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Comment by tentacleuno | Hacker News Reader

It might sound a bit silly, but I've had pretty good results just naming my devices after Pokemon. Whenever I have a new device, I open the Pokemon DB[0], choose one at random, and then add it to my .csv file of device names -> what they are and what role they perform.

[0]: https://www.pokemon.com/uk/pokedex

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Rather than choosing at random, I like to pick names that have some relation to the device in question, e.g. "Pichu" for a tiny mobile device, "Snorlax" for the big slow machine, "Articuno/Zapdos/Moltres" for three successive powerful servers, etc. What's extra fun about Pokemon, if you're familiar with the franchise, is that you can pick names based on generation, with older generations for e.g. older devices, and if you're _really_ familiar with the franchise you could even pick names based on types or other characteristics.

Very similar here. PCs get Pokémon region names (MacBook is Johto), non-PC Ethernet connected devices get Professor names, all other devices are Pokémon.

Oh, I do the same! For instance, zygarde is my 14TB NAS, which I consider pretty big. I'm not familiar with the franchise though :)

I was so proud of my spec'd out M1 Max MacBook Pro that I named it "Arceus", the god of the Pokemon universe.

My company uses codenames like this for our services and it drives me insane every time I have to go look up which is which or mentally convert to the name it should have been given.

At work, let's just call things what they are.

Sounds like that would be a perfect simple application for a go/ link or a Raycast extension, just saying :p

This is not silly at all :-)

Seems pretty in line with the RFC about this https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1178.txt

I do something similar but with other mobile/gacha game characters since those names are always in abundance. I also try to do some kind of correlation with the fictional settings too (groups of devices will correspond to meaningful in-domain names)

For non-mobile devices like workstations or servers, I also tend to directly give FQDN, like (name).(location).(my-personal-domain.tld)

If youlook for a naming scheme: this wiki has you covered

https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page

I do the same thing but with Star Trek words! I have a somewhat logical naming scheme too. Computers are named after Star Trek ships (Yorktown), phones are named after handheld devices (Phaser), and drives are storage related things (Isolinear). And my printers are just named Replicator and Synthesizer.

This is fun.

I've been using chili peppers (peri, shishito, ancho, ...) for my devices for the last few years. Many years before that, I was using named swords (notung, glamdring, sting, etc).

Back in college my boss named a sun workstation lab with aleutian islands, and another after indonesian islands. (Some of those were fun to remember, there was an umnak and an unimak.) The servers were named after seas and oceans. We tried to name a new lab of windows machines after bugs, but the department nixed that.

I've historically preferred to use Culture series ship names (eg. GCU Grey Area, GCU Jaundiced Outlook, etc.), but stopped after Elon started naming his SpaceX ships like that.

I then went for Scottish Single Malt names (eg. Laphroaig, Jura, etc.).

After quitting alcohol, I've now settled on Douglas Adams names (eg. Deep Thought, Grunthos the Flatulent, etc.).

Naming machines is the most fun part of the job.

My go-to is either gods from Norse mythology, or Transformers for servers.

I set my iPhone to an emoji, and apparently it's one of the emojis that is composed of multiple emojis to render correctly. It's fun to see how every device it connects to draws the emoji or more likely boxes a little different.

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