Learning something new offers a unique experience to take notes about tips, tricks and lessons learned that an experienced user may not think is noteworthy or think of at all. This is a bit of a journal of my experiences learning the ropes of Mac OS 9 in 2025.

This was originally written in April 2025 but I forgot to publish it. Oh well.

So you want to get up and running with AppleTalk on Windows 2000? Good choice!

If you’re looking for an instruction guide to successfully connect to SQL Server from a Mac using AppleTalk, I’m afraid this isn’t it. This is documentation of efforts made to get it to work and the dead-end result.

I have a Windows 2000 Active Directory domain that had one domain controller. I added a second domain controller and performed what I thought were all necessary steps to prepare the new domain controller to be the only one in the domain. Turns out I missed a few key steps and broke my domain.

For the retro part of my home network, I have Windows 2000 Server running Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP servers on the retro VLAN. I was running this on Proxmox, but wanted to move this over to my Debian server running libvirt.

Rather than try to migrate the actual virtual machine, I installed a new instance of Windows 2000 Server under libvirt and added it as a Domain Controller.

libvirt has support for legacy operating systems, but its default configurations are not optimal and will cause difficulties.

I first joined Gmail back in 2003 when it was in an invite-only beta. When Google for Work became available, I moved mroach.com there to get away from my old Mailgun -> public Gmail forwarding which broke spam filtering.

Times have changed and I’ve had about enough of Google in my life and it’s time to make a move. On Mastodon and Reddit I had seen Migadu mentioned several times as a simple, affordable, no-nonsense email hosting provider. I took the plunge and setup an account there.

When I went to my first Eras Tour show, I was out of the loop on a lot of the fan chants and interactions. Before my next show I got up to speed thanks to some videos and guides people had put together.

Since then, the tour has changed to include The Tortured Poets Department and the removal of some other songs.

For the past 20 years or so, my Super Nintendo has been sitting in storage in my parents basement in the US. This is a standard original US version of the Super Nintendo. I finally brought it back to Denmark a few months ago.

When importing a console from one region to another, there are two big considerations: power and video.

When it comes to validation, I don’t like to re-invent the wheel. Many programming languages have built-in modules for common types of data, such as a URL.

In Ruby, we have the URI module which is often used to generate, parse, and manipulate a URI. It has a method URI.parse which accepts a string and creates an instance of a URI.

For a time, I thought this was a decent approach to use. You could validate a string as a URL doing something like:

A month ago I received my Framework Laptop DIY Edition. Since I first heard about this laptop, I was eager to try it out as a Linux daily driver and to support the Framework effort to create a repairable and upgradable laptop. I know buying into the first generation of a new product is a gamble and there could be issues, but I dived in nonetheless.