Tom Warren, The Verge, on being a teenage IT manager for his family:
All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.
All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.
And:
All of that tinkering and hacking things ended for me shortly after the iPhone arrived, and the closest I’ve come to it recently is playing around with a Raspberry Pi and Kodi.
And:
Apple’s App Store and the iPhone have altered computing massively, beyond my own examples. Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palm have all had their businesses disrupted by the iPhone. The iPhone’s impact has also shaped how we use PCs today, and our expectations of computing in general. Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.
Apple’s locked down and sandboxed environment for apps is a new model that has succeeded with consumers and security. Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.
This article resonates for me. I truly miss the days when I could tweak just about every aspect of my devices, from swapping out memory, drives, graphics cards, to building custom cables that enabled third party devices to interface with my rig.
The new reality, of our own making, is a constant state of siege, one that makes the Apple ecosystem a safe port in the constant storm. But I do miss the tweaks and the repairability.
“Of our own making” sounds a bit problematic to me. That “constant state of siege” isn’t the fault of millions of consumers who were sold unprotected Windows boxes for over a decade.
Fair point, though I really was going for the larger “our”, meaning, as an industry, we evolved into a complex state with many holes to be exploited, sophisticated tools that were turned against us.
I cannot help but hear that “sounds a bit problematic to me, Dave.” in the voice of HAL
I’m available for parties and VO recording. See the receptionist on your way out.
It didn’t kill my inner nerd. It moved my inner nerd firmly to ring 3, where he’s much happier creating things than dealing with device drivers and other useless shit.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring
Many inner nerds are still a bit resentful because people are no longer asking them to superciliously recommend computers or phones.
Yeah but a lot of us are also thankful we don’t get inundated with that crap.
Amusingly, I spent Sunday afternoon doing something I’d been meaning to do for awhile – wipe an old PC, install Debian and make it the host for a networked Time Machine backup since I’m crap at remembering to plug in the external drive. I gotta admit – it was kind of nice rolling something of my own again even though it wasn’t hardware. But do I want to go back? Not really.
You probably weren’t the ones that made it unpleasant for anyone to ask in the first place. 😉
Did you get Time Machine running on it reliably? I’d never considered building my own.
Yeah. I used this guide: https://samuelhewitt.com/blog/2015-09-12-debian-linux-server-mac-os-time-machine-backups-how-to
A couple of notes:
1) I had to reboot the server the first time to get everything started properly (his instructions don’t mention that).
2) Services don’t start up until you login so you’ll want to set your default user to login automatically in case you need to restart the machine.
3) I had some odd permissions thing happen and the Time Machine user couldn’t access the time machine directory even though it owned it and permissions were wide open so I just used the default user as the Time Machine user and boom.
IF you have a PC around use that but if not, I’d get a Raspberry Pi (this kit likely – https://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Complete-Starter-Kit/dp/B01C6Q2GSY?tag=823814-20) and use that.
Oh and I use an external USB drive so that if you ever need to do a full restore you can plug it into the Mac. For browsing Time Machine the network is fine.
Feel free to email me (my name @gmail.com) if you have questions.
No… but it just got old. It’s like asking a doc what this pain means at the dinner party.
Oh, I heartily agree. The parallels on the design side are maddening.
Coworker: “Oh, you’re a designer, right? Can you do this flyer for my church’s bake sale? It won’t take you any time at all.”
My eternal thanks to “Mad Men” for finally putting this soul-killing moment into a hit tv series.
That said… there were people I didn’t mind helping out, whether design or tech recommendations were involved. But the doctor/dinner party thing is all too real.
Thank you so much. Bookmarked.
And yes, I’m thinking a Pi. I’ve been wanting to tool around with one for years now. 🙂 I appreciate an excuse.
The only reason I didn’t use a Pi so far is that I had an old PC in the closet gathering dust. I might still replace it with a Pi to get the lower power consumption but this was a no cost proof that it works.
You can also use some NAS boxes as TM targets (the Synology line does this as does QNAP) but the single disk Synology box is $180 plus the drive for a one drive NAS and since I only really wanted the Time Machine function, eh.
I used to be a DIY kid & guy who made his own PCs. But there were ALWAYS hassles and support issues….Especially with family. I’ve re-installed Windows hundreds of times. It got to be too much like work. I’m Mac and iOS now, have been for a decade. Never had to re-install OS X. I have other things to do in my life…
Likewise.
What was the Mad Men scene? I don’t recall
I believe it was a late-season side-plot where Elizabeth Moss’ character Peggy Olson, trying to reconnect with her church, agrees to design a flyer for an upcoming event as a favor to her priest.
Having done so, and believing it’s done, she then gets called in for a very specific design review by the priest and the event committee.
These are people who neither care about where Peggy works, what her skills are, or indeed have anything to contribute to her simple, appropriate design apart from their egos. The priest was useless.
I was very grateful for this scene.
I truly DON’T miss they days of SCSI Voodoo, sussing out the $@#!%$@ 8,657th different way someone decided to make their custom serial cables, and all the associated crap of working ON rather than WITH my computers.
https://xkcd.com/349/