The "joys" of old hardware...

Having a couple of old system failing on a client's site. A pain - you advise all the scanning and repairing but you know they're going to die. Reinstalling all those specialist apps is going to be No Fun At All...

Just spent quite a bit of effort ofver 3 days setting up a nice little stealth monitoring box from an old Thinkpad with a dodgy screen. Screen not a problem since I'm using SSH and VNC (which goes Really Well over a LAN), but last night it locked up, and ClunckClunkCluck... this morning on boot. Mucked about tryiong to get it to boot Knoppix and do a fsck - but it died for good. Bugger!

So, off on the scrouge for some other old kit...

Health status

My health is not the best. Two and a half years ago I was diagnosed with myeloma after finding myself suddenly very breathless when doing strenuous exercise. The myeloma had in turn caused amyloidosis - which in its turn had severely affected my heart, causing heart failure. Not cool. Two years ago, after six months of prep chemo I had an autologous bone marrow transplant. Now, two years on, and I'm doing pretty well all considered. I'm not disabled in any way really - apart from not being able to easily walk more that about 500m! However, I don't have sufficient heart capacity to cope if I were to be hit by a bad flu or COVID-19... As you can imagine, I'm keeping pretty strictly to the lockdown procedures...

How can you support LinuxUpskillChallenge.org?

How can you support LinuxUpskillChallenge.org? I'm often asked how "students" of the LinuxUpskillChallenge course can support it, or show their appreciation... Patreon? No, I don't need the money, and the project itself has only minimal costs for website etc. My small team are happy to pay for this for now. Spreading the word The major way you can help is by "spreading the word" so that as many people as possible are aware of the course. It's not always the best option - but at the moment most people are unaware that it even is an option. It's also the case that the more we have signed up for each class, the more interesting, dynamic and informative the comments in the subreddit are. Send them to: LinuxUpskillChallenge.org Join "the team" The course material itself is a bit of a living document, needing a constant stream of small tweaks and updates. Developing a "Part II" will take a lot of discussion and work. Managing the s...

"Succession planning" for the LinuxUpskillChallenge"

The current "Linux Upskill Challenge" course was designed as a commercial course, and was run that way from its launch eight years ago. As outlined in my recent "Health status" post here, I've now pivoted to a not-for-profit approach running on Reddit ( r/linuxupskillchallenge ). This has been pretty successful so far, but it depends on a level of care from me that's not sustainable long term. (I get monthly visits from a palliative care nurse, have a Do Not Revive notice on my refrigerator - you get the picture!) So I need some little helpers, to fill the following roles: Posting the daily lesson If the lesson hasn't been posted by me before 12:07 am UTC, then assume I'm not able to - and someone else will need to do so. The source of the lessons is in publicly available in my Github, so anyone can do this, and it will appear at the top on the topics when viewed in "New" order. If you're a "Moderator", you can and sh...

Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

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