the thrill of being root for the first time was more powerful than you probably can imagine. This feeling quickly faded though, since I was root only on my own machine, but still, it felt big at that moment.
Back in 1999, you could not just install Linux and expect everything to work out of the box. Just setting up the graphical environment required a lot of leg work. Like knowing the vsync and hsync of your monitor (CRT monitors, remember those?), screen resolution, colour depth and a few other bits and pieces. If you got it wrong, it would just flicker your screen and crash. Fun times, glad they are over.
The Linux kernel
At some point I started compiling my own kernels. Adding and removing features to make it as small and streamlined as possible, and yet still be able to boot. I learned a lot about hardware back then, well, a lot about which hardware I had at least. Also, I learned how long it took to compile the kernel on my machine. It was just long enough that you didn’t want to make too many mistakes. So, circa 20 minutes?
Looking back, I’m glad most distros shipped with the source code as well as the compiled binaries. Downloading a new kernel took ages, that is around 38 minutes assuming we download a 17MB .gz file on a 64 Kbps (ISDN) connection.
Dial Internet
Eventually, we got internet, dial-up of course, but probably not the one you are thinking about, unless you made the connection from the previous paragraph. If you did, kudos. Anyway, my parents went straight to ISDN, two lines, always on. Except I wasn’t always on, because dial-up still cost money by the minute.
I had an Teles ISDN card where IRQ address had to be set manually (ISA bus), luckily there was a German project (German domain at least) called ISDN4Linux which helped a lot when setting up the correct kernel modules and software config. I guess ISDN was more of a European thing.
A funny thing about this ISDN card – well, funny might not be the right word – from time to time, the card would stop working. Rebooting the machine did not help. However, changing the ISA slot did. So, each time it stopped it was just a matter of turning the machine off, moving the card between one of the ISA slots available, and power it back up. Yeah, that was not a funny thing. I should not have written that.
I don’t know if anyone else ever had that problem, but the solution, as I mentioned, was easy. And as long as I never put the lid back on, or fastened the screw securing the card, it was a quick and painless experience. Except for the part were the machine had to be powered off and back on. Okay, skip quick and painless, let’s say: easy but tedious.
The year of the Desktop
Despite a lot of talk about “the year of the desktop”, it never really happened for Linux. Well, it happened for me. I used Linux full time on my desktop for over a year and a half around 2004. It was good and it felt good. I was master of my domain, still rocking Enlightenment as my go-to desktop environment.
XMMS and gkrellm, those were the days.
Picture above: If you read Norwegian, I did eventually get paid for that Windows XP stint. If you don’t read Norwegain, I still got paid.
Now, however, I was using Gentoo. A Linux distribution that was compiled for your hardware on your hardware, promising more speed and control. The speed gain would come after installation and certainly not during, because downloading and compiling every package took ages – and this time I’m not talking about 38 minutes anymore, but hours.
I did save a bit of time when I worked as a sysadmin at a school. Using computers in the computer lab and a boot disk, I could harvest their collective processing power to install Gentoo on my laptop using distcc, a distributed C/C++ compiler system. Also, the school had way faster internet then I had at my apartment.
Then games drew me back to Windows. Now days it’s mostly Lightroom keeping me back, but the way Windows is heading, Linux as desktop looks way more interesting again. I’m still using Windows 8.1 at home, and it’s not because it’s great.
What’s this all about then?
I learned so much about computers back then, and Linux really was a big driver in that regard. Do I miss it? I would be lying if I said no, but on the other hand, my previous rant post have showed me that this probably is more about nostalgia then anything else.
I guess that’s basically it: me dipping my toes in lake nostalgia, again.
This post got (un)popular on Hacker News. Let me just clarify that this post was meant to be humoristic and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but that seems to have been lost in translation between brain and keyboard.
I have heard the term “digital natives” applied to todays youth because they have grown up with the Internet, iPads, and whatnot. But I beg to differ. When it comes down to the meat and potatoes, they do not know jack shit.
My digital upbringing
In comparison, I grew up with the 286, 386, 486 and all the other x86’es. I learned not only about the meat and potatoes of computing; I learned the full haggis.
During my teenage years, I had computers upon computers in my room, some spilling their guts.
Later I had my own little server setup in the basement of my parents’ house. This was after ISDN dial-up, in the heyday of DSL technology. Look at this beauty: now this is a server rack.
Today, all of this have been reduced to a laptop in the corner running VMware’s free hypervisor, ESXi. I have one virtual machine on it, running Linux, and when the disk fail (it has happened before), I will do like any grown man without a backup would: cry. But you better take my word for it, because when it happens, this blog post will be gone with it.
Rocking that floppy
I have installed Windows 95 from floppy disks, or “the save icon” as the young kids would recognize it. Not only that, I have installed Linux on an IBM PS/2 server – again from floppies – and I got the thing online. But it is only that much you can do with a 486 on a rather obscure hardware.
This weird knowledge has helped me in career. Installing weird stuff on weird stuff. Making DOS talk to Novell NetWare. Write small custom programs to deal with big proprietary hardware.
Digital natives my ass, all they do is stream videos on YouTube and Twitch. Let me share my digital upbringing in full by showing you this image:
On the far left you can spot an IBM PS/2 server with a 100 Mbit hub on top with a custom power supply, the original failed during a thunderstorm. Then there is a Linux “server”, the one with the guts hanging out on the first image. Finally, on the desk, my main computer at the time, a 230 MHz(?) machine with Windows 98 running.
If anybody is a digital native, it is me. I did not just grow up with computers, I grew up alongside them.
