How many other Computer Nerds are here?

[Psychobilly]

These pictures are pretty old showing some of my Desktops but I think they look awesome still:




This one was a screen shot I did when I was in college and did a presentation of what a "Sniffer" looks like reading TCP/IP Traffic in real time:



Same thing, and me running Nmap to show what Network Traffic looks like when you are running a Port Scanner:




Lords of Acid Theme for Window Maker!

 

[MtRainDog]

This picture isn't mine, but I used to love the desktop cube in linux. I think it was part of the "beryl' plugin suite I ran on ubuntu/gnome (*i think, it's been a while). Only really used linux/unix in school, and a little at my first job out of school. Haven't touched it in almost 15 years.

This was glorious though

 

[MtRainDog]

 

[pwnytailjoe]

Nice rig!

I'm not. Anymore. Into computers.
I still keep up with OS distros and such but I currently don'y have a machine that makes it past post and the last PC game I played was Portal sometime around 2014. Also, the I have limited electricity and that would cut into grow-power.

I do have all my certs, though they are somewhat outdated at this point.

I miss the XP/Rainmeter days.

But I'm really here for TLOA



I've got some old screenshots from the early part of the century I'll see if I can dig up.

 

[Psychobilly]

@MtRainDog ; yeah the 3D desktop extension was sweet! I remember messing with that a few years back and it looked incredible! Some of those shots of mine were Enlightenment E17, which was also pretty awesome with the Special Effects like raining and snowing on the desktop lol. I never ended up sticking with a single desktop or GUI style because I sometimes wanted KDE or Gnome, and sometimes I'd use FVWM2, Window Maker, NextStep, and the Enlightenment ones depending on what I was doing and how much RAM I had lol.

@pwnytailjoe ; I had a feeling about you with a name like that, that you might be into this stuff a bit too lol!

I no longer have top of the line machines, and never ended up getting the SGI Workstation I wanted, but I do have my old ass Pentium III running Slackware Linux with it's dying video card that I use as an FTP Server. It has SSH enabled so that I can still use it without the video card or monitor.

I ran a mix of OSs; multiple versions of Linux, FreeBSD, and I may still have Solaris around here somewhere.

I'm glad you guys replied! I'll post some more of my nerdy pics in a few!

 

[Psychobilly]

And now for a little Unix Historical coolness with a Magic: The Gathering back end!



Phil Foglio did the first art work for the BSD stuff happening at UC Berkeley back in the day, and he also worked on Art for cards in Magic: The Gathering. I used to play that a lot back in the mid 90s.



SGI Workstation from back in the day..... Never got to play with one as they were expensive even AFTER they were old LOL, but they sure do look awesome!

Here's some more:


^ That there is a screen shot of what IRIX looked like; SGI's own version of Unix.


Man considering how most Computers were grey boxes and how hard Apple tried to be the "most artistic" looking, SGI was putting out machines that looked stunning in my opinion. LOL the cost of one of those was a lot like buying a decent car so, again, I never got one, never got to play with one, just REALLY loved them haha.


The Nutshell book every sys admin would have bought LOL.

And a game that not only made Trent Reznor too busy to release another NIN album, and kept me working through large amounts of Coffee:

 

[MtRainDog]

And a game that not only made Trent Reznor too busy to release another NIN album, and kept me working through large amounts of Coffee:

View attachment 107779

Oh man I loved the original Doom game. We used to have LAN parties in our high school computer lab. Hell we used to lookup the Anarchist Cookbook and porn sites, etc on school computers because no one was monitoring/no blocked sites back in the early days of the internet. Things have changed quite a bit...

 

[Psychobilly]

Oh man I loved the original Doom game. We used to have LAN parties in our high school computer lab. Hell we used to lookup the Anarchist Cookbook and porn sites, etc on school computers because no one was monitoring/no blocked sites back in the early days of the internet. Things have changed quite a bit...

