Remote wifi temperature sensor. I have an existing 1-wire temp sensor net & wanted to put something in the greenhouse w/o running a wire. I just needed to add a cheap wifi dongle and it just worked. I took a small $ risk and almost no time. If I was doing 10-20, there are cheaper solutions for more time spent, but I think I got a good value.

Since then, I played with RiscOS on it. I'm now playing with it as a thin client that someone built. I'm also going to play with Plex on it. Maybe I'll play with Plan 9 on it.

The first task could probably be done on on any of the other ARM boards that run Linux. The others tasks might work on other boards, but people are building and optimizing for the RPi.

All these ARM and microcontroller boards are fantastic. RPi made the others hit the under $40 price point. It reminds me of the days of Apple vs C64 vs Atari vs IBM and I hope they stick around.

If you're using the computer in the hotel business center to get console access, you probably don't care about security. If you care about security at all, you're going to use your own device.

Conserver is great. I've used it to monitor Linux consoles after boot (via grub handoff to serial console). Serial consoles are cheaper per port then KVM port and you have a log you can grep.

I've also used it to monitor several consoles going to embedded devices. The users could take over when a coworker had gone on vacation w/o calling the sysadmin.

Lamb, Chicken, Cows and Pigs are not endangered species. Lions are.

There's a worth in becoming domesticated. Ever see a wild Cow?

MH stores each email as a plain text file, each folder as a directory. It uses the unix filesystem as its database. It's very quick and has tools to re-order a folder quickly.

In addition, MH has tools to convert mail formats. It was designed in the days of low cpu power and small disks. It also lent itself well to being wrapped by other tools like xmh, exmh and mh-e so you don't have to learn the raw MH commands.

Yes, IMAP is cool, but don't discount MH. Plus the O'Reilly MH book is free as a PDF.

Oh, some IMAP servers and mail clients use MH format or something derived from it.

Minix ran on an 8086/8088 with 512k ram. It used the same 64k I&D model as PDP-11s

I have that issue. Also the 1984 issue that focused on Unix. I got them around 1990.

DEC had a number of MIPS based computers that ran Ultrix.

DECstation 3100, 5100 workstations.
The 5900 (and 5800?) mini computer.

Ultrix ran on Vaxen and MIPS systems.
The Alpha chip and OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64 replaced MIPS and were much faster.

I think SGI had Indy and Indigo2 systems at the time of the DECstations. They may have preceeded the purchase of MIPS by SGI

Well, he was probably running on SCO, not Linux or FreeBSD.....

Reboots to fix problems should never be done.

Reboots as a matter of policy isn't a bad idea.

If your system reboots periodically, you force network disconnections, memory cleanup, etc.

Users that logged on months ago are no longer tying up resources. Maybe they don't need it but forgot to logout. Or their client died so there's a zombie on the server.

Administer? No. Debug? Yep! http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7295/1/

I don't run vim if it's not part of the OS. I run /usr/bin/vi because it's part of the OS. On Linux it might be vim. On BSD it might be nvi, on Solaris it's vi.

Real Unix vets know how to use the tools that came with the OS and don't *have* to use extra stuff. But we'll use nmap if we have it. Or emacs.

FWIW, you can use echo * when ls isn't available.

The rope is the rail. The only place you need bearings are the ski towers. Look at a ski lift.

Heck, look at every ski area with a lodge at the top or even an EMT shack. They use the lift to get supplies up.
Of course it works. It's in use at every ski area in the world. A purpose built system would be more efficient.

You forgot Itanium. Server 2008 runs on Itanium.

Alpha has an x86 to Alpha JIT compiler that would eventually turn an x86 app into native code. It wasn't enough to keep NT on Alpha.

I think everything else got steamrollered by x86.

MS has the work environment locked up. We all run Windows to AD/Exchange/Office/Sharepoint and other native apps. Maybe some users will get a thin client to a terminal server to run legacy apps with a native web browser locally.

Most home users will just need a web browser on a phone/tablet/laptop/desktop to access everything. They're finding that Windows doesn't need to be a part of that.

Connie Willis wrote an interesting story called Remake.

All dead actors rights were under license and it was more cost effective to use dead actors then unknown live actors.

http://www.amazon.com/Remake-Connie-Willis/dp/0553374370

I've been using a web browser since 1993, both at home and at work.

I have always had lots of bookmarks and usually want the same set at home and at work. It's always been a pain to combine them without duplicating or losing bookmarks. I used to use my bookmarks.html as my home page.

I've gone from Mosaic to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox. I tried external sites like delicious but didn't like how it got brought back to my browser. I tried scripts that would merge 2 copies into a master copy.

Foxmarks was the 1st system that did what I wanted. It even helped when I tried Chrome. I love saving a bookmark at work and finding it at home.

I don't want to have to sync anything else. I use different extensions, cookies, logins, etc at home/work. Work has a censoring proxy that blocks some sites. I don't use facebook, youtube, etc at work because they monitor for "excessive usage". I can wait until I get home in any event. I certainly don't want any tabes brought back to work.

The next thing I want to find is a bookmark cleaner to clean out dead links. Some of my book marks might be for a device I power on in summer and off in winter every year and I want to keep those even if they go off the network.