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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • My university in Germany operates entirely in English. The academic world is very international so it often falls back to English to support the faculty and students. Issues in the community will also be run through the university news routes, so while I’ve been learning German, I’ll also have a big resource with my work community.

    There’s a few places to check for positions. I interviewed in Ireland and Scotland as well (didn’t get the jobs). There’s also Australia and new Zealand hiding out there. Or Canada. Hell, Mexico has a great university system you could look into.

    Your PhD does open new doors. It’s by no means a guarantee of a faculty spot, but it’s valued so you can leverage it.


  • The position is in Germany. It might be out of the frying pan and into the fire given Germany’s right wing rise, but that’s happening across the western nations and we’re all in trouble.

    I don’t have a ton of advice for you. I defended over 10 years ago, so I’m moving straight into a tenured/permanent position as senior faculty. For an ABD, I’m not sure what the landscape looks like these days.

    If you want to make the move, start talking to people. Reach out to people publishing in your field and talk shop. Collaborate with them, talk about the future, and be willing to take a postdoc (or german system W1) position. It’s more ramen and a small bedroom, but it’s one where there’s healthcare and civil rights.

    Academia (and most professions) are all about networks. Talk with people, collaborate, and grow that network. Something will come along.



  • I bought a 386 motherboard that needed a patch. Not software, but by soldering a wire between two pads. You just basically figure it out and went from there with a soldering iron.

    Build the computer from parts? Sure. Soldered it like it came as discrete components? Also sure.

    Tech savvy is often in context of when you were learning in your teens to early twenties and then what of that skill set is still applicable today.


  • We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.

    Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn’t even see it download before it was done.





  • azimir@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlFreeCAD 1.0 released
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    4 months ago

    Huge congrats to the team and my condolences on the loss.

    FreeCAD is a huge part of my engineering toolkit and your work is greatly appreciated.

    I expect that the 1.0 will be in the Debian repos by about 2026 and I’m looking forward to it. Stable distros be stable distros. :-p






  • I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

    The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

    The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.




  • I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

    I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.




  • They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.

    The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.