2012-08-22 Working on remote machines is nothing special for Unix adminis- trators. SSH is just too common. I, for instance, have a server at my parents house on which I do all my email work. No matter where I am physically, I work on the machine there. There's noth- ing special with this situation. Today, however, I made the situation become special. I ``magical- ly'' printed a note to my father on his computer while I was in another city. The situation itself is the same, but instead of ... | mail I used ... | lp This change in detail changed the perception of the situation fundamentally. I changed the world in a non-digital way. I al- tered the house in a plain visible way. Digitality is not under- stood really by people. If it would be, then the printing of a page would not be recognized as something special; it would be just the same as I did all those years: I worked on a remote machine. The reason I printed the note to my dad was purely practical. I needed to change things on his machine but wasn't sure if the system would work as expected thereafter. Thus I wanted him to know that I had worked on the system and that any unexpected behavior would be the result of my work. If I had sent him this note by email, he maybe would have not been able to read it. Printing it on paper appeared to be the most practical alterna- tive. Actually, it should have been obvious, but we forget about such approaches. We computer guys cannot truly understand the di- gital world neither. Long years have passed after I first read about reading one's mails only once a day. The idea had convinced me but I was never strong enough to realize it. Today, I have changed my fetchmail cron job from ``*/8 * * * *'' to ``8 4 * * *''. We'll see how often I'll run fetchmail additionally during the day. At debianforum.de had been a nice thread with the question of how to print an arbitrary text file and get at least 10 lines of out- put in any case. If the file is shorter, empty lines should be added. I enjoyed the problem and provided two approaches. Further comments by others followed. The thread is in German but the code is in Unix languages. ;-) [0] [0] http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=138044 http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke