palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social

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

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Comparing audio cassettes to modern high-density tape storage is pretty much the same comparison as an 8-bit computer with a modern 64-bit server, or, say, a hamster with a human.

Basically the same thing, but the differences are somewhat notable.

512KB? At the risk of going all Four Yorkshiremen, that sounds luxurious.

Floppy disks held 170KB if you were lucky to have a drive. The PET line, like many 8-bit computers, used a cassette tape drive (yes, those things that preceded CDs for holding and playing music). Capacity depended on the length of the tape. And it took ages to load.

The PET was fancy because it had a built-in cassette drive. That's what you can see to the left of the keyboard in the picture.

Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there's a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it's very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn't put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

/old man rant

dude

The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that's where the setting actually resides. It's a pain to do, but that means it's possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.

For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won't get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.

It's currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.

(In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn't recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)

Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.

One wonders how a state with increasingly fascist tendencies would handle this crisis if it became impossible to ignore...

Most shells will issue $PS2 as the continuation prompt if you quote a filename and try to insert a carriage return.

Ctrl-V Ctrl-J is the explicit keypress pair to insert a carriage return without triggering $PS2, but beware: If the carriage return is outside of quotes, that's equivalent to starting a new command in much the same way a semicolon or a new line in a shell script would.

echo "hello^V^Jthere" [Enter] echoes hello on one line and then there on the next, but echo hello^V^Jthere [Enter] will echo hello then try to run a command called there

We'd have to assume that whatever fixes spaces in filenames would also have an option to fix this subtlety. And I say to whoever tries: Good luck with that.

This is the sort of thing I was talking about with "Don't go running commands [...] unless you're sure what they're going to do [...]"

I did a breakdown of this one on the snoosite back in the day. Searching "fork bomb" on YouTube is probably a better way to get that breakdown these days.

Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you're not really learning "Terminal" so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like "Bash examples" to get a feel for it.

If that's too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash's manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they're aimed at someone who's already somewhat competent.

Anyway, here's one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

If Bash isn't what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don't think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

To check what shell you're using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

Finally, a bit of advice: Don't go running commands you see on the Internet unless you're sure what they're going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don't know or trust - I can't vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It's possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.

If my hasty checking is valid, there's nothing in the Bible about holy water. There's holding a baptism, but nothing about holy men blessing water to imbue it with the Holy Spirit.

As such, I assume that any liquid blessed by a priest might be considered holy.

Something something Godly Gatorade, Blessed Baja Blast etc.

I remember using Pico, Nano's predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.

As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).

If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.

(Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)

That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.

I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.

Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.

And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.

Article now contains a link to a tweet showing a reissued image that has the Shuttle blurred out. Got to wonder if someone got in trouble for putting the Shuttle in there.

Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.

Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.

Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.

Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.

The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.

Not aware of any specific usages, but maybe they're used as meta-sets. e.g. "consider a set of numbers 𝕏 and a set of numbers 𝕐 ... etc, which can't be done with the defined letters.

Unicode originally only had the double-struck letters for the defined sets ℂ, ℍ, ℕ, ℙ, ℚ, ℝ and ℤ, but the full alphabets were later added at higher code-points with "reserved" gaps where the defined seven letters would otherwise appear.

(Complex, Hamiltonian quaternions, Natural, Prime, Quotient (rational), Real and Zahlen, a German word for counting numbers, for anyone wondering.

Quick edit: Zahl is cognate with English "tell" and "tale" which are both related to "tally", believe it or not. "Recounting a tale" didn't used to mean telling(!) a story, but instead literally checking a previous count, and developed the wider sense later.

Also, ℍ not getting "ℚ" because ℚ couldn't have "ℝ" is kind of funny.).

Prediction: Once everything is an app, there'll be no need for generic encryption and anyone found using it will be labelled a terrorist enabler and locked up.

Do you want deforestation because that's how you get deforestation.

These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.

This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.

Now it's true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by... reverse engineering.

And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.

The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.

If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.

But I'm not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.

Poe's Law in action.