Five unattached ideas

Occasionally I collect links that I think might make interesting posts, but individually these don’t really constitute enough to ramble about. So here are a few points bundled together, so that they might stand better than they do alone:

1. I learned something the other day, by way of Phrakture’s blog — how to properly supply information for a bug report. I report them when I’m sure they’re bugs and not something freaky I’ve done wrong, but I need to make a note for future refrence because the tips and guidelines there seem wise. Once more, the Arch Linux Wiki proves why it’s one of the best around.
2. So long as we’re mentioning blogs, I’ll make another plug for Luke Maciak’s Terminally Incoherent, which is a nicely written collection of technological discussions ranging from gaming to TV to popular culture. I don’t have a submission for the call for “best IT stories,” although I do have a truly classic anecdote about the tech staff at my last job, who didn’t know how to fix a Fedora Core 4 server because it had never broken in the three years it had been running, and ended up asking me if it was possible to do some things for them. …
3. Ubuntu GUI users have a club of their own, and it seems to me that there ought to be a CLI club too. Membership will be loose and casual, anyone who uses operating system that has a command-line prompt is allowed to join. No dues, aside from an occasional screenshot to entertain other club members. I submit:

   

   There will be punch and pie.

4. About a month ago I made a note to myself of a page that showed some helpful terminal commands. Some of them are useful, others are rather mundane, and still others are now tattooed on the back of my left hand, so I can read them as I type. There are a bijillion sites around these Internets that show wicked ways to use the command prompt, the best of which are command line fu and Command-line Kung Fu. I should’ve used the word “fu” in the title of this blog, but at the time I didn’t realize its popularity with Linux geeks.
5. Finally, there is a sad irony in the pursuit of computers that are silent — or at least computers that are less than noisy. As I mentioned in that thread, I have a perfectly soundless machine … the only problem is, nobody wanted to talk about my 120Mhz Pentium laptop but me. Still, to think that 14 years ago we had quiet computers, and now you actually have to buy specific parts to dampen the noise … what’s the word for that? Oh, yes: regression. Or at least, it is to me. 😉

Now go forth, and be kind to one another.