The Week in Operating Systems
What if everything we did was an OS?
Kitten and I both had to play more than our fair share of "tech support" in recent days; so I decided to report on this week's goings-on as though they were various operating systems.
Ready? Go!
Cheeseburger MacOS
Last Tuesday night we reached for one of our "easy dinner" staples, in the form of a Velveeta cheeseburger mac box kit...
Much like an Apple operating system, this stuff is more or less total crap out of the box: heavy on things that aren't great for you, and basically useless unless you're willing to hack it and bend it into something more suitable to your needs.
For starters, let's beef up our defense against viruses by introducing a damn vegetable or two! We might as well throw in some onion so we can route our pasta over the TOR network for anonymous eating...
Then we can flash Tomato on our router for some added security and a ton of quality-of-life improvements...
Then it's time to cook the meat. We use half ground beef, half ground chicken because it's a bit healthier less unhealthy that way...
You can either install the meat manually from cold storage, or download it from the cloud. Your choice...
Then it's time to apply pasta updates...
Please do not turn off your burner until your pasta has finished updating!
It's starting to look pretty good!
And don't forget: Cheeseburger MacOS is basically a bunch of restrictive but sleek-looking proprietary garbage built on top of an otherwise solid and open FreeBSD base system.
If you sift out the high-fructose Steve Jobs, you're left with something rather tasty...
Bon appetit!
Linux Mint
As Kitten reported here, my HTPC randomly went down last week and apparently decided it didn't feel like booting up anymore; so I had to reinstall Linux, and Kodi, and Retropie, and a bunch of other crap from scratch.
That went more or less okay—although I originally bought the parts to build this machine way back in 2014, and times (and tech specs) have changed just a bit in the decade since. So, the four gigabytes of RAM I had in there suddenly wasn't quite up to the task of running a modern OS, emulating video games, and transcoding high-definition media all at the same time.
I jumped over to Amazon and ordered a pair of 8GB sticks for a measly $21, which were set to arrive within 24 hours. Then, while we waited, Kitten and I fired up Turtles in Time from 1992 and beat the snot out of a bunch of bad guys arcade-style :)
Sure enough, the new RAM arrived the next afternoon; and I performed some quick open-heart surgery...
The patient made a full recovery...
Note the 15,828.7 mebibytes of total memory—which is a lot better than a measly 3,900-something...
Anyway, my trusty little HTPC is all minty fresh and has that new Linux smell again :)
Windows-Pains
On Wednesday evening, we got a notification from The CloudTM about some inclement weather headed toward our area...
(Personally, my money's on Trenton.)
Kitten and I were stepping out to take Riley over to Kassie's since they were heading to Six Flags in the morning, when we happened to notice that one of our neighbors had left his back passenger-side window down. So we did the ethical thing and walked over to knock on his door and disclose the security hole to him before The Cloud had a chance to penetrate his defenses.
But then we explained that we were just an ordinary pair of white-hat hackers trying to keep the premises secure, and they were grateful :)
Here's their family's sysadmin headed out to update their Windows...
You'll find that Windows updates never end!
Apple(bees)
Saturday we headed over to my parents' house to celebrate my sister's birthday... and, sure enough, we saw on our way out that our neighbor's Windows already needed to be updated again...
Anyway, my mom had said we'd be ordering pizza for dinner; but then Kelly changed the plan and requested take-out from Applebee's instead.
So, we were back to Apple again—which of course meant I'd need to "jailbreak" my dinner just to render it capable of doing what I wanted.
But ultimately, I couldn't figure out how to sideload a pizza onto the Applebee's order and just have them take delivery of a medium sausage-and-pepperoni and then compress it into a stromboli tarball and include it in the final .zip file with everyone else's order.
Lame.
I ended up just getting a burger instead.
I'll have Liv hack into the Applebees mainframe and drop an APT in there for easy one-click hacking next time. She works under the table, so her labor's pretty cheap ;)
Of course, that also means that her restaurant is unregulated by health inspectors of any kind... so eat there at your own risk!
I find Hannah to use fresher ingredients...
Four out of four kittens recommend the hand-peeled cucumber meal!
Kelly had insisted that she didn't want a present this year... and we'd said, "Challenge accepted!"
But we tried to make up for that by getting her a card that must have single-handedly required killing off half the Amazon rainforest to produce...
Then we all sang "Happy Birthday," conspired not to let Hannah blow out Kelly's candles, and gorged ourselves on chocolate cake...
...and Mom, Kelly, and the girls looked through some photos from years past while Riley helped Athennia fold our clean laundry and I went out to harvest our garlic and this week's batch of tomatoes.
Parrot OS
When Athennia got to work Monday morning, she was welcomed by this lovely greeting...
Microsoft strikes again.
If any of Athennia's colleagues had thought to bring along a USB stick with Parrot OS on it, they might have been able to do some digging and get to the bottom of this.
Here's a Parrot screenshot. It's very sexy...
Instead, they did the next best thing: Athennia's coworker Melinda has a friend who owns an actual parrot; so they brought him in as hired muscle to see if he'd have any luck getting things working again.
He did not. But he boosted morale quite a bit :)
The parrot's name is Andy.
And I'm told that his "theme song" is the Indiana Jones theme song.
...And that his "backup theme song" is the Jurassic Park theme song.
...And also, his previous owners were total assholes who abused him; so he's got some trauma that he's working through, which makes him very hit or miss with whom he feels comfortable...
But?
He immediately took to Athennia—and even gave her a kiss :)
OpenBSD, ClosedBSD, LuigiBSD
Ah, yes... onward to the *BSD family!
The "BSD" in OpenBSD stands for "Berkeley software distribution" (as in, a flavor of UNIX developed at U.C. Berkeley coming into the 1980s).
The "BSD" in ClosedBSD, however, stands for "big stupid douchebag"—as in some piece of New Jersey trash who intentionally blocked both lanes of Route 1 the entire way from Morrisville all the way to the PA turnpike just to prevent Athennia from passing him on her way to work yesterday...
This world will never improve until we starve assholes like this out of society.
When Athennia got home from work and checked the mail yesterday afternoon, she had a lovely letter from UnitedHellth, explaining that they've opted to employ their tried-and-true Delay, Deny, Defend strategy and have determined (somehow) that Athennia's gallbladder surgery was in fact not medically necessary.
This did not make Luigi happy: In fact, he damn near looks like he could give a CEO another hole to breathe out of...
...which brings us to the "BSD" in LuigiBSD—short for "better stop dickin' around," because we all know that Luigi and UnitedHellth don't play well together ;)
This world will never improve until we Starve. Assholes. Like this. Out of society.
MX Linux
Finally, we end on another flavor Linux :)
I'm actually not sure what the MX normally stands for here, but today it stood for "Mexico"—since my friend Richard and I had lunch at Cancun earlier.
And then, as always, we went for a walk at Five Mile Woods...
On an unrelated note, having already blazed through both seasons of Blood Ties in the past week, Kitten and I started watching Revolution this evening.
It's pretty awesome so far.
And now, this is winter logging off.
wintermute@kartography:~$ sudo shutdown now