Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn't encounter any new major bugs.

Doom and Doom II.

They certainly were not the first games I played. For my young self, games before then were either trivial games which you can figure out and play easily or difficult games without manuals which held my interest for brief periods of time. Games were (and are?) a certain difficulty and operate as they were designed. For Doom and Doom II, that was different.

Doom and Doom II were the first games I used cheat codes in (because they were the first games that I knew cheat codes for). The cheat codes in those games spoiled because they did more than just "make you invincible" but they also let you walk through the walls of the levels (noclip). They allowed you to see how the game worked (at least in a small way). You could also level jump (a more common cheat code) so that you can see levels that I did not have skills to reach. This made the games more than just a triviality since I could keep exploring and trying new things despite my skill level.

Those games were able to be modded though. You could easily get CDs with plenty of mods that changed the weapons, added levels, completely changed the game, and so on. This was the first game that I ever played that could do that. The CDs also came with editors which let me dabble in messing with weapons myself (where I managed to get around 1 FPS with all the rockets I fired at once from a rocket launcher). As such, the games could be made fresh and new again by modding it to be something different.

Those games also had a great sound track. It seems like a minor thing (and other games have great sound tracks as well) but I learned that music significantly influences my like or dislike for a game. Games that I played before didn't have bad music per say but nothing earlier really grabbed my attention like Doom and Doom II.

I do enjoy many modern games. Still, I miss that games typically do not have cheat codes (and things like noclip are a rarity in any new games) and modding has never seemed as "wild" as some of the Doom mods that were created back then. If Doom was never around, I'm sure that some other game would have grabbed my interest in different ways (likely it would still have a great sound track though). However, I would have likely missed the wonder of seeing how a game worked and seeing a game be modified.

Fortunately, these games are still playable today and still have new mods released for them today. As such, I can take a nostalgic trip and play them whenever I want.

My ChatGPT, on the other hand, was not as helpful.

Bonus Bing AI result below.

For a certain area, I back in to a parking space so that the sun in the afternoon is coming through the back window. This means that my drivers seat and steering wheel are not the temperature of the sun when I have to drive away. Other people may park in different ways to avoid the sun in the morning should they prefer to drive out to get lunch.

SDF offers far more than just this Lemmy instance. You should poke around https://sdf.org/ and see what other things may be of interest to you. Other social networking things are found under Social in the top menu. Also, there is aNONradio, information of which is a bit hidden I think. They can be found at this link and more info is also at this other link.

On SSH, you should be able to type in uinfo to see information about yourself and groups to also see a bit of information. Both should let you know if you paid for an upgrade or not because they would mention something about ARPA.

When paying for an upgraded account, they needed to know your SSH username in order to give that account increased permissions. If that was not done then they likely need to know information from you so that they can associate the payment with the correct account.

It has been mentioned at the link below that there is an email address where you can reach out and mention membership issues. It may take a bit of time for a reply though.

https://sdf.org/?faq%3FBASICS%3F12

The fun aspect of older computers is that they had interesting ways to carry out certain tasks. There wasn't "the best way" to do a thing figured out yet and there were many companies trying all sorts of things for one reason or another.

The Commodore is the only computer I know of that put "another whole computer" into their disk drive in order to make the disk drive work (meaning it was pretty much the same computer as your main computer). So your main computer and the disk drive are pretty similar and your main computer talks to the drive computer to figure everything out. It just seems like such a heavy handed way to handle things but it clearly worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS -- This explains the OS that is on the drive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC -- This explains what you work with on the computer

The photo reminds me that the PCjr used an optical mouse with a metal mouse pad.

I still remember that small amount of time that I used a mouse with a metal mousepad (on a Macintosh). It seemed like those style of optical mice only lasted for a very brief amount of time and was a tad finicky. Still, I wonder how many folks never knew that mice using metal mousepads even existed.

Information about the shell access part of SDF is at their website ( https://sdf.org/ ). The Join page explains a bit more as well as how to upgrade your membership to a different level.

https://sdf.org/?join

Basically, you can register for a free shell account. You can opt to pay for lifetime ARPA access ($36 paid once) to get access to developer type programs. The MetaARPA level ($ 36 a year) gives you even more things.

Software that is accessible at certain membership levels can be shown after logging in to your terminal by typing in software and following the on screen directions. You can pipe the command over to grep to learn that git only shows up at the ARPA level. As far as I know, you need to be ARPA or higher to access git. Regardless, you need to be ARPA to access compilers like gcc so you may want to upgrade anyway.

Notably, I am at the ARPA level and I can run the git command without any issues.

What may help in the future is that you have access to the bboard command. There you can post help messages to the HELPDESK board which may receive a faster response.

http://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial -- This explains how to use bboard.

Reddit is the self proclaimed "front page of the internet" and some of the subreddits that are "firmly in control" by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.

People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.

Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will "always come back" so long as those communities remain intact.

Long winded explanation but hopefully it clears a few things up...

There is a protocol that allows two or more things to talk to each other. That is called ActivityPub and things that speak that protocol can work together. The things in this case are the servers which you register your account with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

You can have two different things (kbin and a Lemmy instance) and they can work together despite being different. They are differently written programs in different programming languages. The ActivityPub federation thing allows your Lemmy instance to ask to be sent all posts and comments from another server "just to have" as a local copy which you can then read on your server. If you comment, vote, or post on your server's "local copy" then your server sends that update back to the original server so they can update their records.

The content being downloaded from a remote server is like 1 person looking at everything over there. At that point, you and everyone else on your server can look at your local copy which is quick (if your server is not overloaded). The remote server can better handle lots of users from where you are at because your server is taking on the "user interaction load". This way, the user load is distributed to remote servers where the users do their interactions and the smaller "like 1 person" transactions are sent along when necessary.

The way things work on the Lemmy side is that you can see other communities by using the search function or by clicking on the communities button and clicking on all. You will see all communities that your server "knows about" (including communities hosted on this specific server). It automatically downloads all content from remote servers that it "knows about" (and it does so frequently) but that is driven by you first asking the server to get things from a specific server if necessary.

You can ask for things by searching for a specific address starting with a ! character. Wait a few moments and search again and you should be able to see that the content was retrieved for you. (You can search by a more granular term like the server address itself if necessary.) At that point, you can interact with that community in expected ways (like subscribing to that community to see updates from them).

The link you need is on the right side of any community page you view. Examples are technology@beehaw.org and kbinMeta@kbin.social

Once everything is set up and working, the server you log in to will automatically gather posts and comments from "the fediverse", show it on your screen, and send along any comments or votes you make back to "the fediverse" for others to see.

That all being said... kbin is a bit overloaded at the moment and is not quite sending updates to other servers. When they have that sorted, you should be able to interact with them. Refer to the following post from chaorace for more information.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/67263

When I was graduating from college, I realized that I would soon lose terminal access to their main server. I wanted a place to store my old programming bits and bobs that I could still SSH into. I found the SDF back then and it served that purpose well. At that point, I learned of bboard and I like to read that from time to time (although I have never posted to it).

(For those not in the know, bboard is described at https://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial )

SDF is notable to me because it a shell account plus more things. This elevates it past any computer I can just set up with any Linux distro. The "more things" is what keeps me checking back and what makes SDF special to me.