I like over engineering as a hobby, it keeps me up-to-date with the times regardless of my $dayjob tasks. My home network is over engineered with UniFi backed by Cat 8 and 2.5G switches with fiber terminating on prem. However, one of the things I love to add to my web pages is the response header of X-Clacks-Overhead “GNU Terry Pratchett”, no relation to GPL. It’s my little way of honoring an awesome author Terry Pratchett.
Working in technology often takes away the magic of things for others to discover, what do you do to put a bit more of the magic back in this industry just for fun?
Well, personally, I never really learned anything about linux system administration so I just nabbed myself an old laptop and started messing with Arch. I think everyone in that space massively underestimates how complex it is– Like, sure, OK, I figured out Systemd-boot eventually, I have this thing running, now… wait, Sudo isn’t part of coreutils? Wait, the kernel doesn’t include anything for power management? (Oh my god this battery is shockingly garbage according to tdp) Wait, I’ve got to get something to handle networking before I leave the install utility… Oh hey I can’t get manuals because I don’t have man…
Next I want to see if Wayland can do anything without a compositor (can it maybe just show a single application with no way of backing out because there’s literally no window management?) Probably just doesn’t work on it’s own but I’ll see.
The major trouble is just finding information. Archwiki is wonderful but I still feel like I need to do even more research than that most of the time.
You might be interested in eventually playing around with Gentoo or Linux from Scratch.
Maybe eventually, although there’s a point where I wonder whether we’re all not doing a lot of useless busywork other people have already solved for us under the guise of learning something useful.
I mean, does it matter? Whether the problem we’re facing is something completely new, or something that has been asked a million times, it still might be new to us, and that is a moment of learning. Now, whether that is useful or not, that’s something only you can say.
Currently, I’m enjoying just tinkering with everything and seeing what interests me the most . I’m someone who tried to get into technology a few times over the past years, but only started getting invested in doing things a few months ago when I got into the concept of Personal Knowledge Management and realized there’s soooo many cool things outside of the Google/Windows ecosystems.
My main laptop now has Linux Mint on it and all my software is currently free. I’m thinking of getting into self-hosting webapps—I just managed to install docker, so I’m researching which web apps would be best for my needs.
I bought an old laptop (17 inch and a CD player! The perfect streaming device!) for sixty dollars, that turned out to be upgradeable. So I can replace the battery and ram in it and hopefully it’ll run as smooth as new. After that, I want to try out adding a graphic card to my mother’s old computer and turning it into a very basic gaming desktop. If I get a job, I am thinking of learning how to build my own gaming desktop in the future.
Currently, I think I’m having a lot of fun just starting out as a beginner!
I have seen this header on Usenet too.