nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I would recommend PoE security cameras. You probably want support for RTSP / ONVIF.

I have some Amcrest cameras talking to Frigate. It is completely local—cameras on a separate VLAN that can’t talk to the Internet, footage is recorded on a server running Frigate. Works very well for me. No vendor lock-in is also nice!

This is actually the one that I would agree with (edit: see below), if the difference is “professional” vs. “academic.” I certainly wouldn’t call a natural science degree professional, and if you’re in a research institution studying some form of engineering I’d probably put you in the same category. Just my experience/opinion though (and the rest of the exclusions are super stupid, I agree).

Edit: from the replies, this is referring to Professional Engineering; in my corner of the world, “Engineer” is an overloaded term that generally means electrical, mechanical, software, and sometimes computer engineer. My comment was referring to these engineers, who are rarely licensed and study alongside scientists in school. I completely agree with parent in the context of “professional engineering” (I mean…it’s right there in the name…).

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

Some would call the former command cat abuse.

In short, unless you want the contents of a file printed to stdout (or multiple files concatenated), the command can probably be written without cat, instead using the filename as an argument (grep pattern file) or IO redirection (cmd < file).

Stylistics and readability are another thing though.

Personally, I think the person who cooks should clean the cookware and the kitchen. The incentives are then aligned, and at least for me, it makes me a much tidier cook.

Also, cooking can be fun, cleaning not so much. Separating cooking/cleaning duties just punishes the person who doesn’t get to cook.

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!

Let’s see Stephan Miller’s card…

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…

Anything can use it, but I think by convention it’s used for http on a non-privileged port.

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

When they talk about being the party of Lincoln this isn’t what I had in mind…

Scully and Mulder would not put up with this shit.

It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).

To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.

But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.

I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.

We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.

It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).

You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

D’oh, I’m a doofus — it’s search that I was thinking of (apt-cache search, not apt-get search).