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 name... at the moment) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

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

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

palordrolap,

Those guinea pigs are enormous.

Either that or it's a tiny trap and it was meant for a guinea-pig-sized bear such as, if true, the one in this comic.

palordrolap,

There are no capybaras in this strip unless they're in disguise as exceptionally large guinea pigs or wearing a bear cub costume anyway.

palordrolap, (edited )

This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key.

Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.

Now it's all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn't have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.

Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.

There'll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?

Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.

(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)

palordrolap,

People with newer Intel CPUs are way ahead of you. Even if they'd really rather not be.

palordrolap,

Yeah, it's a DVD now, right?

... Right?

palordrolap,

J. Draper, London historian and, from what I gather, popular TikToker and YouTuber, has an interesting hour-long video comparing the Muppet version to the original as well as the various things that wouldn't necessarily be covered in the original, like costumes and how London looked. It's not quite a watch-along, but it does cover things in movie order.

Watch here

If you're of short attention span (not judging, I'm in the same boat), put in on in the background while doing something else.

palordrolap,

She doesn't point out why the extra Marley might have been given the name Robert [1] (or maybe I missed a subtle raised eyebrow somewhere), nor did she show the shop front entitled Micklewhite's [2], but I don't suppose those fun facts are particularly relevant to a comparison / review.

[1] Bob Marley. Geddit? Funny joke is funny.

[2] Michael Caine's birth name was Maurice Micklewhite. He only made the legal change to his stage name fairly recently, well after the Muppet Christmas Carol even, because he found that people were confused and made suspicious by his documents not having "his name" on them when he was travelling.

palordrolap,

Am on LMDE6 with an ancient Nvidia card. Because I've had to resort to using the Nvidia OEM driver installer (which can be a pain to use), installed Xorg updates lurk quietly until a full reboot at which point they generally cause offloading of GPU tasks to the CPU instead because it hasn't figured things out properly.

Timeshift has been useful at least twice in getting me back to a less stressed system.

I think I have a procedure figured out now though (documented here for posterity even if it helps no-one today):

  1. Make a Timeshift snapshot just in case
  2. Install the pending Xorg update
  3. Reboot so it's fully active
  4. Check to see if GPU tasks are being offloaded to the CPU by doing something graphics intensive and noting temperatures or usage%. If not, a miracle has occurred and continuing isn't needed.
  5. sudo remove the execute permission on /usr/bin/Xorg so that it can't immediately be restarted by subsystems designed to protect the average Mint user from command lines and consoles.
  6. Kill Xorg
  7. Log in through a console, via Ctrl+Alt+F1 or similar if not dumped to one by killing Xorg.
  8. Re-install the Nvidia OEM driver
  9. sudo put the aforementioned execute permission back on
  10. Repeat steps 2 and 3 and hope that this time the GPU is doing the work.

Reboots ought to be replaceable by running specific commands, but I haven't gone deep enough into things to know the right things to do there. Reboots are quick and easy enough.

Obvious intermediate steps include not doing anything else important during this and saving important work before starting.

e.g. did you know it's possible to bookmark all open tabs? Well worth looking into.

palordrolap,

Doctor Octopus inspires many.

palordrolap,

Until the kids get their hands on it and decide use it to "paint" half a room.

palordrolap,

Maybe if he's a bit of an ass.

palordrolap,

Josh probably isn't that much of a fan of his birthday, tbh. It's the rest of us.

Well.

Those of us who decided or accepted that we'd celebrate Josh's birthday for him around the time of Roman Saturnalia or the pagan mid-winter* festival, even though that's very much unlikely to be the right date**, because there were already celebrations going on at that time. The whole "let's decorate a tree" thing is pagan.

There are some offshoots of Josh's fan club who don't think much of his birthday either, and instead have the big celebration around his death-date instead. Not like "at last he's gone and kicked the bucket", more like "yay he went to heaven and paved the way for the rest of us, or so we tell ourselves because that'd be awesome.". That's totally not also based around celebrations that existed before Josh, no siree.

Anyway, my point is that his opinion isn't really known, and he probably wouldn't decorate a tree. He'd be more likely to shout at it for not having figs.

  • where "winter" is defined as the seasons autumn and winter together, the same way that "day" can mean daytime and nighttime together)

** compare how the British monarch often has two "birthdays": An actual one and an official one in June where people can celebrate in nice weather. (Liz's real birthday was in April and Chuck's is in November. Both rainy months.)

palordrolap,

Do better.

palordrolap, (edited ) 
$ locate -r '.so$' | wc -l 
4468
$ locate -r '/lib[^/]*.so$' | wc -l
2488

We're going to be here a while.

palordrolap,

Tentatively yes.

I did once manage to mount an external USB NTFS drive to a VirtualBox-hosted copy of Windows 7 and was actually able to defrag it. I assume I also ran a quick disk check before that, but it was a long time ago now.

