We have maintained old laptops and virtual machines for a long time - I think we have some Windows 95 ones. We have (or rather we had) some quite expensive gear from Spirent and other companies for doing network stress testing - and the only way to operate those is from software that only ran on Windows 2000.

We also had some gear that we could control with a web browser - until the IETF "deprecated" the SSL/TLS algorithm that the box required - there was no upgrade path. So we had to keep an old laptop with an old web browser else toss a $75,000 piece of test gear.

We've also had to maintain some Linux machines - like Fedora 7 - but those are easiest as VMs, usually on VMware Esxi.

The laughable joke that is UX design - specifically desktop applications that poorly display documents inline using mobile UX paradigms.

Example:
How do I purge this useless unsearchable PDF that I hasn't even rendered the first page because Adobe Acrobat (or whatever it's called today) is still showing AI and ads after 10 seconds of paid company time?

Do I click the X on the right? Do I click the arrow on the left? Do I click something else? Living under the boot of mediocre neoliberal fascist extremist techbros sucks.

The laughable joke that is UX design - specifically desktop applications that poorly display documents inline using mobile UX paradigms.

Example:
How do I purge this useless unsearchable PDF that hasn't even rendered the first page because Adobe Acrobat (or whatever it's called today) is still showing AI and ads after 10 seconds of paid company time?

Do I click the X on the right? Do I click the arrow on the left? Do I click something else?

Living under the boot of mediocre neoliberal fascist extremist techbros sucks.

The solution for me is to memorize the download icon and open documents in Open Source software that actually lets me get my job done and collect my pay.

I don't begrudge my colleagues who roll in bubbles filled of corporate filth - as unwealthy USians their lives are as utterly disposable and replaceable as the lives of me and mine (hell, the United States Federal Government has declared me and mine to be terrorists to be disappeared and murdered in concentration camps simply for existing and voting a certain way in a free and fair election.)

The company requires Microsoft products for interfacing with each other and customers - which, whatever; I'm paid to do whatever the company tells me to do with whatever leadership gives me.

All of my team members maintain one or more 7-10 year old Windows PC's scavenged from departed colleague's desks that have been formatted and sys'd with our preference in Linux distro - this is what we do to step up and do our frigging jobs to add value to the company on behalf of our wealthy private equity masters.

@richard Running a hypervisor on old hardware is always a problem. And some BIOS/UEFI turn off things like the Intel VM support - I'm lookin' at you Asus.

Until recently I used the bare metal hypervisor Esxi from VMware - it is still available, for free and I've got a Intel Ultra 9 in a Geekom box running it. I've rarely had trouble with Esxi.

I'm also using KVM/QEMU on Fedora 4x for my Linux and FreeBsd VMs. It is very solid. I have no troubles with stability or using the underlying Linux at the same time for other things. (Right now this is on an I7 [I think] on a fairly recent Asus NUC.)

Almost all of my newer systems are on NUC sized platforms. I am most pleased with the ones from Asus and Geekom.

Just be sure your extension cord is up to the job with the coffee maker.

I was watching a popular home improvement show one day and one of the experts mentioned that toasters and coffee pots are huge strains on the system.

"wut?" says I... "nah, no way, those little things?"

denial

then we had a hurricane and were operating on generator power for a few days

We can fire that gen up with 2 refrigerator/freezers and a full size upright freezer attached (not the ideal way to do it), and it doesn't even flinch.

Plugged in the coffee pot, hit the button... it audibly groaned. 😳

so when I needed more outlets in the kitchen, I went straight for a heavy duty workshop power strip!

Our house wiring was done by a sequence of dumber-than-rocks electricians.

Our first ones never turned off the power when they strung wires and stuff - I watched them repeatedly be launched off of their aluminum ladders when they touched the wrong things. And they ignored many of my direct instructions (like not to daisy-chain the telephone wires.)

The next phase was done by a guy who similarly kinda ignored even common sense. He set up one circuit that wraps more than once around the edges of the house, with a GFI at every point. So, for instance, when we had a leaky hose that wetted an outside outlet, somewhere in a long sequence of GFIs one of 'em blew - it can take hours to track the circuit and reset every GFI in the sequence. And to top it off some of the GFI's are hidden - like there are two or three of 'em behind the trash bins in the trash drawer in our kitchen - even with the trash bins removed they are not easy to locate, even if you thought to look in there. This guy also lost (inside the walls and floors) some of our phone circuits - we simply had to abandon them. Fortunately we were able to abandon our 2nd phone line and patch together a workaround. This guy eventually and suddenly died - we kinda have a guess that it happened to the sound of a 60hz zap.

