Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows. Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.

This is terrible advice.

Multi-region architecture is hard, and AWS sure don’t do much to make it easier. Cross-region data transfers are too profitable for them to do that.

Passive PoE getting a lot of stick in the comments, but for one-off point solutions, it’s fine as long as you know what you’re doing.

I have it to run a couple of MikroTik devices in awkward places and not having to run wall warts and flimsy DC cables around the place is very handy.

My next switch upgrade will be a proper PoE+ one, but it’s not justified yet.

If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.

Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.

A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.

Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.

It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.

Well, my employer’s AWS bill is in the region of $20m/year and the additional IPv4 tax is on track for adding an additional $250k to that for no benefit at all.

Well, 1.25% is quite tiny. And I'd bet you're not moving to IPv6 anyway, at least not entirely, since a good amount of people are probably accessing your services over IPv4-only connections.

quarter million sounds enough to pay an engineer to make it work w/o v4. then again it's only a 1% increase and might not be worth the effort.

My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.

My parents' house still has fuses with fuse wire. They had it rewired when they bought it in the 1980s, and that was the standard then.

A fuse blowing is so rare I don't think they're worried by the inconvenience. It might happen every 5 years or more.

I recently replaced the old fusewire plugs with MCB modules. Really didn't fancy trying to wind a bit of wire around the terminals in the cellar in the dark :)