palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally reg

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2 yr. ago

Hunt literally co-wrote a book on how to turn the NHS into a US-style system, and members of his family are prominent in private healthcare.

Understand now?

Begins planning a coconut / computer wedding.

Recursive chmod (or chown) has been breaking things since before systemd was a thing, so even if systemd is now responsible for stopping things from working, it can't have been that previously, especially at the time I might have done something silly.

As for repairing permissions only, I suppose it would be possible, assuming the system still works (or can somehow be encouraged to do so) to copy only the permissions (or at least infer them) from a backup or something rather than the whole files.

Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.

One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called "root", but that wasn't the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new "root" with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell "root" that it was UID 0.

The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.

Instant, sure, OK, but pick a slightly less evil brand. I'd say Kenco maybe, but that doesn't seem to be as well known outside Britain. Maybe Folgers for the North Americans.

But, how can it say anything without audio?

Just because you can...

Just put MOUSE.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS or run MOUSE.EXE from your AUTOEXEC.BAT

... wait, where am I again?

Well, it definitely works when shifting people politically.

Coming soon: Mockrosoft Overton Windows™

May could have been a good Thatcher but for the lack of balls. Truss could have been a good Thatcher but for the lack of a brain.

The former, a school administrator elevated well beyond her abilities, the latter, a child with a head full of Tory rhetoric but no means to innovate or extrapolate.

In a way, we should be glad we got them and not Maggies mark 2.

Theoretically yes, but yes, in that order.

I've worked with Linux for decades at this point and I'm still not 100% sure exactly what breaks; it's a mistake you make once, if at all, and you'll only get a little way into even trying to figure out how to fix things before you throw your hands up in disgust and reinstall / restore the OS (or whatever subdir was affected).

If I was to hazard a guess, it's the kernel itself that balks, but there are other, almost as fundamental things (lib.so files and the like) that may also be deliberately fussy.

Dude's in bed. ZZ is clearly the superior choice for the sleepy vi user.

TL;DR Maybe FreeBSD?

Back in the day, I was very interested in (the now extinct) PC-BSD, but it really didn't like the unusual HDD setup I had (Third IDE channel maybe? The details are fuzzy now.)

Never got to the stage of trying gaming on it, but I think I might have been planning to dual boot?

Anyway, it must have been a while ago because that was my previous PC, which I donated to a relative the better part of a decade ago.

So, given that it was a FreeBSD, I guess that's what I'd be looking into, but I can't say I know enough right now.

Can also recommend HISTFILE="", which amounts to the same thing.

That site really needs a newer stock photo of cash. I felt compelled to look it up: The paper tenner was withdrawn in 2018 and the round pound coins were withdrawn in 2017.

Feels like last week. Where the hell has the time gone? (Pandemic probably hasn't helped.)

Back on topic, those economists are letting their cold, blue little hearts rule their heads. Ghouls.

If you're using find all the time, check to see if you have or can have some variant of locate installed. It indexes everything on the system ( this is configurable) and can be queried with partial pathnames, even with regex, and it's fast.

Back in the 80s/90s there were keyrings that would play an alarm if they heard a whistle at a particular frequency. You're basically playing Marco Polo with your keys.

I assume they lost popularity because the batteries tended to run out at inopportune times. Batteries are better now. Maybe it's time those things made a comeback.

At that point I'd be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It's then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.

There are even awk repositories, but I'm not sure there's a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.

LMDE6 came out within the last couple of months. It's based on Debian 12 which, at time of writing, is less than 6 months old.

Upgrading is still wise every couple of years because the base Debian distro also reaches EOL, but yes, rolling updates occur constantly in the meantime. Provided the system owner allows them to anyway.

You know that sed does more than s///g, right?

Someone even wrote a version of dc (the arbitrary precision RPN desktop calculator) with it. They were clearly insane of course, but it proves that sed is more than just find and replace.

Honourable mention to awk's sub() and gsub() that, at least for basic find/replace, do the same thing. awk is often surprisingly quick.