Cody Richardson

I enjoy learning about time. It's fascinating to me how we've globally agreed that time will be different for various parts of the world, how we are going to represent that time difference, and making sure that we know the most accurate time possible. This isn't just important to make sure you're on time for an appointment, but it is surprisingly important in the technology we use every day. Here's everything I find interesting about time. Time Zones and UTC As of this writing, there are 38 time zones in use globally. Most are an hour offset from their neighbor, but some are only 30 or 45 minutes different. Some countries encompass multiple time zones (United States, Russia) while others use only one despite being large enough to have previously used five (China)! Time zones get complicated very quickly, but have a rather simple origin -- Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the goal of aiding sailors in determining longitude at sea. This is where the term "prime mer...

  Several years ago I had heard about the concept of a "RetroPie." A Raspberry Pi loaded with hundreds of classic games that can be connected to custom home builds, arcade systems, or just a normal TV. The idea always interested me as I'm a fan of '80s style arcades, but primarily from the perspective of getting this to work on a computer about the size of a credit card. I recently decided it was time to give it a try. I had seen plenty of Raspberry Pi's before -- I knew what they were and generally what they were capable of, but never actually used one. My  Raspberry Pi 4 Model B  actually had better specs than I was expecting. Next I needed a case and other supplies to get this ready to be a RetroPie. A list of requirements is supplied on the RetroPie website . Ordering Supplies I already had a USB keyboard, a USB flash drive, a USB controller, and an HDMI cable. I needed to order: a case (I chose one that looks like a NES) a micro SD card (I went with 256GB)...

  Reading File Permissions Linux file permissions are broken down by User, Group, and Others. Permissions for read, write, and execute can be associated with each entity and are displayed as rwxrwxrwx. As an example, take alternatives.log  -- the first entry shown in the screenshot above. The file is owned by the root user and the root group. It's permissions are set as -rw-r--r--.  The first "-" we're going to ignore for now, and we'll focus on the rw- r-- r-- section. The can be interpreted as root (the user) can read and write this file, but not execute. Root (the group) can only read this file. Finally, others, which means anyone not the user or group, can only read the file. Now that we can check the file permissions, what if we need to change them? First we'll change the user and group that owns the file, then we'll come back to the permissions. Changing File Ownership First, any given file or directory can have the owner user and group changed ...