Oh man! Bro! Like I said it was already 1999 when I got my first computer but I ended up getting a release of the original 3 DooM games on CD years back, and since Linux and BSD both had ports of it I was able to play it on those OSs too. Still to this day one of my all time favorite games! The original Quake is on that list too; managed to get the "paid download" as a Gift one year and I totally loved it. Unreal Tournament is pretty high up too lol.

I couldn't do a nerd thread without DooM though! ? iddqd idkfa..... I still remember the cheat codes hahahaha!

 

[MtRainDog]

There are 11 types of people in this world... those that understand binary, and those that don't.

 

[Psychobilly]

There are 11 types of people in this world... those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I have a tee shirt from ThinkGeek that has a similar saying lol ?

 

[pwnytailjoe]

@MtRainDog ; yeah the 3D desktop extension was sweet! I remember messing with that a few years back and it looked incredible! Some of those shots of mine were Enlightenment E17, which was also pretty awesome with the Special Effects like raining and snowing on the desktop lol. I never ended up sticking with a single desktop or GUI style because I sometimes wanted KDE or Gnome, and sometimes I'd use FVWM2, Window Maker, NextStep, and the Enlightenment ones depending on what I was doing and how much RAM I had lol.

@pwnytailjoe ; I had a feeling about you with a name like that, that you might be into this stuff a bit too lol!

I no longer have top of the line machines, and never ended up getting the SGI Workstation I wanted, but I do have my old ass Pentium III running Slackware Linux with it's dying video card that I use as an FTP Server. It has SSH enabled so that I can still use it without the video card or monitor.

I ran a mix of OSs; multiple versions of Linux, FreeBSD, and I may still have Solaris around here somewhere.

I'm glad you guys replied! I'll post some more of my nerdy pics in a few!

The name is from a job I started back in 2013. I was going to get a haircut before a job interview but they rescheduled two days earlier and I didn't have time. I had just been growing it out kind of mopishly so I pulled it back into a ponytail and got hired. I said I would cut it if anyone ever made an issue of it and no one ever did so here I am 8 years later, still no haircut.

Anyway, 2 days after I started the job, they sent me to Nevada to do some projects and my coworkers back home were like "where did that dude....what is his name... go?"
One of the guys I knew prior dropped the *ponytail joe* and when I returned to Cali that's what everyone was calling me????

At the same time I was trying to get some free seeds and Purple Caper came up since I got the Cookie Lady clone from Harborside.
He wanted a twitter or blog so I was like fuck it, and bought the domain so I could run the blog and get free seeds.
Now it's all just kind of strange. But it's mine so I'm keeping it.


On the computer side, I got my first Apple IIe back in 1984. Messed around with that until I got a 386 in 1988 and pretty much used it for graphics since I was in the offset printing field at the time.
In 1996 a guy named Cory Altheide became my roommate and changed my computer landscape pretty hard. I've always had some limb in the game somewhere.
In 1986-88 San Fran, Deke Nihilson was a close friend and he was dating Tom Jennings at the time so I picked up a lot of stuff on that end.


I did help desk stuff for a bit in the early aughts but to be honest, can't really stand most of the people associated with the industry.

In 2010, after Gizmodo got hacked, a bunch of us that hung out in the backroom forums started a facebook group which I mostly live vicariously through now.
That group and Ars are about as far as I delve nowadays.

 

[Psychobilly]

Typesetting back then bro... my heart goes out to you lol. I've worked as "Head Computer Tech" for a company, but most of my fun came from college.....

I couldn't do phone tech support with my personality..... here's a true example:

Back in the early 2000s, my mom worked for a Hospital here, and they had in house IT, but they sometimes took a long time to show up, so over day my mom calls me and says "Allen, the screen on the computer is upside down....."

Now in Windows 98, I think it was ALT CTRL PG UP or DOWN that would flip the screen like that, and apparently a Doctor had come in and tossed his briefcase on the keyboard and caused this.

I told my mom to flip the monitor and I think hung up.....

