Also, if you remember enjoying hacking, maybe pick that up again? There’s a massive shortage of security engineers at all times.

First of all, you can totally do it! The field is massive, but also full of very bad programmers, and seeing how you were able to write a coherent text of three paragraphs, that already puts you ahead of the curve. Determination and perseverance is key.

I would suggest to play to your strengths. Java is still Java. Most of the progress since the 1990s was in the libraries and tooling, which only recently have become passable. The language itself also evolved somewhat, but there’s nothing that you won’t pick up in a couple of days of working with it.

Start with [1], work through all the boxes that are unfamiliar to you, practice a little on a pet project, or an open source project, and you’ll land a job in no time.

[1] https://roadmap.sh/java

You likely have a mental model of Subversion, so what I would suggest is to try to forget as much of it as possible first, as Git is very different.

Take a tutorial that is aimed at Git beginners, e.g. [1]. This will help you start building a new mental model as well as get first practical experience.

After that, read the official docs starting wtih the object model[2]. The reason why many people struggle to get into git, especially after using other VCS, is that it was built from the ground up, without much regard of the established conventions and terminology. Linus Torvalds once mentioned that he used his experience designing file systems when developing git.

So the object model of git is very simple, but also not intuitive. However, once you understand it, everything will start making sense, including the xkcd you’ve linked.

[1] https://gitimmersion.com/ [2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

I didn’t use yaml much while it was gaining popularity, and therefore didn’t pay much attention. But this article really made me pay attention and now I distrust anything that uses yaml in any capacity.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

I can’t imagine how normal people use any software at all. When something doesn’t work for me, often I can figure out what could’ve gone wrong. For instance, there might be bug in the JavaScript form handler, and I can just bypass it. Or an app doesn’t invalidate its cache properly, so I just need to flush it manually.

One problem with that is that you will end up with two EFI partitions. This is not supported very well by anything, really, so you will run the risk of Windows messing with the wrong partition anyway.

I’ve updated my comment.

Edit: it appears the PWA support in Firefox is not ideal, see responses to this comment.

Chromium is not an offshoot of Chrome, it’s more of a precursor to Chrome, and it is completely controlled by Google. As such, it will also drop support for extensions that do not support Manifest v3.

If you want to enable PWA support in Firefox, it looks like this is possible (however the experience doesn’t seem to be great, see responses to this comment): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing

For other browser suggestions see, e.g. https://www.xda-developers.com/4-browsers-manifest-v2-ublock-origin/

If you wanted to support all possible drivers, you would basically need to rewrite the entire kernel. You could make one specific anticheat work by supporting its specific calls, but this will take a lot of work, and will probably be broken with the first ever update.

In the past there were projects that supported specific types of drivers, such as ndiswrapper, but that had a very limited scope.

Here’s also an answer to a similar question: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/544776/installing-proprietary-windows-drivers-on-linux

“take a decision” is also a valid phrase: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/take a decision

I’m not sure what a “music jukebox” is, and how it’s different from a music player, but I would recommend to try mpd. It should work with your collection, although I don’t have personal experience with collections of this size. Some clients might also not have been designed to work with such collections, so probably you’d have to try several.

This seems to be an encrypted file: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47712102/sd-card-files-with-encrypted-data-console-text-in-it-how-to-get-my-files-bac

I would try magick identify from imagemagick. If that doesn’t work, I would try strings just to see if it has any metadata at all. Cameras usually store their model name somewhere.

He did some short format writing, but The Martian was his first published novel, I think. He was a software engineer before that.

Artemis follows the same pattern of a capable main protagonist solving problems, so it is not very different from the other books in terms of characters, but it is much better in character depth and development than The Martian.

Just as a general advice that has only occurred to me recently: if you don’t like a book, stop reading it and read another one. There are great books, and there are mediocre, and also you some might work better for you, and some worse. If you start with a book that you don’t like, and power through it anyway, you might be reluctant to try another one.

You’ve mentioned sci-fi, but didn’t mention Robert Sheckley. If you haven’t read any of his stories, drop everything and read Citizen in Space, for example.

If you’d rather go for something more modern, fun, but also a little sad, try The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

For something extremely entertaining, but also mysterious, try Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson.

If you’re into videogames and like drama, try Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. That’s the best book I’ve read in the past 5 years.

This, and Artemis too. Basically anything by Andy Weir at this point.

to be fair, the way it’s worded I can parse as “a language for web programming”, instead of “a programming language for the web”

Install GnuCash, learn accounting, and start tracking your money and use proper financial language. There is a lot of good financial advice out there (budgeting, investments, debt reduction), and all of that is much more efficient if a) you know where your money goes and where it comes from, b) you are proficient with financial software, and c) you can talk to the banks in their own language.

Fantastic, thanks!

Very nice! Could you tweak the colours a bit so they work in dark mode?