Before I did it, I backed up everything important off the drive to another location just in case. I'd recommend you do the same.

As to how I did it, I'm afraid I don't remember, but it can't have been that difficult. There may have been some kind of raw mount option in the virtualisation software.

The other potential obstacle is the fact that things have moved on since I did it. Newer Windows / NTFS might be not be as easy to fool into accepting a drive over weird virtualisation pathways. Or the virtualisation software might not allow it as easily or at all.

Hopefully that's not the case.

palordrolap,

Fun fact: The Windows BSOD colour was as easy as adding a couple of lines to a .INI file for a long time. Then, as they tend to do, they made it more difficult, but it was still possible. Third party tools were written to do the work.

Very recent MS Windows I have no idea about. My search-fu is failing me.

Anyway, my point is that the "two lines in a config file" method would be nice.

Knowing systemd though, it'll be "send some kind of message into a /proc pseudo-file", or a sub-sub-sub-command of one of the many systemd* commands which ultimately does the same thing.

palordrolap,

It's rare that I get to feel anything remotely comforting about not being able to afford new hardware, but if I understand correctly, my BIOS-only dinosaur can't be exploited.

Still vulnerable to thousands of other exploits no doubt, but not this one.

palordrolap,

"I can't AFFORD to keep FEEDING all these COATHANGERS! There's so MANY!! What can I DO?!? AAAAAAA!!!!"

palordrolap,

It's washing machines and dryers that find socks delicious.

... which is less of a joke than you'd think. Small items can get partially forced between the rubber seal and the drum and then when the drum rotates, the item is slurped outside like a strand of spaghetti.

Also sometimes identical-looking socks that get paired together by the manufacturers eventually drift in appearance because they were from separate dye batches, leaving the owner with a pair of odd socks.

The other other explanation is the sock gnomes. We don't talk about the sock gnomes.

palordrolap,

Makes sense to me.

My only concern is that pipe c is shown as having two different shapes: straight and slightly curved.

Based on the fact that the design requires that a and b be different, there would undoubtedly be the same situation for the four slightly curved c pipes. That is, there would need to be two "c2" pipes and two "c3" pipes in the set rather than just four more of the same c pipe.

That makes me think the diagram at the bottom was made before a decision to cut costs and/or simplify. Four regular c pipes will undoubtedly be cheaper and logistically simpler to manage for both shipping and user construction than having those two extra pipe types.

It was, of course, relabelled to match the supplied parts, but the hints of the original design still remain.

palordrolap, (edited )

Pipewire? It's very new to me and can't say I know much about it, not that I knew much about its predecessors either.

::: spoiler ...
(But putting the silliness hat on...)
:::

The pipes in the diagram are obviously named pipes, but they're not Linux pipes. There seems to be not only multiple types (which is disturbingly Microsoft), but often multiple by the same name (which would confuse most sane OSes, if not the insane ones too.)

It's almost like they're instances of a subroutine object all running in parallel...

palordrolap,

Technically the insect in the original gag was a moth, not a fly.

Certain kinds of moth caterpillars eat cloth. Banknotes at the time and location of the original gag were made of cotton fibre paper, (and indeed some places still do this, or did so very recently) so were theoretically as delicious to those caterpillars as cotton clothes would be.

For clothing, mothballs can be used to deter them from laying eggs wherever the clothes are, but it's kind of hard to cram a mothball into a wallet. Also, the money probably already had the eggs on it, which is too late for a mothball anyway.

Thus, if a moth flies out of your wallet, it means that the paper money is long gone because that moth had time to get all the way from egg, through note-munching caterpillar to moth before you opened your wallet.

palordrolap,

At least it's your own vomit.

palordrolap,

"UNEXPECTED_EOS" is almost certainly "unexpected end of stream", that is, the file is missing the end or there's data corruption and the unpacker has interpreted the bad data as meaning the file should be longer than it is.

Redownload the file, or try to download it using a different tool (e.g. wget or curl rather than a browser). If that still gets a truncated file, try a different source / mirror.

palordrolap, (edited )

To distinguish two Firefox profiles that I run simultaneously, I use different themes on each. For Firefox this might actually be the best way.

For a file manager (I assume the Dolphin you're talking about is the file manager), the closest I remember seeing is a red toolbar on the unrelated Nemo file manager when it's run as root.

If Dolphin is per-user theme-able, then you could do what I do with Firefox. If it supports other kinds of plug-in, then maybe there's one that does what you want already.

To my knowledge, windowing systems can't override the title of an application's window, and even if they could, the application could change it back again at any time, creating a race condition, or a very ugly situation where the system picks and chooses which windows are allowed to modify their titles and which ones aren't.

Therefore, I think you'd have to write your own plug-in (if they're a thing and the API permits title modifications), modify Dolphin's source code yourself or submit a feature request to Dolphin's developers, cross your fingers and wait.

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