Hi all,
Not sure how I missed the "Introductions" section yesterday, but I was made to feel welcome anyway - thanks for that.
I've been fooling around with computers, first as a hobby, then professionally, since about 1981 and I've been getting more and more fed up with MS for about half of that time and I keep telling myself, "This is the year I finally completely dump MS Windows for good". But, of course, the business world just keeps eating up the MS line, year after year so I'm pretty much doomed to always have -some- Microsoft taint in my life. In fact, I'm typing this on a 2010 vintage Win7 Pro box that followed me home from work after it retired... Its' not -too- bad though, since I've been tweaking it to my preferences since it was new, and MS stopped "supporting" it a few years ago.
Horrifyingly, it -did- just pull down 2 updates about a month ago. I use it mostly as a terminal for the Linux boxes and for running one of the few remaining flash games in the browser.
Almost all of my other geekery involves Tiny Core Linux, which I've been using since it first went public back in 2008. I'm running it headless on an HP thin client, on a tower with lots of disk storage for backups (also headless) and on a couple of hand-me-down laptops. Actually, I almost always install linux to be usable headlessly, even on systems that will supposedly never need to be used that way.
I got my feet wet with OpenWRT a month or so ago when I bought a cheap router on clearance and turned it inside-out give several wired-network-only boxes access to the internet via wifi. Running a wire the entire length of the house with pets around just wasn't going to work!
Programming-wise, I'm a C guy who became a MUMPS guy, I do a lot of shell scripting and I used to, in a previous life, "collect" programming languages (anyone want to talk about Forth?)
If I can help anyone with Tiny Core Linux, grub boot loader or general scripting, please don't hesitate to ask.
I'm in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area (USA).
My ferocious looking avatar is actually the BDE (best dog ever), having "gone belly up" for some tummy rubs.
Not sure how I missed the "Introductions" section yesterday, but I was made to feel welcome anyway - thanks for that.
I've been fooling around with computers, first as a hobby, then professionally, since about 1981 and I've been getting more and more fed up with MS for about half of that time and I keep telling myself, "This is the year I finally completely dump MS Windows for good". But, of course, the business world just keeps eating up the MS line, year after year so I'm pretty much doomed to always have -some- Microsoft taint in my life. In fact, I'm typing this on a 2010 vintage Win7 Pro box that followed me home from work after it retired... Its' not -too- bad though, since I've been tweaking it to my preferences since it was new, and MS stopped "supporting" it a few years ago.

Almost all of my other geekery involves Tiny Core Linux, which I've been using since it first went public back in 2008. I'm running it headless on an HP thin client, on a tower with lots of disk storage for backups (also headless) and on a couple of hand-me-down laptops. Actually, I almost always install linux to be usable headlessly, even on systems that will supposedly never need to be used that way.
I got my feet wet with OpenWRT a month or so ago when I bought a cheap router on clearance and turned it inside-out give several wired-network-only boxes access to the internet via wifi. Running a wire the entire length of the house with pets around just wasn't going to work!
Programming-wise, I'm a C guy who became a MUMPS guy, I do a lot of shell scripting and I used to, in a previous life, "collect" programming languages (anyone want to talk about Forth?)
If I can help anyone with Tiny Core Linux, grub boot loader or general scripting, please don't hesitate to ask.
I'm in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area (USA).
My ferocious looking avatar is actually the BDE (best dog ever), having "gone belly up" for some tummy rubs.