lentils! chick peas! beans! legumes in general, they are great! you can integrate them into anything…

(ie. cook a bunch of lentils to eat warm with whatever veggies you can steam… but leftovers the next day are turned into a salad, etc. )

oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…

friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.

“Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.

from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.

… trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!

… a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…

… what am i gonna do with all this, now?!

[fiddling…]

[months passed]

… “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.

… a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!

🤯

Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…

This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!

3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…

Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…

… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

Internet Libre o Barbarie!

“Allo, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again?” ;)

yt-dlp -U ?

welcome home! <3

don’t use it if you’re flying a plane, though!

newsboat <3

to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long

Let’s start mirroring and torrenting full ROMsets!

yeah you need to know the password or secret handshake (like a protocol handshake) to be let in! :)

“porte” in French means a door.

Imagine each port is a door, all neatly aligned… some of them can be opened and lead to something… (a service)

pine64 because freedom.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ is a good place to start.

US government: “Make us an app that people can use so we are the only ones accessing their meta-data.” Developer: makes Signal US Government: 👍

am glad that https://simplex.chat/ doesn’t even need to touch sensitive personal data strong selectors such as phone numbers or email addresses!

I have been daily-driving one for more than three years now, and totally happy with it. (with some caveats, some work and nerve-wracking moments, but that’s the exciting lot of the continous learning of free/libre computing…)

PInephone! A bit of work, requiring to not being shy opening the hood of a linux system. but totally worth it, the reward is freedom and its continuous cycle of collective learning…

(although the Pinephone is not really a “smartphone” in the sense most people use that word: a restricted computer that allows to run wallgarden applications… a pinephone doesnt natively run “smartphone apps” and is more like a full-blown, general purpose computer running GNU/linux that also contains a modem enabling calls, sms and data…)

do you think a company like cloudlare.com, that injects its javascript in between given site and you, will hesitate one second before transmitting its data with the FBI (or any other police), and help them tracking users down?