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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • My first vehicle was a 1971 Ford 3/4 ton. It was extremely reliable and tough. Having sat for most of the previous 30 years in a barn, it even looked good.

    But it had all of the safety features of 1971. Power brakes the would lock up and throw you off the road if you more than thought about braking. Lap belts and a solid steel steering wheel to smash your teeth on. If you somehow hit the steering wheel hard enough to break it, you’d be impaled on the steel pipe steering column. Speaking of the steering, it didn’t have power steering, so if you hit a rut on a rough road, the steering wheel would spin out of control. You had to just let go of it until it stopped spinning lest it break your thumbs. Also, the gas tank was inside the cab behind the seat for extra car crash fun.

    It was a beautiful death trap. I kinda wish I could have put it back into a barn for another 30 years instead of selling it.



  • /sbin is like /bin, but for system administrative type commands. /usr holds all the other software that isn’t critical to get the system up and running.

    A device file is a special file that’s like a pointer to a piece of actual hardware, like a serial port or a hard drive. /dev also has some non-hardware special files like /dev/zero. When you read from that one, you get an endless stream of zeros. Or /dev/null, that discards any data that’s written to it.