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

Self-administering amnestics

Ah, I see you have discovered an infinite loop. Not that you'll remember.

Of the total population.

The working-age population is probably half that, which doubles that 16% to 32%.

Let's see a newspaper run with "Austerity gone wrong: One in three Britons have no savings"

But then that's too many words for a front page.

At a guess, it's because the function of preserving file dates and times is more likely than setting the port to something other than the default, so it gets the lowercase character, whereas ssh doesn't do anything with files so the port option gets the lowercase character.

The inconsistency is annoying though. I wonder if they could make ssh's -p option case insensitive so -P works across the board. (Maybe -P is reserved for some unknown future purpose?)

A work-around would be introducing long options and having --port be the option's long name across all the commands, but then, that comes with its own problems.

Technically, if it's a land line port and still connected to an exchange that hasn't gone completely VoIP (that's a thing where I am), it might actually be possible to build a charger module that plugs into that port.

Would it be worth it, though? ... No.

Low power is supplied over old land-lines for the purposes of making telephones ring and powering other handset bits and pieces, within reason of course. Using it for anything else is undoubtedly illegal as phone lines aren't rated for huge power draws.

(If you're interested, there are videos online where people have hooked up LED lamps etc.)

But, let's say that module existed and was legal. Your niece still wouldn't be happy with it.

To avoid burning out to the telephone line, any such device would have to be a r e a l l y s l o w trickle charge.

I wouldn't even think about it for emergency power outages. A battery backup is a better option.

Device 2? Had to look that one up. Secondary tape drive. Maybe also double duty as disk drives on the user port, but I may be mixing that up with the C64.

For a few basic things, yes. For a couple of others, I've set up a shell function or a script instead.

Obligatory warning before I list a few of my aliases - overriding commands by an alias with the same name can be dangerous, as it can mean that expected behaviour can become destructive behaviour on a foreign system without those aliases. e.g. a common error is aliasing rm to rm -i so that rm always asks if the user is sure. Until that user is on a different machine without the alias and the files vanish without warning, anyway. Oops.

Some of mine are arguably questionable in that regard, but I don't think any will result in anything particularly destructive if I expect them in the wrong place.

These two override the default which command to deliver slightly more useful output, especially when the command is itself an alias (or an alias override). command is a bash builtin:

    
alias Which='command -V'
alias which='command -v'


  

The obligatory ls config override. long-iso formatting ensures that ls's output is consistent, which is tidy, and also useful for further processing. That said, use of stat is probably a better choice for that sort of thing.). LC_ALL=C setting is so that things sort in "ASCIIbetical" order. My locale mixes upper and lowercase filenames and I'm too old-school for that sort of thing.:

    
alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style=long-iso'


  

Some versions of mtr start in GUI mode. -t prevents that. And of course, Windows muscle memory dies hard:

    
alias mtr='mtr -t'
alias tracert='echo '\''Use mtr, you ninny.'\'''


  

Hex dump using the ancient and nearly always present od command (the incantation is right out of the od manual):

    
alias odx='od -A x -t x1z -v'


  

Process control. Give either a PID and the process will do as it's told. Usually. :

    
alias pause='kill -TSTP'
alias resume='kill -CONT'


  

How many times do I type the wrong thing? Too many:

    
alias quit='exit'


  

Setup for fortune. The first one is self-explanatory. The second one shows which of the fortune files the fortune came from (-c) but does some shenanigans to send that header to STDERR rather than STDOUT. This makes the header vanish when fortune is piped into fun things like cowsay.

    
alias bofh='fortune bofh-excuses'
alias fortune='fortune -c | while read -r line ; do [[ ! "$A" ]] && echo $line >&2 || echo $line ; [[ "$line" == "%" ]] && A=1; done'


  

I have a load of silly text cipher filters as scripts, but this one came for free with the bsdgames package

    
alias rot='caesar'
alias rot13='caesar 13'


  

And of course, every time I create a new alias (which isn't very often, I admit), I run this one, which dumps all current aliases into a file that some distros set up by default.

    
alias save_aliases='alias > ~/.bash_aliases'


  

Pretty sure the other guy would be kissing Israel's behind too. But you know this. You're anti-US whoever's in charge, right?

Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the Toriest of Tories, actually admitted that they'd shot themselves in the foot (he may even have used those exact words) by introducing voter ID at the last elections; a larger contingent of the Conservative-voting public than for other parties was unable to vote due to not having the requisite ID.

Many Conservative voters are scared shut-in curtain-twitchers who think the world's gone mad (I mean they're not wrong on that count, I speak as a shut-in myself), but that fear, for various reasons, makes them keep voting Conservative. Kind of hard to get ID if all you do is stay at home and your only way of staying informed is to read the Mail and Express every day, it would seem.

Thus, I would have thought the Cons would have found some excuse to get rid of it before the next lot of elections.

But then, that might mean getting the whole party to agree that it was a mistake rather than the occasional stopped clock.

This, or wmctrl that has some overlap. OR if this is Wayland (and not Xorg), whatever alternatives for those the window manager provides.

Anyone know what those are?

Embarrassingly, I can't find where I read specifically what - ostensibly innocent - groups he was, and possibly still might be a part of, in order to refresh my memory.

He was a £75k a year doctor in 2012 though, so that much is out there. Admittedly, that isn't much, but if you earn that much, you know someone who knows someone, even if you don't know anyone directly.

"Bounds checking, mobof--ker! Do you speak it?"

Gerry has friends in high places - that bears repeating: he has friends in high places, and FWIW, he gives me sociopath vibes.

Hot take: Epstein's address-book full of high-profile people makes me wonder if there's an overlap somewhere.

Gerry's payment for their help is the constant rehashing of his daughter's disappearance in the news for whatever purpose that might serve. Even for a sociopath (assuming he is one), that's got to sting. But help is help, and he's not in prison, so maybe it's worth it.

Kate's fear and guilt is written all over her face, passing for and included with the expected grief, but she's had their two other kids to raise and she's afraid of what might happen if she leaves Gerry, so she's stayed with him.

Did either of them actually kill Maddie? No.

Well, not directly.

And in the tiny sliver of a hope she's still alive? I think I'd prefer she's been dead this whole time than have ended up in someone's basement (or a place like Epstein's island).

Prediction: They'll leave it as long as possible before calling the election.

Secondary prediction: If they think people are predicting they're holding off as long as possible, they'll call it earlier than they have to in order to prove the prediction wrong.

Tertiary prediction: "Earlier" will be no more than a month.

The card's Nvidia. Mint comes with the Nouveau driver which doesn't quite cut it, at least not for me. Maybe some of that's baked into the kernel these days, I'm not sure.

Earlier Mints (LMDE included) provided an installable package of the OEM legacy driver for cards as old as mine, but Debian 12 (which LMDE 6 is based on) doesn't.

I should point out that graphics works without the OEM driver, but it doesn't work well. Work is offloaded to the CPU that the card is perfectly capable of doing.

Not if it's really old. My dinosaur is over 12 years old and Debian stable (on which LMDE is based) no longer officially supports my graphics card.

If I want the graphics to work properly, I have to install the proprietary driver the hard way, and reinstall it every time Xorg updates.

There are alternatives but all of them require more work or giving up features.

(And no, I can't just buy a new computer.)

Obligatory meme versions (contain strong language):

Oh no

Oh f--k

oh no we need to stop it at this level before it works its way to the top

"Where do you think we are?"

To use the trash as an analogy, I even picked up the bag and walked around with it a bit (the tab was open. I know I looked at it and scrolled down), but did it make it to where it was supposed to go? (information can into brain?) Doesn't look like it.

Clearly I did not. And now I am concerned because I thought I did.