Then there was me telling one of her co-workers that the way to fix her problem was by smashing the PC to bits and putting it in the oven for a few hours, and while she waited she could read the "free novel" every computer came with about a Spanish Explorer named "Manual"....

I also think I told someone once they should package up all of their equipment back into the boxes they came in and take it back to the place they bought it, and when asked about what to tell people ar the font desk, I said "tell them please take this away from me, I'm too damn stupid to own it".

There was a website of "Tech Support Nightmares" and at the age of 18 - 27, I was a prick. The stories are funny, but I can't imagine actually treating anyone like that anymore.

CEOs may make a lot of money, but at least one has broken a CD-ROM drive thing it was a holder for their Coffee Mug.....

Sometimes I'd get bored and make "Bastard Floppy Disks"...... some contained a simple batch file:
Deltree C:WINDOWS *.* /y
Or
rm -rf /*

Others had a batch file that copied all passwords stored in RAM and then deleted everything..... one I think I actually stuck match stick dust inside so that the read head trying to access the Floppy wood have enough heat to ignite the match stick dust......

A cousin of mine owed me money for constant fixing of his computer and decided he wanted Linux..... he wouldn't pay the money....

I started slow at first; logged into his computer, as root, used a console mixer to turn all his volume up to max..... used ftp to grab a song from my FTP server, and played it at 3 AM on max.....

Still didn't want to pay..... logged in as root again, changed his default run level to 6 (essentially an infinite loop that starts as the computer boots up..... it boots, and then instantly reboots, until it's unplugged). He did finally pay after that lol.

Yeah I don't do tech support anymore..... I was a bastard and a half lol.

 

[pwnytailjoe]

I truly miss the small juvenile stuff... like the desktop screenshot as background and hidden taskbar. Watching the user dumbfounded, wondering why nothing is working... the side-splitting laughter from us idiots in the corner watching all this take place...


I almost forgot small form factor. I had a British guy in a forum nudge me head first into mini-itx. That became a money-sucking obsession from '06-~'13.
I was moving Hackintoshed Dell Mini-9's for a second and then just customized netbooks. That really was a fun time.

 

[Psychobilly]

I truly miss the small juvenile stuff... like the desktop screenshot as background and hidden taskbar. Watching the user dumbfounded, wondering why nothing is working... the side-splitting laughter from us idiots in the corner watching all this take place...


I almost forgot small form factor. I had a British guy in a forum nudge me head first into mini-itx. That became a money-sucking obsession from '06-~'13.
I was moving Hackintoshed Dell Mini-9's for a second and then just customized netbooks. That really was a fun time.

Oh bro I know! Taking a screen shot and then removing all the icons and the task bar, and then setting the screen shot as the Wallpaper..... LOL as you said; It was funny at the time! LOL!

I'm glad I'm not such a prick like I was then though; The Bastard Operator From Hell stories.... I ended up writing an entire series on AntiOnline back when I was an active member there (The Bastard Sys Admin From Michigan) I wrote those and for the first time, had people asking me if I could get them published and they'd pay money for them in book form, and some of the stuff I wrote, was stuff I'd literally done LOL. Hell one time, I posted one of my newest "episodes" of BSAFM and a member who read that found a story online from a town here in Michigan where someone had broken into the wireless head sets used at fast food places and insulted customers, and started putting 2 and 2 together LOL......

I did in fact do that, just not to the place they were referring to in the news clip. I tortured a KFC around here a few times though as I could talk to the staff wearing Head Sets, and I could speak through the drive-thru box to customers too. Again, it was "funny at the time" but looking back, being older.... I was a prick LOL.

I'd rather grow weed than insult people and make them feel bad. I feel like I can take that as "Personal Growth" because bro.... When I was younger; If I had ever taken Viagra I probably would have just gotten taller.... LOL!

 

[jaguarlax]

@Deebs

 

[dstroy0]

Hello fellow computer users! I always seem to pick calming landscapes, mushrooms, or cave pictures as my computer backgrounds. I spend almost all of my waking moments on the computer writing shitty software for microcontrollers, or learning how to write shittier software for microcontrollers, it's a good use of my time.