We now have an electrician we feel is quite competent. But we have not undertaken to fix the spaghetti layout of our house circuits (I really need to create a map and label each outlet.)

you don’t use your dishwasher as storage space

I still haven't decided if this is genius or privilege-eyeroll—but one family installed 2 dishwashers—used clean dishes out of one while they loaded dirty in the other, lather rinse repeat

a long sequence of GFIs

more than one GFCI on a single circuit will trip without input... guess how I know this 🤦‍♀️ we figured if one was good, 2 was better... NOPE

I really need to create a map and label each outlet.

it annoys me on the daily not knowing which circuit I might be overloading with a vacuum or something... but it's kinda hard to do the mapping when the fkn box is outside

dumbest shit I ever heard of in my life

put everything in either upside down or backwards

the last building I worked at, the construction plumbers switched the hot and cold in the men's room

steaming urinals, anyone?

these babies

good to know another source for those... I had to get them from a home improvement big-box (when they were merely MAGA-curious, not full-on fascist)

2-prong ones are set up with the switch in a different location 🤨 wtf

it annoys me on the daily not knowing which circuit I might be overloading with a vacuum

*or which one to turn off if I need to work on something!!

I saw a clever thing where you get a little thing to plug into a target outlet, then you go to the breaker box and run a sensor over the breaker switches. When you get to the one that serves the target outlet it beeps. Presumably the thing you plugged in is sending a signal down the wire and the sensor picks it up.

You also get a small array of colored LEDs and you can read how they light up to diagnose different issues with the outlet.

@((( David "Kahomono" Frier ))) - I have tool from Klein tools that does exactly what you say - it helps track back from a plug to a circuit breaker. (It also has a wiring tester [it showed that our office was incorrectly grounded] and GFI tester. Great tool ... ah, here's a link...

kleintools.com/catalog/electri…

My grandfather and father repaired TVs - often ones with vacuum tubes and always with a high voltage CRT. It only takes once to learn that the CRT must be discharged, fully and permanently (while the work is being done). The old black-and-white TV's were pretty bad. But the color CRTs - those were a hyper-zapp of another color!

(Of course all of this paled against my laser lab at UCLA where I had capacitors the size of Jerry cans charged at 24KV.)

My cousin, however, had the worst experience.

He was in Mexico, fishing. Out on a lake in an aluminium boat. A high tension power line crossed the lake, those wires were not very high up.

He cast his line - it went over those high tension lines. He stood up in the boat to knock his fishing line back over the power lines. That was the last he ever saw of his arm - it vaporized. He was saved only because when he collapsed back into the boat he broke the circuit.

My dad told me a story of some family members telling him to "hold this" for them when he was a kid (probably early 1940s)... "this" being a live circuit 🤬

I told him I hoped his father kicked somebody's ass.
He said his father was in on it.

That's the point when I realized he came by his shitty behavior honestly 😒

(later I did the family tree... whoa nellie, you can trace the BPD straight up the male line on that side... when you're such an asshole that run-of-the-mill documentation makes it clear well over a century later, you were an asshole)

the labels are all faded from baking in the heat of the AZ sun.

yours are outdoors too?! I'd never heard of such a thing when I lived in the mid-Atlantic

I saw a clever thing where you get a little thing to plug into a target outlet

I own such a gizmo (somewhere 🙄) but the whole outdoor thing has been A Problem 😒 I'm constantly having to whack invasive crap away from it＊, and just don't have spoons left to run back and forth (and collect mosquito bites) for every damn outlet in the house.

if I could find the gizmo
which I can't
I Lose Things™️

＊as we speak, the remains of a dead vine are behind it 😳 probably bad, but wtf can I do?

BREAKER BOXES NEED TO BE INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!

That was the last he ever saw of his arm - it vaporized.

😳

Our PBS station was down for some length of time (measured in months, maybe over a year) because their not-very-old transmitter spontaneously combusted.

It was copper and aluminum 🤦‍♀️... manufacturer told them copper and aluminum make a great pair for their purpose... AYFKM? HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU BIG ENOUGH TO MANUFACTURE TV TRANSMITTERS BUT DON'T KNOW BETTER THAN PUTTING COPPER AND ALUMINUM TOGETHER??