fiscalnonsense

Diskless rocks for making appliances. I have rock solid raspberry pi based micro-sd based services because of this - diskless mode keeps the sd writes to a minimum. unplug the power at will? sure, go for it.

In active use:

retropie - pi3b+

gps based ntp (2x pi2 + gps hats. Chrony rocks.)

rtl_433 monitor for 915 and another for 433 (2x pi2, 2x rtl-sdr sticks)

an ads-b 1090 monitor (pi3 + rtl-sdr stick)

libreelec - plex clients (2x pi4 (1GB and 2GB)

an emulated macintosh (pi3)

a flood monitor in the basement (pi1)

an aarch64 dev platform (cm4-8GB) and another (pi5-8GB)

This.

nginx is simultaneously a registered trademark of F5 and imnsho mouth garbage for English speakers. This is a good opportunity to rename the project.

The arrow keys seem to be placed for maximum torture, which was pretty typical in the 8bit era.

Inverted T forever.

Linux literally is a 3rd party knock-off of his 1970s work.

I had something similar with a TSA event in the late 90s. My buddy and I took second place in the nationals for Computer Construction. We asked "why didn't we get first place?" and the response was "because your inventory had serial numbers listed. No one does that."... which was jaw dropping, because both of us had receipts from recent purchases at computer shops were every serial was tracked. Near the end of the event we found out that the judge of the computer construction contest was a teacher at the same school as the winner. Our teacher did nothing to contest it as we had a flight to catch. -sigh-

I've found reduced keystrokes for common operations.

I use "sudo -i" instead of "sudo su -"

in vi, I use "ZZ" instead of ":wq!" to save and exit.

bonus: I save time typing repetitive things into the shell by making cut and paste capable stanzas in documentation like this:

  cat << EOF > newfilename
  ...
  EOF

Of everything done, doing nothing about something "so that I can be home at night" still places highest in my list of challenges with software engineering.

Answering the first question - the keyboard... pro's type, a lot. It'd be fantastic if they had decent keyboards... full spherical keycaps and travel. None of this flats and scissors mush... I gots to type brackets and braces for a livin', yo.

For the second... depending on your eyes, get the retina display. For most people, its worth it. If you wear coke bottle thick glasses in 2014... maybe not worth it. Fitting more characters onto the screen and having the text rendered ever so properly is lovely for writing code with.

If you run VMs, the i7 is handy. Otherwise, the i5's are pretty rocking as is. I always go with multiple power adapters... but you can stock up slowly on sales and ebay if you're not already living la vida macbook.