The original Anarchist Cookbook was incredibly scary to the feds. It was filled with mostly useless and dangerous (mostly to the “Anarchist”), but the name and the feelings at the end of the Vietnam war captured the public’s attention.
It was passed around mostly by Xerox machine or fax copies. By the time I saw a version in the late 80’s the one I ran into was a blurry and unreadable mess. The original author is on record saying that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote it and that no one should follow any of the bomb making bits because he’d never made one himself.
Even with all of that, it holds a serious impact on our communal memory and social ideas. The name alone is going to live forever, even if the original text is lost to time.
I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.
I was in Salzburg back in 95 with a HS exchange program. We were traveling around and having a great time. That day we went up to the castle kinda near closing time. The entry booth was unmanned so our group walked on in.
We walked around, saw lots of the castle and the views over the city were enchanting. Most of our group left, but about six of us were still in the castle later. It turns out they close and lock the main gates once all of the tourists are out. Since we didn’t get tickets in, we apparently went uncounted and got locked inside.
On my my buddies came running up to me as I was sitting on a battlement being morose (summer fling issues) and declared with alarm “we’re locked in!” so I jogged to the gate with him.
This is pre cell phone and we weren’t great at German. I told him to rally the rest of our stragglers and stood by the gate to think of how to get out. As the group was walking down the path to me, I heard keys jangling outside the gate.
After a moment the smaller postern door opened. Standing outside was a kid about 13 years old with a sack of groceries. I said entschuldigung and blocked the door open. Our group all piled out through the gate and ran off down the road while the kid just stood there looking shocked.
That was the first time I accidentally got locked in a castle in Europe. They’re remarkably effective at keeping people both in and out, both are issues I’ve had to deal with at various times.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
Based on the various other descriptions of the DBUS features, I kept thinking “this sounds like a message passing model with a bit of CORBA hiding in there”. It’s got a bit of SLP and AMQP/MQTT to it, just on a local machine instead of a distributed network. It’s solving a lot of problems with service discovery, message passing structure, and separating transmission layer details from service API design. Raw sockets/pipes can always be used to pass data (it’s how DBUS does it!), but there’s additional problems of where to send the data and how to ensure data formatting that sockets/pipes do not have the capability of solving by design since they’re simple and foundational to how interprocess communication works in the kernel.
When teaching programming classes it’s awful trying to figure out every IDE’s git interface that my students are using. Each IDE puts the buttons in very different layouts and they even change the names of the buttons because they don’t like the way git itself named operations. It’s untenable to know them all and actually be efficient and helpful as the instructor.
Instead, I say they’re welcome to use the IDE, but the class materials use the canonical underlying command line tools and terminology. They just need to search for how to translate the real git interface to however their chosen tool does the same operation, but it’s up to them to figure it out.
When they do ask for help, I bring up the terminal (usually even inside the IDE) and run the git commands just like we went over in class.
All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That’s why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.
For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you’ll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.
I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I live and die by ssh and scp. Sometimes rsync for larger moves.
Once you’ve got ssh for terminals (used to be x sessions too!), then port forwarding and socks proxies, add in scp for file moves, and layer in sshfs for whole file system mounts it’s a potential combo for remote work and network tunnels. Such a phenomenal toolkit.
I scored a pair of small wire cutters for a couple of bucks years back and they keep doing a solid job. I worried at the $3 price tag, but it’s been a solid investment.
That said, don’t buy solder on Aliexpress. It’s barely made of solder. Make sure to invest in a good iron and solder it’ll be a life changer for electronics work.