/looks longingly out the window, and catch my aging face in the reflection

Wait there's more: a couple of simple plastic glasses joined with a string under tension also does the trick.

However more seriously, while being snarky about "obvious" things can be fun, we should all remember to acknowledge the xkcd's "Ten Thousand" effect as a very real law of life.

mDNS / Avahi is also great if the machine advertises itself: just use machinename.local after plugging it.

Though the interface needs to be configured for link-local addresses. In my experience, NetworkManager now periodically resets the link if it can't get a DHCP server to respond. I understand the rationale, but it used to be simpler to plug into a headless machine and be confident that you could just ssh in.

Used to play Duke Nukem 3D over a null modem serial cable.

In the days of the spectrum where you loaded via an analog audio input from a tape, and saved via the output, you could move from one to another in the same way, skipping the tape.

Apparently this was about 1kbit per second.

If you get away from BASIC commands and copy the tape routines up into RAM you can mess with the timing values, and with care you can get it from an average of 1800bps up to around IIRC 12000bps before things really fall apart. Probably with better interfacing you'd get even faster.

With more conservative values, this is how "speedloaders" worked. In the late 80s or early 90s one publisher released games on CD where it would load in the loader at normal rate then ramp up to some unholy speed that CD had the bandwidth and stability for but tape did not.

edit: as for length, it depends. you won't get a gigabit over 150m of crap cat3, but you will get a link, even if it's 10 half-duplex.

[1]Most people don't realise how much power ethernet consumes. Even 100Mbps ethernet consumes about 0.5W per port and it goes up with higher speeds.

> Removable storage is quite slow unless you are willing to spend a lot of money.

An SSD good enough to copy tens of GB quickly is not cheap.

Not Warcraft though - some ancient DOS game.

For every standalone building that has a ground, that building also has an electrical potential. This potential is not necessarily the same between two neighboring buildings. When you stretch a copper line between them, you are tempting fate, electrically, not to mention the dangers of lightning strikes and the elements attacking that connection.

It is generally recognized that fiber optics are not only very efficient and durable, but also impervious to electrical troubles of the type that may plague inter-building connections. Simply grab switches or routers that support at least one fiber-optic connection, and link up!

Carry a couple USB-C to RJ-45 dongles ;)

Occasionally we had someone who knew what they were doing and had their Windows 95 settings set up correctly, and then all we had to do was activate their room's Ethernet port and add their MAC address to the DHCP server's list of authorized MACs. But most often I or one of the other techs had to head down to the person's dorm room and set up their computer's network settings correctly before it would work. Once the 169.254 address was replaced by 192.168, my job was finally done. But there were times when that took some doing.

Also, why is he talking about "ethernet"? Its the IP layer, not the ethernet layer...