If you’re keen on dabbling, focusing on one and making it your own is a great way to go. You might find that the distro was standing in your way when you start from something more bare metal.

The problem is once you go off the distro's beaten path you quickly find yourself forking things like package managers to add features you want. I guess I could pick one and become a contributor... but I really don't have time so... dabbler I remain.

I do everything on bare metal, but if a distro doesn't work very well "live" by booting to its USB stick, I'm not very likely to install it as an actual inhabitant of a particular PC, whether desktop or laptop.

I suspect reasons like that are why character.ai is #7 on https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights - I’m not seeing many other reasons for regular use.

In the UK we are lucky to have a bit better of the system - Openreach (or Virgin) own the cables, and ISPs pay Openreach to do the transit. IP based not dark fibre unfortunately.

That said, most ISPs won’t escalate when there’s an OR problem, or at least take a long time to, and then the OR tech is usually just trained to test the cable coming in and not a lot else.

I used to be with Andrew’s and Arnold (run by @revk who surfaces around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your behalf.

I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.

It feels so odd (in a good way!) to see people talking about A&A - I recommend them to everyone I know, they’re truly excellent.

What's an or problem or tech? A web search gives predictably nothing

In the context of UK infrastructure, "OR" is an abbreviation of "Openreach", part of the BT Group that is responsible for the infrastructure from ducts and poles to street cabinets and exchange buildings. It is not an organisation that an end user can access for support and is charged by ISPs to repair, upgrade and install additions to large parts the telecommunications network. It can be difficult to convince one's ISP to have Openreach investigate a physical fault or bottleneck, unless that ISP is the aforementioned Andrews and Arnold who literally implemented automated methods to repeatedly bounce faults back to Openreach when the latter insists on erroneously rejecting faults. Makes for entertaining reading :-)

Openreach. The infrastructure provider

Where do you live that chicken breast is cheap? It’s about £7/kg for the crummy water filled breast here in UK

Can't really say about the UK but the cheapest options here are in order 1) frozen chicken leg quarters and 2) an entire chicken (fresh, not frozen) which you have to break down yourself. Both options are around 3-3.5€/kg

That is an insane solution to the problem. I’d rather put a match to it.

I was talking with friends who use action cameras heavily. GoPro seem to have suffered the same fate - defacto to second class, as they’ve just failed to innovate.

I suspect a cheap fridge is still a fixed speed compressor. Same with AC units - only the nicer ones are “inverter”

Genuine question ( I avoid windows) is putty still necessary now that WSL is a thing?

Putty is obsolete for SSH terminals, but is still useful for serial terminals (like when you need to flash a bricked router )

Putty is a terminal emulator and an SSH + telnet client all in one. Now Microsoft offers a number of platforms that overlap to provide similar functionality.

WSL2 (aka WSL) is the Linux system that runs a Linux kernel and apps within Windows (technically a hidden HyperV VM) with some loose bindings to the OS resources for networking, files etc.

OpenSSH is the SSH client installed with Windows. It can be used via CMD or Windows Terminal + Powershell . You don’t need WSL installed. So it’s great for VMs or remote shells.

Powershell is the Windows Shell (like bash on Linux or CMD on earlier windows) that lets you run openssh and other windows CLI Apps

Windows Terminal is the new-ish (6+ years) terminal emulator that lets you run a variety of shells. Most commonly Powershell , Bash (WSL), or you can SSH to any host using openssh . It works like tmux with tabs/windows into any remote host .

I decided to lay this all out because Windows apps for SSH and terminals are a little different than Linux.

Putty is also still useful for when you need to automate connections to SSH servers with password-based login. OpenSSH's client really doesn't want you to do that.

sounds interesting can you tell me more? like within a bash script and a password cred is used (instead of ssh key)?

Windows has shipped with OpenSSH (client and server) for years. Windows Terminal has also been available for years, and now ships with Windows. So you do not need PuTTY.

That said, some people like PuTTY. It is much easier to setup and use. It also offers other features (like serial communications).

The OpenSSH SSH client has been included in Windows as default since 2018, so you don't even need WSL to use it anymore.

Just open a terminal and type ssh just like you would in Linux.

Sometimes, lots of companies will lock down WSL and similar because they can't as easily control what's running in it for security or policy reasons. In those cases putting would be easier to audit and deal with since it's much more single purpose

OpenSSL was available on Windows even before WSL.

The nuance is it’s a job building with the tool he’s created. It’s like turning down the inventor of (insert DBMS here) to build a CRUD app.

Fair bit of their website down too. Hug of death or related issue?

Probably hugged. It was working a short time ago