What’s a null? Zero? A philosophical question? Occasionally someone hands me an old MacBook Pro saying that the screen is fried, asking if it’s junk.

I check to see if it’s an A1706, A1707, yada yada, open the lid, and knock the back of the screen like I’m knocking on someone’s front door. “Is this flexgate?”

There’s always that confused look as it turns on and as to not look totally insane, “Wait, I know what you’re going to ask next, so who’s flexgate?”

Here’s an obligatory shoot yourself in the foot joke that I just came up with:

You’ve just learned about a gun that makes it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot. To check, you load in a set of bullets, switch the safety lever mode attribute to recursive, and confidently pull on the trigger. To your surprise the gun explodes recursively. Everything is intact, except your two feet which have been nix’d into two billion pieces.

I’ve just remembered this micro blog. There are these rare ‘how do you know this stuff!?’ moments. And, that’s from lurking niche distributions in high school like Bedrock or Puppy.

NixOS is roughly Ubuntu’s age actually. Guix is technically the really new/shiny. I used to do CentOS (with SELinux) personally too, but I’m mainly back on Alpine and Debian.

I’ve been asked about power outage trackers occasionally. And, the thing is… BPL (or was it Bahamas Grid who knows) has an outage tracker.

There’s a service hub for submitting anonymous reports and an outage dashboard.

There’s a WhatsApp Channel too, but I dare anyone to explain the difference between “searching” channels, groups, communities, et cetera.