I've been running various homebrew routers for close to 20 years now; OPNsense is fantastic. Bonus, run it as a VM on your Proxmox host and eliminate a few wires!

I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does. I see it as a critical part of my job as service to the students. Some of them are just flailing, yet they don't reach out.

I miss teaching in person. Since Covid, all my classes have been online. I would follow the lecture material, but would also demonstrate important aspects of each topic as we went through them and encouraged the students to do the same on their laptops.

My biggest challenge are these online learning platforms. We use ZyBooks. There are two components, the "book" part where the student reads and the programming part where they write some code. The second part sucks. It's not real programming; it's a padded cell where the student writes code and provides any input. The output is automatically evaluated pass/fail. The student has no interaction with the operating system or interpreter and in my opinion, it loses something without that context. They could have an extra CR/LF in the output and they'd fail the assignment. In the real world, who cares? The problems are often absurd; asking for things that nobody would ever encounter.

My final rant is student-focused. I get a lot of emails like, "I'm trying this and here's a screenshot of my code and I get this error message and I can't figure it out." Somedays I want so badly to tell them that if they pasted the contents of their email into google instead of sending it as an email, the solution would be one of the first three results!!!

https://skn.noip.me/pdp10/pdp10.html

For most vanilla hosting, you could get away with Proxmox and be just fine. I've been running it for at least 5 years in my basement and haven't had a single hiccup. I bet a lot of VMware customers will be jumping ship when their licenses expire.

Glad to see it evolving!

I remember learning a lot about the scantron forms and realized that if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning!

Personally, if I'm writing software that needs to talk to a human I'll just build a web interface instead of a GUI.

I'm sure that was no small expense for my parents, but it really was an investment in us kids!

It's wonderful having access to all that and more on your phone, but there was something special about that long row of brown volumes. I was always excited when the annual supplement came; my brother and I would flip through it to see what new knowledge had been discovered!

I started as an NTT instructor, then program coordinator, and was interim department chair. With each step came more course releases and more administrative work; I was pretty unhappy by the end. Now I'm an adjunct and teach one class per semester. As the author mentioned, it doesn't pay but it funds my hobbies and I really enjoy the teaching part!

Red Snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. NOAA will tell you we're devastating the species (boat captains would not agree!) and they adjust quotas and season start/stop dates based on catch info to help balance the business of fishing and the health of the species. It's a tough job because the captains are often at odds with the scientists.

It could be possible to sanitize the data and remove the position information, but they kind of need some general location to do some of the science.

I led the development of one of these systems from a software standpoint: https://thoriumvms.com/

They're not cheap -- $2K or $3K depending on options and $40ish/month for service. We were reselling Iridium service as the underlying transport.

Looks like the bottom just fell out of this business -- glad I'm not relying that for my paycheck anymore!

https://skn.noip.me/pdp11/pdp11.html

various VMs and containers:

pfSense pihole Plex Homeassistant Subsonic (music server) virtual desktops for various purposes (keeps things isolated) syncthing (to move backups offsite) guacamole ephemeral VMs for testing/learning ~25Tb of storage in various RAID configurations for media and backups

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/