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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Aside form all the stuff you find in bash, it has some additional unique features mostly related to shell programming. A few example include

    • floating point arithmetic and math functions like sin, cos, exp etc
    • “compound” variables (kinda like an object in javascript)
    • An extended version of getopts which supports both long and short options, and it implicitly creates some additional options for you i.e. a usage page available at --help and a longer manpage style output available at --man
    • In addition to the usual shell builtins, it has a ton of optional ones you can enable at build time, which ranges from basic stuff like chown and chgrp (faster than invoking a new process) to an integrated tcp/udp server with an event loop (i.e. “mkservice” and “eloop” commands)
    • Command line and history editing with vi/emacs commands
    • coprocesses: you can start programs/subshells in the background but still communicate with the std input/output of them while the main script runs either by using the -p flag to read/print or by assigning file descriptors to them (so you support more than one background process this way)

    TBH, I don’t even use some of these features, but it’s still a very cool shell, and probably underrated. Not to mention I like being contrarian at times.

    Note; AFAIU these advanced features don’t apply to ksh’s clones like mksh or openbsd’s ksh, they are unique to the original “ksh93”.

    On the downside, it’s command completion is pretty basic compared to bash. It completes paths and filenames, but you can’t extend it to complete command line arguments to commands or anything



  • Crash reports are one thing, but web browsing data and enumerating devices on your local network go well beyond that objective

    From https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/topics/idsa-cip.html

    Other devices in your computing environment

    The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast

    information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.

    The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.


  • I recently got a Chromebook from work (it’s no longer supported by manufacturer, so it was bound for ewaste). A Toshiba Chromebook 2 (model CB35-B3440).

    Installing Linux was pretty uneventful after struggling a bit to get ChromeOS re-installed, which I had to do as the original image was ‘enterprise managed’ and thus had developer mode disabled. After reinstalling ChtomeOS and removing the hardware write lock (a foil sticker on the MoBo), I ran the install script from https://mrchromebox.tech/ which reflashed the firmware to Coreboot. Its pretty much a standard EFI laptop at that point.

    It has 4GB memory, an Intel Celeron N2840 CPU and 16GB eMMC. I put Fedora LXQT on it. Overall, it is very underpowered in the CPU department, noticeably more so even compared to other low end laptops of similar vintage I have. But, its good enough for web browsing and e-book reading. The HD screen looks pretty good and the best part is the batterey life is way better than any other laptop I’ve had. You can actually use it for a full day on a single charge. If you understand the limitations, its a worthwhile device considering the cost of these ranges from free in m case to about $40 used on Ebay