Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
Hah. I had a similar moment of enlightenment with FreeBSD when somebody explained that you can just cat a wav file into /dev/audio (or /dev/dsp? forget the exact name). And that you can produce white noise by catting /dev/random to the same destination. With no barrier to the sound card like that, I was free to experiment with programming dfferent noise algorithms and figuring out how digital audio works. I eventually did things the proper way with OSS and finally sndio on OpenBSD, but direct, universal interfaces like files invite that initial exploration and help you get things done quick and easy.<p>netcat is also a secret weapon around the house. My girlfriend runs macOS, but it's way more reliable to just nc files to each other over wifi than deal with all the cloud and airdropping bullshit.