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  Who said system administration as a profession was dead?

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  1986 was quite a year in UNIX. Page 54-ish on here are the proceedings of the EUUG annual meeting, which included sessions on: 4.3BSD, Kernighan on recent work on troff and grap, a C++ tutorial from Stroustrup, UNIX on S370 mainframes, the draft ANSI C standard, and X/OPEN. It's fair to say that a (by today's standards) tiny number of dedicated computer scientists were advancing the state of the art further every year in the 80s and 90s than the entire bloated tech industry no...

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  One thing I heard 35+ years ago which really stuck with me was that the finest precision component in the average household was the head gap on a VHS deck, at 300nm. Even features on integrated circuits didn't get that small until the mid-90s. But today those same features are only ~10nm or so, finer than the most precise engineering tolerances. The pace of technological development has been so fast that it's easy to forget how astonishing this is. Sometimes I feel like the guy...

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  I think this is what in Vienna would probably be called "maximum Praterstern". https://www.polizei.gv.at/wien/presse/aussendungen/presse25d0.html #austria #vienna #wien

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  I've been messing about with Claude Code to do fun stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have the slightest idea how to get started with (web programming, in thie case) and built a weather-and-headlines display which updates automatically and integrates with my Home Assistant instances to get things like (very) local weather data from the station in the back garden and how long the dishwasher has to run. I want to run it on a spare CRT portable as a more interesting information display...

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  I am generally wary of using AI tools for old-TV stuff as the risk of flooding Youtube with even more shitty mocks is definitely real but in the interests of science I tried telling Claude to recreate Test Card F from the technical specification published in EID & George Hersee's documentation rather than just finding an existing image and cleaning it up. It didn't do a bad job. as you can see below, but it rather pedantically found a couple of discrepancies from the orig...

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  Guardian: "Portrait looted by Nazis found in home of Dutch SS leader’s family" https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/may/11/portrait-looted-nazis-home-dutch-ss-leader-family-toon-kelder-goudstikker-hendrik-seyffardt

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  Today in "just HF things", the latest revision of the IARU Region 1 40m bandplan: 7000-7010kHz: oldtimers sending morse at 45wpm with a straight key 7010-7018: CW being sent by lesser mortals 7018-7020: Some really brave newcomer calling CQ in very slow, hard to copy Morse. Good on them. 7020-7030: German stations sending impeccable Morse into ruthlessly efficient antenna systems and almost blowing your ears off 7030-7038: Russian propaganda 7038-7047: digital modes, RTTY, old...

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  The daughter made this video explaining her medical condition as part of her illustration class and you should definitely watch it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=VZNX5L1K7TM

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  4.3BSD Taco? https://types.pl/@secretasianman/116497222943358872

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  Recently (after the Hungarian elections) these unattributed posters started appearing on sites across Vienna. This one's at our local tram stop. It's now been discovered who was responsible for them, and the answer is: the ÖVP. Yep, the same party which willingly went into coalition with the FPÖ and nearly went into coalition with them again after the last election. Of course they aren't doing this because they have a genuine concern for the future of liberal democracy a...

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  Not just that, but as many of DB Fernverkehr's woes are infrastructure related rather than, as it were, their own fault there's no guarantee that other operators will fare any better. They'd have a better chance of making the network more reliable overall if they cut slots completely rather than simply reassigning them to another operator which, among other things, won't have the advantage of being able to scrounge up a replacement trainset that isn't sitt...

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  August Wöginger, head of the ÖVP faction in parliament, has just been found guilty of abuse of public office after intervening to ensure that a (male) party colleague who it was felt "was owed a favour" was awarded a senior job in a regional tax office over the obvious and most qualified internal candidate (who just happens to be a woman). His party have loyally stood by him up until now - "innocent until proven guilty" and all that - and have strongly resis...

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  "In somewhat unclear comments, Trump told reporters that the UK had “a long way to go”, adding: “We won’t want another Neville Chamberlain, do we agree? We don’t want Neville Chamberlain.”" - Guardian I'm not sure that's a comparison he should be making, as the most logical conclusion if he's comparing Starmer with Chamberlain is that he's Hitler in this scenario.