So unlike some folks, I’m still very much reliant on $DAYJOB for the majority of my income. But I managed to carve out a niche in an unexpected place.
OS/2 consulting
It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.
I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.
It didn't help that the earliest P5 Pentiums ran on a 5V rail. Newer revisions starting with the P54 core used 3.3V and helped with keeping the chips cool.
Well and the earliest versions of Windows 95 used FAT16 (specifically VFAT for support for LFNs or long file names). So enjoy those ridiculous cluster sizes if your hard disk even approached a gig or so.
I wholeheartedly agree. Presto was very lightweight and, to my knowledge, exceptionally standards compliant as well.
I think the last version of the Presto engine did have a source code leak, but naturally it's not a great idea to work on it unless you want to catch a lawsuit.
Yeah, if the Opera corporation gave a blessing to use the leaked code then that would be great; I'm not going to look at it until I know for sure I'm not going to be sued.
It's too bad, I hate that we basically only have two browsing engines that people take seriously: Blink/Chromium and Safari for iOS. Firefox is there but it lags pretty far behind those two. Having a little more competition in this space could be good.
I'm aware, but that's not usable yet in any real sense. I'm glad we're getting another engine and it would be cool if it becomes competitive with the other. I'm just saying that Presto was already competitive with the others before they changed to Chromium, and I wish that they had open sourced it if they weren't going to use it anyway.
I get the love for Macbook trackpads, but Lenovo really nailed it with the ThinkPad trackpoint and glass trackpad combo, especially on more recent models.
I know Lenovo has their issues, but out of all the non-Apple laptop companies, they are by far the best out there. And to their credit, they do try to listen to customer feedback.
Also, AFAIK, Lenovo still has their ThinkPad designs developed by a design think-tank lab in Japan that they own (and IBM still has a bit of influence here as well) so I know Lenovo still gives somewhat of a damn in trying to develop a solid laptop.
Only the T and X series benefit from the Japanese design studios though and have the build quality to match. The E and L series are indistinguishable from a myriad of bargain bin business laptops, including Lenovo's own ideapads.
OS/2 consulting
It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.
I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.