 

[Psychobilly]

Hello fellow computer users! I always seem to pick calming landscapes, mushrooms, or cave pictures as my computer backgrounds. I spend almost all of my waking moments on the computer writing shitty software for microcontrollers, or learning how to write shittier software for microcontrollers, it's a good use of my time.

My Fiance got a "digital picture frame" this passed year and currently it's all running off a USB drive and is almost 900 pictures we have taken in our hiking and walking in the woods, and a good chunk of them are different Mushrooms we find out there. Sometimes it's species we know are edible and sometimes it's just the way they look, but yeah lots of Mushrooms. Some we eat, some are catch in a picture and release lol. I guess a Unix hiking boots joke could work if you've read the Hacker's Dictionary lol.

What languages do you "speak" ? Personally I've never enjoyed programming too much, though it's hard not to respect the black belt nature of Assembler and C since you can write Operating Systems in them. I also did enjoy the possibilities of Perl and Ruby, and of course Shell Scripting.

Love your set up in your grow by the way!

 

[dstroy0]

I’m becoming more fluent in ASM, I’m ok with C, python, sql, Java, and c++11. C++ is what most of the microcontrollers are programmed with, and the different environments use GNU GCC as the compiler usually. Sometimes different boards use a different compiler which makes portability directives a fun preprocessor game. Making stuff portable is interesting, there are quite a few differences between manufacturers, language features are not available or are sometimes not fully implemented if they are. For this latest project I had to implement vsnprintf on several platforms that didn’t have it.

 

[Psychobilly]

I’m becoming more fluent in ASM, I’m ok with C, python, sql, Java, and c++11. C++ is what most of the microcontrollers are programmed with, and the different environments use GNU GCC as the compiler usually. Sometimes different boards use a different compiler which makes portability directives a fun preprocessor game. Making stuff portable is interesting, there are quite a few differences between manufacturers, language features are not available or are sometimes not fully implemented if they are. For this latest project I had to implement vsnprintf on several platforms that didn’t have it.

For portability have you ever messed with NetBSD ? I literally don't remember the sheer number of platforms that it runs on, but I imagine by now there's finally a Toaster running it LOL. That's a decent list of languages you've got going. I personally can't code to save my life, but I did enjoy messing around with simple things in Perl and Ruby, and I had books to attempt some C++ and downloaded books for C and I THINK Assembler, but it's been a while since I dug through my digital book collection.

I think I still have them on my FTP Server though (Running an old ass version of Slackware) and I still have all my configuration files backed up around here somewhere. It was easier to back them up then to sit there trying to configure Mutt every time I installed haha.

Not my images, but they're Sun




Are you into Operating Systems much? I used to collect them; Had everything from old DOS and Windows stuff that came out before I ever owned a computer to BeOS and different Unix "flavors" LOL.

 

[MtRainDog]

For portability have you ever messed with NetBSD ? I literally don't remember the sheer number of platforms that it runs on, but I imagine by now there's finally a Toaster running it LOL. That's a decent list of languages you've got going. I personally can't code to save my life, but I did enjoy messing around with simple things in Perl and Ruby, and I had books to attempt some C++ and downloaded books for C and I THINK Assembler, but it's been a while since I dug through my digital book collection.

I think I still have them on my FTP Server though (Running an old ass version of Slackware) and I still have all my configuration files backed up around here somewhere. It was easier to back them up then to sit there trying to configure Mutt every time I installed haha.

Not my images, but they're Sun


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Are you into Operating Systems much? I used to collect them; Had everything from old DOS and Windows stuff that came out before I ever owned a computer to BeOS and different Unix "flavors" LOL.

I built (a very simple) OS back in school (oh some 20 years ago) using C and iirc, with a FAT16 file system for simplicity. As for assembly, I’ve only played around with MIPS because that’s what they used to teach comp architecture in school lol. But it was good for understanding how a CPU works and some basic cpu concepts (cache fetching, pipeline architecture, etc)