palordrolap

@[email protected]

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,

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, (edited )

In Field of Dreams the ghost voice says "If you build it, they will come.", but fails to say "Oh yeah, you have to look after it once you've done that. You're gonna need a ride-on mower."

Like many folks on aggregator sites, I'd create magazines / communities / sub-sites if it didn't mean I then had to manage and moderate them afterwards. (There are many things in life that fit this pattern.)

Rhyme criticism:

  • "-zines" and "weeks" is, well, weak.
  • "Arrives" and "cries" is slightly better, but not by much.
  • "Soul" and "foul" don't rhyme either, despite appearances.

Then again, maybe it's my own accent that's spoiling these?

palordrolap,

Do better.

palordrolap,

And that in turn might be based on the story of the tired and hungry French aristocrat who, desperately trying to get to England to escape the Revolution, stopped into an inn for something to eat.

Ordering an omelette, something he thought to be sufficiently common and wouldn't give him away, the conversation went similarly to the one in this comic when he was asked by the suspicious innkeeper how many eggs he'd like in that omelette.

He did not make it to England.

(Soft-handed aristos have staff who know these things, but they themselves don't. The innkeeper, of course, knew this.)

palordrolap,

The lack of answer to the question "Why are Meta suddenly so open and willing to integrate with the Fediverse when they've basically been doing the opposite with their own products?" is a huge concern.

My guess is that they don't have an exact game plan yet, and are letting their naive, enthusiastic staff - those with no idea of the answer to the above question - do the initial scout and integration work with a view to see how it can be perverted for Meta's profit/benefit in future.

Meta probably wouldn't use the word "perverted", but from an outside perspective that's what it'd be.

My thinking here is exactly the same as in comments I posted about Microsoft's embrace of Linux a short while back: 1 2

palordrolap,

THEREareWORSEwaysTOtypeTHINGSandSTILLhaveTHEMbeKINDofREADABLE.whoNEEDSspacesWHENweHAVEtwoLETTERcases?

OrMaYbEwEcOuLdEsChEwEvEnThAtAnDjUsTaLtErNaTe.IfThErEaReWrItInGsYsTeMsWiThOuTvOwElsThAtCaNsTiLlBeReAdWhYnOtWrItElIkEtHiSiNsTeAd?

palordrolap,

Fun fact: All tetrapods are technically fish. Tetrapods are animals with four legs. Or two arms and two legs. If you get my drift.

There's the joke where God creates man and an angel berates him by saying "No, what you've done there is taken a perfectly good monkey and given it anxiety." ... but it's worse than that.

We're all fish. Most land fauna, including humans, are horribly mutated fish. Fish mutated enough to survive on land. This comic isn't a comic. It's the horrible, horrible truth.

And in writing this I realised that a great prophet had said all this before me (though if he were alive today, he might have said "personal computing devices" instead of "digital watches"):

"And lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." ­­— Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

palordrolap,

Yeah, that's how you can get an oddly dull but thought-stopping intense pain that's reminiscent of a bad cramp. The sort that feels like something's taking a bite, but from the inside, or like being punched in slow motion but there's no fist to push away and oh boy that smarts for the love of god make it stop.

The intensity fades as quickly as it sets in but you won't want to touch that part of your body for a while afterwards in case you set it off again. In time a bruise may develop, but not always.

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, (edited )

Perl has both $a || $b and $a // $b.

The || version is older and has the value of $b if $a is any false value including undef (which is pretty much Perl's null/nil).

The // version has the value of $b iff $a is undef. Other "false" values carry through.

Ruby took both "no return required" and "no final semicolon required" from Perl (if not a few other things), I think, but it seems that // was Perl later borrowing Ruby's || semantics. Interesting.

i.e. 0 || 1 is 1 in Perl but 0 in Ruby. Perl can 0 // 1 instead if the 0, which is a defined value, needs to pass through.

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,

Ylu might wake up brain damaged

Ylu might

Ylu

Uh-oh.

palordrolap,

For the love of God and all that is holy...

(If you know, you know.)

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,

TL;DR The fruit of the tree of knowledge being a literal apple is non-canon, being entirely based on a pun.

The word "apple" is not used in the Bible, that is, unless the Bible in question is a translation that specifically uses that word. Even then, see below.

The whole apple thing comes from:

  1. the fact that the word for "apple" can be used as a synonym for "(any) fruit" in some languages and context, and so could mean any fruit.

Think about French pomme de terre for "potato" which is literally "apple (meaning 'fruit') of the earth". Dutch has aardappel (earth apple) which is the same thing. Fun fact: Old English eorþæppel (earth apple) allegedly meant "cucumber". Go figure. But I digress.

  1. Latin is the main ecclesiastical language for one particularly influential branch of Christianity and one word for apple in Latin is "malus". That sounds like a lot of unrelated Latin words that start "mal-" that mean bad or evil, thus an apparent connection to the fruit of the tree of knowledge also leading to evil.

(I mean, it might actually be a proto-apple of some sort (modern apples did not exist 7000 years ago or whenever it was supposed to be) but the Bible doesn't specify.

Some scholars think that the whole thing developed out of metaphor for abandoning a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for farming. Others think that it might be a reference to beer / alcohol, which is one of the first things humans got interested in after farming.)

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,

That looks like it might be the monitor's own on-screen display rather than anything Puppy related. My guess is that the monitor hasn't been detected properly and Puppy is putting out a resolution that the monitor can't deal with.

Since the message says 1280x1024, either the monitor is 1280x1024 and can't deal with anything else, or it's not 1280x1024 and is being sent 1280x1024 resolution and is complaining about it.

