Linux kernel is leaving 486 CPUs behind, only 18 years after the last one made.

Now that’s extended support; I used my first 486 in 1991 or so. At the time, they seemed wicked fast. I remember those days of waiting expectantly for every upgrade, hardware or software, as it always offered real improvement. Now every update is dreaded as yet more will be taken away for fake security¹, to show you more ads or to steal your data left and right.

Much was far worse then, but we had a lot to look forward to. Or so we thought.

1. That shit-for-brains doofclowns buy into for some reason

Because cracksmoking MacOS likes to change the names of drive mounts unpredictably (mostly by adding things like “-1” and “-2” to them) when it gets confused, I had to use globbing to reliably identify a mounted volume/directory in my Bash scripts. Here’s what I did:

for VOL in /Volumes/myvol*; do
    # Check if it's actually a directory
    if [[ -d "$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here" ]]; then
        DEST="$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here"
        break
    fi
done

This finds the first item named “myvol” and in a later part of the script not excerpted here slaps what you want in there. But warning: this snippet like Cisco stuff takes action immediately on the first match only, so if you might have more than one match just be aware of that and modify as needed.

I miss the silence of the internet before algorithms started talking over us.

Me too. The internet probably reached its peak in around 2004-2005. You could do most things that you can now but there was nearly no algorithmic crap. No AI. Propaganda was present of course but it was also painfully obvious. There was far less censorship and less useless repetitive squawking by clueless know-nothing doofshits.

Blogging was near its zenith and that was far better than Twitter, Bluesky and other platforms.

I know that those days will never return but it’s not just nostalgia to say that the internet was a superior experience then. (The mid- to late-90s internet was also pretty great, but had severe technical limitations.)

Company is offshoring all roles to India: is this happening elsewhere?

It’s happening everywhere.

The small company I work for didn’t consider replacing any development jobs with staff from India, but rather augmenting existing staff. That idea was nixed after it was determined that we’d most likely have to hire 5-7 Indian “senior” developers to do what one of our existing devs could achieve, and that’d also have to bring on 2-3 additional technical leads to manage this offshore staff.

In the end, there would’ve been no cost savings and development velocity would’ve likely plummeted.

I put the word “senior” in quotes because in India, someone senior does not resemble what that term means in the US. In America, “senior” means that the person has generally 8-10+ years of experience, can take on large projects with little outside guidance, and needs nearly no training in their areas of expertise.

In India, however, “senior” most often means only that they’ve heard of the technology and can speak about it for a 30-second soundbite. Most “senior” Indian IT/dev staff I would not put on Level 1 helpdesk for the tech they claim to know.

And if that offends you, so be it. That comes from deep and long experience.

It's Microsoft's 50th anniversary today!

Do you remember your first computer?

— Jen Gentleman (@JenMsft) April 4, 2025

I sure do, and it had nothing to do with Microsoft. It was a TRS-80 Model III sometime in 1980 and I dearly loved that thing. My family was poor, but my dad was absolutely obsessed with computers. Some doctor my dad knew had bought the machine and could not figure out how to use it. My dad got it from the doc as payment for fixing the doc’s car up¹.

Back then, I’d play various games, write little stories and program a bit. My dad being captivated by computers set me up for my current career; I’ve been using them nearly every day since I was four years old.

1. Which at the time was how my family got many things.

This will only work on the Mac, and has only been tested with an app called Context Menu¹, and requires Imagemagick and other tools installed via Homebrew, and other things I’m probably omitting, but this is a little script I wrote that will work in the Mac context menu to automatically resize any image type you specify and output it with “-smaller” appended.

Here’s how it looks in my right-click menu:

And here’s my glorious code:

#!/bin/bash

for f in "$@"
do
# Get the width and height of the original image
dimensions=$(sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight "$f")
width=$(echo "$dimensions" | awk '/pixelWidth:/ { print $2 }')
height=$(echo "$dimensions" | awk '/pixelHeight:/ { print $2 }')

if [ "$width" -gt 1200 ] || [ "$height" -gt 1200 ]; then
# Get file name without extension and the extension
filename="${f%.*}"
extension="${f##*.}"

# Output file name
output="${filename}-smaller.${extension}"

# Copy original to new file first
cp "$f" "$output"

# Resize and set DPI using mogrify
/opt/homebrew/bin/mogrify -resize 1200x1200\> -density 96 -units PixelsPerInch "$output"

else
# Show dialog with custom icon if image is too small
osascript <<EOF
set iconFile to POSIX file "/Users/quoderat/icons/10112-crying-cat-face-icon.png" as alias
display dialog "Image is too small, home slice." buttons {"OK"} default button "OK" with icon iconFile
EOF
fi
done

It should be noted that if you attempt to resize an image that is smaller than 1200 pixels width/height the script will pop up a dialog box that says, “Image is too small, home slice.”

Tune that puppy how you want. It has comments and it’s pretty obvious what it’s doing and how.

1. Though it can be easily adapted to Mac Quick Actions as it it’s just a Bash script with a little Applescript. Or might just work. I haven’t checked.

I just donated $10 to the creator and maintainer of TabMix Plus for his continuing fight against the inanity of Mozilla and the authoritarian loser Firefox devs.

May he ever resist their doofy clownishness and make a good, useful extension. (That now requires all sorts of hoops to jump through to get it working.)

Everywhere in my field wants you to be a developer now.

It’s sad to see. And pointless. They’re different disciplines. A lot of roles these days expect you to be an expert developer, an experienced manager and a great sysadmin, while doing 10-20 other things as well.

This is just not possible. And I have absolutely no interest in being a developer, which is about all that seems to be valued anymore for whatever reason.

It’s a terrible time in tech.

Most dreaded question: how many years of Microsoft experience do you have.

Pretty much all of them. I first used MS-DOS sometime in 1981, shortly after it was released. That’s 42 years of experience.

If professional office experience, then 31 years; the time, it do fly.

I assume this question means “Microsoft Office” or something as it’s too broad to really answer well, but I’ve used just about every major application MS has ever made and a whole lot of their minor ones too. Alas.