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I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a computer called “gandalf”. Markforged, a company that makes 3D printers, uses a string of two words as a unique name fo

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a computer called “gandalf”. Markforged, a company that makes 3D printers, uses a string of two words as a unique name for each printer sold. You never have to refer to a serial number. I think the second word is always an animal, so your printer might be called “sleeping giraffe”.

Sharlin 3y ago
A local Unix users’ group once had a server named “morgoth”. I guess in general the Middle-earth legendarium is a nigh-inexhaustible source of cool computer names.
iancmceachern 3y ago
We always have a lot of fun coming up with 3d printer names, my favorite- "sir prints a lot"
joshvm 3y ago
wandb (ML data tracking) generates random run names using a similar strategy. Also something we implemented at a past company for our networked spectrometers. They'd get "element_adjective" as a hostname. Another time, we called our drone onboard computers after the Valkyries. There are enough to go around and many of them are short and can be anglicised (e.g. herja, hrist, hildr, hrund). Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it.
- blooalien 3y ago
  > "Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it." As a young "hacker" way back in "ye olde days" of gaming, I played the computer game [0] which fortunately came with a paperback copy of the book at a time when I was an avid reader of sci-fi. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game)
kelvie 3y ago
Formlabs does this as well for their 3d printers, my earliest encounter of this was when Docker started getting popular: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/names-generator.go https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/...

Sharlin 3y ago

A local Unix users’ group once had a server named “morgoth”. I guess in general the Middle-earth legendarium is a nigh-inexhaustible source of cool computer names.

iancmceachern 3y ago

We always have a lot of fun coming up with 3d printer names, my favorite- "sir prints a lot"

joshvm 3y ago

wandb (ML data tracking) generates random run names using a similar strategy. Also something we implemented at a past company for our networked spectrometers. They'd get "element_adjective" as a hostname. Another time, we called our drone onboard computers after the Valkyries. There are enough to go around and many of them are short and can be anglicised (e.g. herja, hrist, hildr, hrund). Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it.

blooalien 3y ago
> "Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it." As a young "hacker" way back in "ye olde days" of gaming, I played the computer game [0] which fortunately came with a paperback copy of the book at a time when I was an avid reader of sci-fi. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game)

kelvie 3y ago

Formlabs does this as well for their 3d printers, my earliest encounter of this was when Docker started getting popular: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/names-generator.go https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/...