palordrolap

@palordrolap@kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

Dieses Profil is von einem föderierten Server und möglicherweise unvollständig. Auf der Original-Instanz anzeigen

palordrolap ,

Linux Musk sounds like the evil counterpart to Mint. A fork of Red Star OS, etc.

palordrolap ,

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

palordrolap ,

Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven't had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there's always someone with a different take.

palordrolap ,

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn't get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn't know what you were doing.

palordrolap ,

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell's manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won't cause an infinite loop.

  • And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.
palordrolap ,

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn't have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I've tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn't intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn't need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

palordrolap ,

One of Perl's design principles was the Robustness principle, though it probably wasn't known by that name at the time. (The name came about around the same time Perl was becoming a thing, something something zeitgeist something.)

Perl can be locked down and made to complain (with at least a couple of levels of pedantry) when things are wrong, but unlike most other languages, it doesn't do so by default.

danie10 , an Random Englisch
@danie10@mastodon.social avatar

Try these Linux bash aliases for more efficient use of the command line

For those who don’t know, bash aliases allow you to create unique command shortcuts. So, a simple word can be used to run a more complex command which may have a lot of additional parameters, e.g. just type the word ‘update’ to execute an update com ...continues

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/try-these-linux-bash-aliases-for-more-efficient-use-of-the-command-line/

palordrolap ,

The trash one is a little outdated and won't necessarily put the trashed file where the user's GUI file manager would put it.

gio trash FILE and kfmclient move FILE trash:/ are the compatible commands under GNOME and KDE respectively. Derivatives generally use one or the other.

Unfortunately, the KDE one is somewhat tricky to do with an alias, what with the parameter being in the middle. I am also unsure as to whether it has a force option. Web results are inconclusive and I'm on a GNOME derivative.

palordrolap ,

find's expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.

That said, there's nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.

The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I'm guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)

palordrolap ,

I think I might be the third option: f'ss-tab.

Couldn't tell you where that's from. When I first ran Linux, the year didn't start with a 2.

palordrolap ,

If they have any sense they'll not try to find out what's on it and send it straight to whatever electronics recycling is available.

Sticking a USB device of unknown provenance into your computer is just asking for trouble. (When you think about it, we even take a risk every time we buy one.)

Sure, you know it's harmless, but they don't know that, even if you tell them. Who are you? You're just someone who used to live in their house. As far as they know, you might be a freak who gets a kick out of leaving dodgy devices around for people to find.

palordrolap ,

"Socky"

"Socky Junior"

"Socky Sock Sock"

"The guy who wrote this implementation was suffering from burn-out, wasn't he."

palordrolap ,

I must have heard "saata" somewhere because that's my head-pronunciation, and it doesn't match how I say data (dayta). Not sure I've ever said it out loud.

Could be an "avoiding saying anything like 'Satan'" kind of thing, not because of religion, but more to avoid lame jokes.

palordrolap ,

Ha. No, I don't think it was Linus, but it might have been someone else European. Really hard to be sure at this point. SATA has been around for a while.

And I've unearthed a memory of the other, other pronunciation that I know I've heard: "serial ay-tee-ay". Why make it an acronym when you can say one of the words and then the initials of the others!

palordrolap ,

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn't laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

palordrolap ,

Weaksauce. Everyone knows you configure at least one Vulcan-nerve-pinch dead-key chord that primes the following key chord to switch the layout.

Only half joking. I'm the guy with Ctrl-Super-Alt-Shift-Pause set to put the PC into Suspend mode.

Unrelatedly, I hope the meme name isn't a dog-whistle of some sort, because that really would be weaksauce.

palordrolap ,

Thanks! I wanted something hard to hit by accident but with a nice mnemonic in it.

A cat-on-keyboard situation could just about manage it, but I don't have a cat.

palordrolap ,

Debian has a .deb that does the job.

Unless you have a really old graphics card anyway and then you have to use the .run installer from Nvidia. Pain in the a-- sure, but still not Joker level hurt-the-world madness.

palordrolap ,

Yep. The phrase "Personal Computer" is fairly old at this point. Everyone and their dog called their computer product a "Personal Computer" back in the 80s. The id-plate on the Commodore 128 and 64C computers had that exact phrase under the computer name.

"IBM-compatible personal computer" is a wordy phrase, and even before the "IBM-compatible" part became somewhat anachronistic, it was being abbreviated to just "PC", heralding the death-knell for most other systems that otherwise had every right to use the name.

I'd like to interject for a moment. ( lemmy.ml ) Englisch

What you’re refering to as Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another closed component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising...

palordrolap ,

Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)

As for Windows' WM being Explorer, yeah, that's basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I've been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.

Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.

Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it's probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it's set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn't the WM, it'll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.

palordrolap ,

Any self-respecting malware writer will download and decompile the Powertools to find out what API calls are being used. Especially if they're calls to an undocumented API.

Having Powertools on your computer is thus not the security hole it might appear to be.

The fact they exist at all - well that's not really a security hole either. Their existence just more quickly dissolves any security-by-obscurity that might have existed. Someone would have found those calls another way.

One might suppose that they contain something special that's not in the stock OS, but then we're back to the malware writer's reverse engineering which would lead them to learn and implement their own versions of whatever it is that Powertools does.

palordrolap ,

You want to win me over? For starters, provide a layer that supports all hooks and features in xdotool and wmctrl. As I understand it, that's nowhere near present, and maybe even deliberately impossible "for security reasons".

I know about ydotool and dotool. They're something but definitely not drop-in replacements.

Unfortunately, I suspect I'll end up being forced onto Wayland at some point because the easy-use distros will switch to it, and I'll just have to get used to moving and resizing my windows manually with the mouse. Over and over. Because that's secure.

palordrolap ,

If I remember right, that is almost exactly what they thought. Or rather he. I think it was one guy. The one who wrote the RFC. And no-one called him on it because at the time, that did not seem unreasonable.

4.3 billion devices that all need their own unique address? It's not like everyone on Earth will need one.

What then followed was allocations of giant swaths of IPv4 addresses to large organisations, compounded by the fact that similarly large swaths were already reserved for special uses, leaving the whole thing with a problem basically from the outset.

I believe that one guy has said that he wishes he'd made it 64 bit and even thought about it at the time. But the "save every byte" mindset of the pre-Internet era was still very much alive and well, and I think that's why he went for the smaller option.

palordrolap ,

With Microsoft, any love shown could well be the Embrace part of the strategy that will lead to Extend and then Extinguish just as soon as they can figure those parts out. They might already have a plan.

The fact they've been able to turn things to their advantage so far does not mean they don't have such a plan. Or won't ever have one.

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