My back pain is returning. It woke me up at 5am, so I’m having an early day today. On the plus side, that meant a nice sunrise breakfast with the wifey. Overall I feel like I have a lot to be thankful for, but the state of the world and especially the thought of election day 2024 makes me feel uneasy. I try not to think about it.
nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.
I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.
The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.
Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.
I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.
I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.
It’s pretty great - it has nice tooling and well structured problems to sharpen your programming skill on. One issue I discovered is, if you are studying a less popular language, the difficulty ratings tend to be inaccurate - things that are labeled medium might be super easy, while things labeled easy might be super difficult.
Also, just because something passes in your local doesn’t mean it will pass on exercism - the resources allocated to their cloud servers are skinnier than what you are likely running. This is part of what pushes problems another level up in difficulty.
If you have an android, there are two games that did a great job with 2d space combat and trading - spacerpg3 and spacerpg4. 3 is definitely inspired by EV Override, while 4 is very much its own thing.