Whitson, I'm impressed with your cable management. Under my desk is a huge nest of power and network cables. About the best I can do is keep them from getting too tangled up. I could probably go wireless for a lot of it but wired is still faster and more reliable, especially for stuff that doesn't get moved around…

Not sure what your concept of HPC is, but hooking up a bunch of these via Ethernet is really stretching it.

One of the just-announced Steam machines is a Brix. This version is big enough to put a laptop HD/SSD, so you don't need to go mSATA. (I believe there's a version of the Haswell i7 NUC that can also do this, but I've never seen it for sale anywhere.

Yes, according to "man diff". (It appears diff on Mac is from GNU Diffutils, which is probably the same as the diff in Linux.)

So here's an interesting one: Q: Why does the output of this command look weird?

The default key bindings in various shells are like emacs. Instead of Escape followed by k/j, you can go up and down with control-P and control-N, and there are other key combinations for editing or searching the command history stack.

A lot of this stuff is second nature for crusty old command line veterans like myself. I would encourage people to do "man bash" (or whatever your choice of shell is; mine's tcsh). There's a whole section about command line history and how to navigate and edit it. (If you aren't used to reading man pages, they can…

Every day, I use "vi" and other Unix tools that are largely unchanged for ~25 years.

informal measuring: using lines on your fingers to measure the water for cooking rice, wrapping the waistline of pants around your neck to determine if pants will fit, ...