Damn, I hope he is just taking a break from online.
I just had a really good friend of mine disappear from social media, didn't respond to messages, nobody could get him on the phone. I didn't know his new address as he had moved a few months ago. It took me some time, but I finally figured out who his landlord was and managed to get hold of him and he told me he found my friend dead from a heart attack a couple of months ago. And he had just completely turned his life around after several years of really bad times. Only in his 50s too...
If you ever do a call out like this make sure that you clearly let it be known how you can be reached in a non-public way so that whoever wants to answer you isn't going to make the persons' original details public. This matters because the information of the newly deceased and people who have gone missing is ideal fodder for the kind of criminal that likes to masquerade as someone else. It also isn't a very good idea to make those details public because then others might start crank calling the person of interest.
The Gryphel Project is awesome, and Paul’s disassembler helped me obtain a listing of the ROM for the Macintosh SE/30, which I used to debug a faulty floppy drive chip. Couldn’t have done nearly as much without his work. Hope he’s doing ok.
At the end the author talks a bit about passing his own stuff on to others. I’ve often wondered if I could or should do the same. I don’t have anything that has a big community behind it but I’ve been making random stuff for a long time. Maybe just open sourcing it is the answer, but some day GitHub (or whatever) will probably get rid of it.
There are a couple of groups that are archiving source code. Software Heritage for example continuously archives repos from GitHub and many other code hosting sites. They are also planning on an archiving service for private source code. ArchiveTeam Codearchiver is about archiving both the repos and surrounding data like issues, pull requests and discussions:
What about other, personal stuff.
What do people do to make their passwords to online services, banks, etc... available to their loved ones after they're gone, in a secure way?
> If he’s died, it’s entirely possible that Paul’s heirs might not think or care to tell anybody outside of his immediate family and friends
My recent personal experience is: would that I knew who to tell let alone had contact details!
Just now, 2 months after a family member died, I was discovered by some friends via her workplace and got to pass on the bad news.
If I could've gotten onto a phone or ipad I would probably have found everyone, but I could not. So maybe in another 6 months I will get to tell someone else. Who knows.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind this post I don't think it's the best thing if he happens to see it, that he gets reminded that he's gonna die some day.
there is that old joke about someone complaining that his old friends didn't keep in touch only to show up at that persons funeral.
with that in mind, i think showing that someone is being missed is a sign of care, and with older people worrying that they might have passed away is just part of that.
i mean, it's fine if you believe that to get through the day but in my experience death has never been a desirable or peaceful thing no matter how wise the person was. i had to watch a very good friend die once who never had a shred of resentment, malice, only wanted what's best for everyone. in the end I gotta tell ya, it wasn't pretty, and I'm pretty sure he'd rather not had been dying. he was 74.
I just had a really good friend of mine disappear from social media, didn't respond to messages, nobody could get him on the phone. I didn't know his new address as he had moved a few months ago. It took me some time, but I finally figured out who his landlord was and managed to get hold of him and he told me he found my friend dead from a heart attack a couple of months ago. And he had just completely turned his life around after several years of really bad times. Only in his 50s too...