This might be an odd/off-topic question, but in Telegram this article has an auto-fetched thumbnail of a cat smoking a cigarette and a text similar to 'heavy metal music playing', I'm just curious where this picture is from, if you have any idea? I checked the README for the repo, pictures of the contributors etc. but I'm unable to figure out where it's coming from.

That's a very very very old GitHub avatar of mine, I wonder why Telegram hasn't pulled a later one.

You can use https://telegram.me/webpagebot to refresh avatar cache

Telegram also shows my old Github avatar - it seems to cache them extremely aggressively.

Curious, thanks for the answer!

The site[1] where the video is actually hosted has the image you described as the avatar of the uploader. Could it be the reason?

1. https://asciinema.org/a/qvNlrFrGB3xKZXb6GkremjZNp

Just some feedback on the sale of the book (which I wanted and probably will buy).

Upon checkout you need to confirm the sale via a email sent to the email address provided by you.

I may be the exception and granted - it's basically due to a very crappy phone on which email ceased to work - but I was not able to finalize the sale since I'm not able to access my private email remotely.

I sent myself the link and will probably give it another shot from home. But you may want to take it up with the seller that there are folks out there for which this is not really a convenient way to close a sale. Especially not after entering valid credit card information.

I'll look into also putting the book on Amazon or another "ebook" website. I chose leanpub as it _is_ for books like this but if it does cause issues for people I'll explore my options on other platforms.

Thanks for letting me know and apologies for the inconvenience.

It's more an annoyance than really a problem and stick with them rather than Amazon. Leanpub looks like a nice enough bunch and you, as the author, receive most of the proceeds.

I'm probably anyway the exception nowadays not being able to access private email remotely. But what you may point out to them is that it may be worthwhile to think through their checkout process. Also for their own benefit and the benefit of other authors

As I said I sent the link to myself and if I don't forget will buy it from home.

I really like to support you and your efforts and it looks like an awesome resource for somebody using bash a lot.

I'm a bit puzzled how you've ended up with a system where you can't access email remotely. That probably took a lot more time than just creating a gmail account or even using your own domain but hooking it up to google for all the boring stuff (like, uh, making it available remotely). Although you mention "private" email so perhaps you also have "public" email which you can access - i'm not sure how I'd configure mail servers to deal with that. Back when I wasn't confident accessing email via random internet cafes etc from my phone I created several accounts and have stuck to that system; some accounts i only access when i'm sure it's safe, and others - not used for banking etc - i couldn't care less about and use from anywhere.

My phone sucks (Nokia 8110 4G, where mail conked after the first software upgrade) and working for a bank, which disallows external messaging for regulatory reasons.

Pointers to documentation of features used would be a major benefit to this reference.

The hacks (as a 30+ year sh / ksh / bash user) are indeed Very Cool.

[OT] Hi Dylan! Just discovered your project - KISS. I respect you a lot for what you write, and you've been an inspiration at times.

Did you just decide one day that you have to write a distribution from scratch? What was the thought process, and how complicated is it actually. Also, I'd like to contribute if there's a chance.

> [OT] Hi Dylan! Just discovered your project - KISS. I respect you a lot for what you write, and you've been an inspiration at times.

Thanks, I appreciate it! :)

> Did you just decide one day that you have to write a distribution from scratch?

Pretty much. I'd been distro hopping for some time and wasn't happy with any of the choices in front of me.

I wanted something that could run without `dbus`, `glibc`, `systemd`, `wayland`, `polkit`, `elogind`, etc etc and none of the other distributions could provide this.

Even Gentoo through their arms in the air when Firefox 69 broke the `--disable-dbus` configure flag (and added a mandatory dependency on `dbus`).

I instead spent the hours patching `dbus` out of Firefox 69 and that's how I ship it in KISS. https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/blob/master/extra/firefox/...

> What was the thought process

Start from zero and build piece by piece questioning each step along the way. Is this needed? Are there alternatives? Can we do this in a "simpler" way? Step away, come back to it later and ask "was this right?", "can we trim back the fat?".

This repeated until things were effectively "done".

> and how complicated is it actually

No piece of software seems to list its (mandatory) dependencies properly so it was a trial and error of figuring out _exactly_ what each piece of software needs.

Looking at other distributions themselves wasn't much help as they list a lot of "optional" dependencies as "required".

There's also no (or very little) documentation online for how to write a package manager or Linux distribution from scratch.

It's been a tedious but rewarding process thus far. I'm talking to you from KISS right now! It feels good to turn on my laptop and be running a distribution I created from scratch. :)

> Also, I'd like to contribute if there's a chance.

Go for it! In terms of contribution there's bug reporting, fixing documentation, adding missing packages, fixing bugs in existing packages etc.

Hop on IRC (#kisslinux @ freenode.net) if you'd like to chat. :)

completely unrelated, it's so funny that i saw this comment, looked at your name and thought "hey, i know this guy!". it turns out i forked your dotfiles ages ago when i first started playing with i3. also neofetch is pretty cool!

Thanks!

Any plans to sell the book in dead tree format?

That'd be really nice and it is something I've thought about, the issue is figuring out the _right_ way to do it. Self publishing or perhaps a publisher of programming books?

I can see now that there's a clear interest in a release in physical form. I'll start seriously looking into it. :)

fff looks amazing. I’ve started building something like it many times, but never finished. Thank you

Thanks :)