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

Charge the doctor a $10,000 bullshit-charge charge, which is what you charge when you're given a bullshit charge. The beauty is that the bullshit-charge charge cannot be countered by another of itself. At least not in these circumstances.

You'd think the doctor could counter with a bullshit-charge-charge charge, but that would both be a clear admission that the initial charge is bullshit, and further, invites another bullshit-charge charge, because a bullshit-charge-charge charge is also clearly bullshit.

"Listen, you. The correct course of action is always and I mean always whatever makes the most money for me and my mutual back-scratching cronies in the short term, possibly medium term if I dare plan that far ahead. Sod the long term and anyone else because I'm going to make damn sure I've got mine until the moment I kick the bucket. What are you going to do about it?" -- Sir Stereotypical Tory

Fun fact: If your shell is Bash or supports the same feature(s), date technically isn't needed; printf '%(%s)T\n' works the same.

Yes, that is a date/strftime-style percent escape inside a specific parenthetical printf percent escape.

"Everything's broken" / "only run it in a VM". Where have I heard that before? Oh yes. ReactOS.

Totally different OS project with some remarkable similarities, apparently.

ReactOS has a head start. Who will win?

Popcorn, anyone?

(But seriously, I'd very much like both to do well.)

Me on LMDE: Sherman / Centurion hybrid it is then.

Censhermion? Uh. Maybe not that name though.

wonder if Cameron has any intentions of running for leadership again.

I would not be surprised if that turns out to be the plan.

There's no-one else in their party who's vaguely fit for the job, even based solely on the last few examples they've produced. A cannier eye, even a Tory one, would likely see that their other potential candidates are just as bad.

A dumb idea that probably doesn't have an implementation: Set Thunderbird to play a sound on mail arrival, but have the sound file actually be a pipe that when read from also pushes a system notification. This is kind of like how randomised .signature files were often set up in the old days.

Other alternatives: 1: There might be a purely mail checker out there that can log into mail servers to see if there's new mail there but not be able to read or download it.

2: Run your own mail server that pulls mail from other servers. Then it's "merely" a matter of checking for file update times on your own machine. Ancient tools like xbiff were designed for this.

What are you using to full-screen the video?

That is, are you using the letter-F key while the video is the active screen element, or likewise, clicking the ⛶ full-screen icon in the bottom right of the video, or are you doing something else?

What it sounds like you're doing is using something like the F11 key, which is the browser's own "go fullscreen" key, but that's not for the video. (I will admit to having done this accidentally once or twice when I'm not concentrating.)

OR Maybe you're not doing that but something else is hooking into F11 instead??

FWIW, I've never had anything like what you describe happening on Mint (LMDE)

Testing on my own computer, one workaround appears to be to use unmodified PrintScreen, leaving a hand free for the mouse, and quickly right-click for the context menu after the keypress but before the Save pop-up appears.

A PITA to be sure, but it does capture the context menu.

As for cropping down a full-screen capture, I tend to use PhotoFlare for jobs like that (find it in Software Manager) assuming you haven't anything else installed that does the job.

It's not recommended to alias a command, especially a common one, to something that fundamentally changes the behaviour like this. The reason is that one day you might be on a different system - or a fresh install - that doesn't have the alias in place.

And suddenly files disappear without the now-expected prompt.

By all means set up an entirely different or unused command name. rmi might be ok, but then again, you could miss the i and still be in hot water.

The usual exception to this is aliasing commands like ls to include user preferences that only change output behaviour. On a different or fresh system, the worst that happens is the user doesn't quite see what they're expecting, but will see something close enough and no files go missing.

If you're on a GNOME or GTK system, check if you don't already have the gio command. It has a trash subcommand that puts a file into the desktop trash/rubbish bin. It can also be used to resurrect files from there. gio help trash shows the usage.

You might even want to incorporate it into your existing script.

This unlocked a memory for me. I wanted a newer version of some software or other than was available by default (smart people might already see where this is going), so I added a repo for a newer upstream distro than my own. (Oh no.)

Suddenly, lots of updates available! "Where's the harm?" I thought, uncertainly. Many, many, many updates installed. Half excitement at the prospect of a shiny new system, half suspicion that the whole thing was an enormous mistake.

The whole memory hasn't come back to me, but I suspect it involved a dependency-broken or unbootable system, then a boot USB and judicious use of Timeshift to get back to a working state.

For monospace, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Was set in my terminal already, but I've just switched Firefox to it as of this comment because I forgot to after a recent upgrade. The default was Liberation Mono, which I don't have much of a problem with (hence me taking so long to do anything about it), but the serifs on BVSM are a bit less severe.

Liberation Serif as the default browser font is fine. Most sites define their own proportional fonts these days anyway, but less so for preformatted text.

For the OS in general, usually the defaults are inoffensive. There was a push a while back to use the Ubuntu font that I really don't like, and there I think I actually substituted it for the non-mono Bitstream Vera Sans, or some other similar font.

Vera is a Verdana-like font, which you'll know if you prefer the Microsoft options.

Different people react in different ways to all kinds of things. It's possible they are doing it right (whatever that might mean), but it has limited effect on them.

Case in point, there's at least one numbing agent that wasn't quite enough for me at the dentist when I needed some deep-ish work doing. Two doses of the regular stuff didn't do the trick for the tooth in question - despite the fact I was drooling all over the place and probably looked like I was having a stroke - so they had to dig out a scary looking syringe and some nasty tasting stuff.

I also had gas once as a kid and I don't remember any high from it, but then does anyone get a high from the knock-out dosage a dentist gives?

For me it's: 2^{1 to 2}16 (I remember the 8-bit era), a hazy gap and then 2^{24 (the marketing for 24 bit colour in the 90s had 16777216 plastered all over it). Then it's being uncomfortably lost up to 2}31 and 2^{32, which I usually recognise when I see them (hello `INT_MAX` and `UINT_MAX`), but I don't know their digits well enough to repeat. 2}64 is similar. All others are incredibly vague or unknown.

2^{23 as half of 2}24 and having a lot of 8s in it seems to have put it into the "recognisable" category for me, even if it's in that hazy gap.

So I grabbed a calculator to confirm.

In a place for programmer humour, you've got to expect there's at least one person who knows their powers of two. (Though I am missing a few these days).

As for considering me to be Ramanujan reborn, if there's any of Srinivasa in here, he's not been given a full deck to work with this time around and that's not very karmic of whichever deity or deities sent him back.

8388409 = 2^23 - 199

I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I'm still none the wiser as to why.

199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you're going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?

Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?

WHY DO I CARE

It's not that much of a spoiler, but I suppose that people who haven't seen it might not know that.

Something, something, Battlestar Galactica.

No, not "Bears, Beets", AI people is a literal plot point. Ditto spin-off Caprica

My brain is an enigma even to itself.