Jorf

And this is why you should put your nerdy couch potato kid into baseball. First of all, it's not a very athletic sport, not like soccer or basketball where you have to run all the time. Baseball started out as a pastime for American inner city dudes who really kinda hated exercise. You *may* have to run once or twice during the game, but more often than not you just stand in place and mostly miss the ball.

However, your kids will get some very valuable lessons if they play on a baseball team. First, that oftentimes winning requires a team effort. As opposed to football or basketball, you can't win with only one decent player on your team -- no matter how good they are, they aren't going to be able to run that ball in from the outfield for a tag-out at home. Everyone will need to work with each-other for that out, even if they don't get along. Yeah, you may have spectacularly caught a fly in the center field, but now there's a runner advancing home from second and you're going to have to relay this ball via the kid playing shortstop -- yeah, the kid who shuts their eyes whenever the ball gets near them. But once they have the ball, the kid is solid, so you just need to gently lob the ball so it lands by their feet. You need to know and play to your team's strengths and weaknesses if you want to win.

However, there will always be times when the whole game is down to just you. It's the last inning and there's two outs and your winning runner is on third yelling "bring me home!" If you strike out or do a weak blooper that gets caught, the game is lost for everyone. The whole team depends on you to do well and do the right thing. So much weight and pressure. So much like real life. Yeah, some kids hate that, but it really does build that thick skin you will need to deal with failure as an adult -- your own, and your friends'.

So, fellow nerds, put your kids into baseball. Baseball is life.

Finally, everyone's favourite confusing rule: infield fly. This rule exists to protect the team running the bases and, like any other rule, was added to prevent abuse. With two runners on first and second, or with bases full and fewer than 2 outs, a blooper infield hit by the batter would normally result in a catch and the batter being out. However, if the infielder intentionally doesn't catch that ball and lets it drop in front of them, now the runners suddenly have to advance, which can lead to an easy double play (two outs) or even triple play (three outs). So, the rule was put in place to prevent this abuse and force the situation to always result in a single out by calling only the batter out and removing the force from the other runners.

Here's another one: in Little Big League (1994) the protagonist's team wins by calling time, and then using a hidden ball trick to tag out the runner when the umpire calls "play" again. That's against the rules, because the play can only resume when the pitcher has the ball and re-engages with the rubber. The umpire would have never called "play" in the first place without seeing the ball return to the pitcher, and even if they did call "play" by mistake, the tag-out would have been immediately contested by the other team's manager and overturned. Sorry!

I'll start with: is the baseball game that capt Sisko and the DS9 crew play against vulcans accurate? The answer is yes, for the most part, except Odo's positioning behind the plate is all wrong. He sets up on the other side of the catcher, in the area where he's much more likely to get hit by a foul ball off the batter's bat. Normally, you work the "slot" between the batter and the catcher. But the rules in the match are called accurately -- anyone physically touching the umpire gets tossed out and must leave the park. In fact, Sisko wouldn't have been allowed to sit in the bleachers, but we'll let that one slide.

Little known fact about me: I'm a certified baseball umpire. I know it's an alien sport to most of you, so ask me anything you want to know about baseball rules and I'll do my best to explain why it is like that.

Whenever I see a “rice my Arch #Linux w/hyprland” video, I’m like:

You think that’s badass? You should’ve tried getting X11 running on a Linux machine in the mid-90s. You needed your monitor & video card manuals & a calculator (seriously) so you could calculate “modelines” for your X11 config file.

If you got the math wrong you’d fry your monitor by driving it at too high a frequency (back then nearly all monitors were fixed-frequency).

Typing “startx” for the first time was *so* stressful.

@landley Equinix Metal is shutting down by mid-2026 and they are terminating all remaining sponsored infrastructure by end of December.

@briankrebs yeah, well, they put Stalin's name on Lenin's mausoleum, too, and then quietly ripped it out when it was politically okay to do so.

Saying our last goodbyes to Equinix servers. First as packet.net and then as Equinix Metal, they served kernel.org wonderfully over the past 7 years. With the deadline looming on Dec 31, we're powering them off today. They've been replaced by Akamai and servers.com, (though we had to downscale our mirrors service from 4 worldwide nodes to just two, one in NA and one in EU).

Just as I was getting over jet lag, I come down with something. Flu, probably, judging by Canada-wide numbers. Both of my kids were sick with it as I came home, and the poor sleep definitely didn't help my immune system.

Stephen Rothwell is "stepping down as #Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026. Mark Brown [@broonie] has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.":

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-next/20251218180721.20eb878e@canb.auug.org.au/T/#u

To quote: ""It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's "I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little did I know what I was heading for.""

Many many thx Stephen for all your really hard work on this over all those years, it helped a tremendous lot!

#LinuxKernel #kernel

@monsieuricon worst Christmas post so far...

@dme Keeping things distributed, for the most part. AKA "returning to the original ARPANet design goals."

I won't lie, some of my infrastructure decisions are driven by the consideration that by 2030 large parts of the world will be in a hot war, with nation states specifically aiming to knock out each-other's energy and computing infrastructure for economic disruption.

I am, hopefully, completely off my rocker on this one.

I know nobody asked me, but I do quite happily use Vivaldi.

Me: 0, jetlag: 3

Me: 0, Jet lag: 2

*Sigh*

I haven't seen my brother since I left Western Australia.

We were separated at Perth.