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palordrolap

@ palordrolap @kbin.social

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Joined
2 yr. ago

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

  • Where to "practice Linux" terminal commands

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  • 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.

  • Elon Musk publicly dumped California for Texas—now Golden State customers are getting revenge, dumping Tesla in droves

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  • Presumably this means that Musk/Tesla is looking to embrace this newfangled source of energy known as "aul" and can be extracted from the Earth itself with a magical device called a "puhmpjaak". Older Teslas can be upgraded by installing a "gehneraydor" in their "truhnk" whatever that means.

    Company may or may not be renamed to Texla and start referring to themselves as the largest ~state~ automobile company in the USA when they aren't.

  • GNU nano 8.0 Released with New Options and Various Improvements

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  • 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.)

  • Hey good news guys!

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  • In some interpretations of "bug-driven" programming, no file, or perhaps an empty file, is an instance of the zeroth-bug: The project does not exist.

    One could argue that this bug zero is the true ancestor of all other bugs. There's something satisfyingly set-theoretic about it.

  • The Millennial CAPTCHA

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  • Different Strokes might well be more of a Gen-X thing. I remember it being on TV (in England) when I was a kid and remember recognising Gary Coleman when he showed up in the '80s Buck Rogers TV series, but I was very young at the time. Pre-school age definitely.

    Also, the younger cast of Scrubs are Gen-Xers and they definitely threw in a few references to it.

    But let's not forget that years-later re-runs were and still are a thing, even on the handful of channels that most people had back then, so there are bound to be some people younger than Gen-X who also grew up with those shows as their parents enjoyed them the second time around.

  • The Average™ arch user

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  • Thanks! I wanted something hard to hit by accident but with a nice mnemonic in it.

    A cat-on-keyboard situation could just about manage it, but I don't have a cat.

  • The Millennial CAPTCHA

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  • The iPod got me. Never had one. Never had a friend who did. This could be a Gen X experience or a cash-poor Millennial experience. If it hadn't been for the hint I would not have got past that part.

    I also didn't have that particular Nokia so it took me a moment to figure out which button deleted mistakes. Mistakenly thinking that the CAPTCHA designers might not have implemented that part of the interface didn't help.

    Had to guess on the boomerang. I've seen boomerangs but didn't know that's what they're called nor have I ever posted one. Again, this could be an "I don't post on that platform" or an "I only post pictures and haven't used that feature" experience. I definitely have an account on at least one platform that hosts them though.

    I am technically not a Millennial. The term for my cohort is Xennial, I believe.

  • The Average™ arch user

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  • Weaksauce. Everyone knows you configure at least one Vulcan-nerve-pinch dead-key chord that primes the following key chord to switch the layout.

    Only half joking. I'm the guy with Ctrl-Super-Alt-Shift-Pause set to put the PC into Suspend mode.

    Unrelatedly, I hope the meme name isn't a dog-whistle of some sort, because that really would be weaksauce.

  • Removed

    what do you think about my tier list of distros

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  • Eh. Not quite. Yes, the main editions use Ubuntu as a starting point, but they remove a load of Canonical's cruft, like Snaps. They have their own suite of applications, the XApps, that are forks of other tools, as well as a number of other improvements and changes.

    I couldn't say whether it's as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is from the original Debian, but it's some distance removed for sure.

    And LMDE is based on Debian, skipping Ubuntu entirely.

  • Auto kill memory leaking processes before swap death loop

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  • You could probably rig something up to periodically check RAM usage and if it's dangerously high, send a system notification - or make an xmessage popup - to tell you to restart Brave ASAP. That is, before the death loop begins in the first place.

    You might also want to install an extension that unloads tabs that haven't been accessed in a while, especially if you're a tab hoarder.

    I don't use Brave, so I'm making assumptions that such an extension exists and that Brave can be restarted without losing all tabs, etc.

  • A broken man

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  • Debian has a .deb that does the job.

    Unless you have a really old graphics card anyway and then you have to use the .run installer from Nvidia. Pain in the a-- sure, but still not Joker level hurt-the-world madness.

  • Actually idk where to ask..

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  • Nah. Notepad in Windows. Definitely.

  • Why is Windows "PC"?

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  • Yep. The phrase "Personal Computer" is fairly old at this point. Everyone and their dog called their computer product a "Personal Computer" back in the 80s. The id-plate on the Commodore 128 and 64C computers had that exact phrase under the computer name.

    "IBM-compatible personal computer" is a wordy phrase, and even before the "IBM-compatible" part became somewhat anachronistic, it was being abbreviated to just "PC", heralding the death-knell for most other systems that otherwise had every right to use the name.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)

    As for Windows' WM being Explorer, yeah, that's basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I've been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.

    Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.

    Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it's probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it's set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn't the WM, it'll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.

  • the hardest exam question

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  • Depends on how you define "scripting language".

    Older techs remember when it was only browser-based and they thought of, and perhaps still think of, "scripting languages" as something that would run from some command-line or another. Starting a GUI browser to run a mere script was a ridiculous concept. (There was also that JavaScript had no filesystem access. At least initially. And then it became a gaping security hole, but I digress.)

    Today, there exist command-line accessible versions of JavaScript but even there (I figure) most people wince and choose anything else instead. Maybe even Perl.

    But another definition of "scripting language" is "(any) interpreted programming language" and where it runs is unimportant.

    From that perspective, sure, JavaScript qualifies. And so does QBASIC.

  • mv Windows Linux

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  • Any self-respecting malware writer will download and decompile the Powertools to find out what API calls are being used. Especially if they're calls to an undocumented API.

    Having Powertools on your computer is thus not the security hole it might appear to be.

    The fact they exist at all - well that's not really a security hole either. Their existence just more quickly dissolves any security-by-obscurity that might have existed. Someone would have found those calls another way.

    One might suppose that they contain something special that's not in the stock OS, but then we're back to the malware writer's reverse engineering which would lead them to learn and implement their own versions of whatever it is that Powertools does.

  • I've never played games. Suggest a couple of addictive games I can play on Linux

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  • Statistics. It's a menu option.

    If you look, be thankful it only shows per-world information. And there's no count of server time once you lose access to a server's world.

    No-one can know.

  • How do you say SUSE?

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  • English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There's bound to be some cruft in the code.

    Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it's the best thing since sliced silicon.

  • Linus Torvalds Injects Tabs To Thwart Kconfig Parsers Not Correctly Handling Them

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  • I turned the volume down to a more comfortable level.