(Or worse, it's a clock frequency error which was a real problem back in the early days of Linux.)

As for how to fix, the answer is going to be different depending on the age of the base Linux under Puppy and the graphical subsystem.

For X/X11/Xorg it's probably going to need use of the xrandr shell command, perhaps to delete the mode that is causing the problem. For Wayland, it appears that each window manager has its own xrandr equivalent. I see talk of a gnome-randr, for example.

To get to a shell in the first place, try the Ctrl+Alt+F1 key-combo. If the computer isn't frozen, that might get a text-based console login prompt. (Puppy might do things differently here though. Not sure.)

Alternatively, look up how to boot to a single-user shell by modifying GRUB options, that is, if no such option is there already.

Caveat: I am no expert. Take this under advisement. Also try web-searching some keywords. It might be there's a really simple fix for this that I don't know about.

palordrolap,

It's "better" because it keeps the yoke of oppression on the staff, and pathological managers absolutely love that kind of control. Ditto the ability to supervise / micromanage / breathe down people's necks.

This manager may not yet have had as direct a revelation as to be able to put the above into words, but they know what they like.

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.

palordrolap,

As the other person said, having a house or flat (apartment) door with a slot in it is probably the most common mail receiving method in Britain and maybe other European countries too. Ireland almost certainly, and common or not, I've definitely seen them in pictures of the Netherlands.

Some buildings might have a dedicated separate slot, but due to convention it's often very near the door, and any external mail boxes aren't far away either. They're often on the wall next to the door.

palordrolap,

Told this before in other places, and loosely speaking, it's kind of timely.

20 or so years ago, re-playing the original Half-Life (thus "timely" because of the recent updates and 25th anniversary of it), I had a relative sat behind me watching me play.

They asked me a question about something or other, and I immediately turned around to answer them.

In game.

I still remember where I was in the game and the milliseconds of confusion, realisation and feeling of stupidity.

That game was, is, pretty engrossing to be fair.

palordrolap,

You clearly haven't seen the comic where Captain America's shield hits its target with the onomatopoeia "WANK"

palordrolap,

I don't understand quantum mechanics.

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." ­-- Richard Feynman

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." -- John von Neumann.

The latter quote didn't occur in response to Feynman, which might be hinted at by the subjects not being aligned, but together they serve my point.

Both these men were terrifyingly intelligent and worked as physicists at least some of the time. If they couldn't understand quantum mechanics, then we mortals don't have much of a chance.

palordrolap,

Needs a line about tankies.

palordrolap,

There are browser extensions available that can help with the choice. From old-school Reddit habits, I tend not to use them on kbin, but here's an example from the one I use in other places: 🥦 (Hoping broccoli is a safe choice and doesn't have any weird alternative meanings.)

palordrolap,

That guy must have really enjoyed getting jifts at Christmas.

In other news, can we hook a dynamo up to wherever he's buried because the high RPM would probably power a small country at this point.

palordrolap,

All English words that start "gif-" (and for that matter "giv-") have a hard g.

While English is well known for a mess of exceptions, GIF has, or had, no precedent for soft G, so you'll forgive people for thinking that the choice of soft G on GIF is a little unusual and being rubbed the wrong way by it.

palordrolap,

Begins planning a coconut / computer wedding.

palordrolap,

Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.

One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called "root", but that wasn't the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new "root" with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell "root" that it was UID 0.

The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.

palordrolap,

Theoretically yes, but yes, in that order.

I've worked with Linux for decades at this point and I'm still not 100% sure exactly what breaks; it's a mistake you make once, if at all, and you'll only get a little way into even trying to figure out how to fix things before you throw your hands up in disgust and reinstall / restore the OS (or whatever subdir was affected).

If I was to hazard a guess, it's the kernel itself that balks, but there are other, almost as fundamental things (lib*.so files and the like) that may also be deliberately fussy.

palordrolap,

Recursive chmod (or chown) has been breaking things since before systemd was a thing, so even if systemd is now responsible for stopping things from working, it can't have been that previously, especially at the time I might have done something silly.

As for repairing permissions only, I suppose it would be possible, assuming the system still works (or can somehow be encouraged to do so) to copy only the permissions (or at least infer them) from a backup or something rather than the whole files.

palordrolap,

Just because you can...

palordrolap,

I only know that one time an obscure thing I was talking about here on kbin.social, perhaps as a response to a post on some Lemmy or another, ended up being indexed incredibly quickly by Google regardless of however things are structured in URLs.

This became apparent when I tried to do further research on the topic and I found myself staring at my own comment as federated on yet another Lemmy.

As long as search engines remain as on the ball as whatever happened there, we might actually end up with a repository anyway.

palordrolap,

Every time I see a headline like this I turn the maximum temperature of my central heating down by a degree. Guess I have to turn it down to 15°C.

The frost-guard "off" setting is 5°C, so assuming 1) nothing changes with regard to my living where I am and 2) we get headlines like this every 3-6 months, it looks like I might as well have my central heating ripped out permanently in about 4 years.

Yaaaaay.

palordrolap,

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.

palordrolap,

At that point I'd be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It's then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.

There are even awk repositories, but I'm not sure there's a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.

palordrolap,

Back in the 80s/90s there were keyrings that would play an alarm if they heard a whistle at a particular frequency. You're basically playing Marco Polo with your keys.

I assume they lost popularity because the batteries tended to run out at inopportune times. Batteries are better now. Maybe it's time those things made a comeback.

palordrolap,

If you're using find all the time, check to see if you have or can have some variant of locate installed. It indexes everything* on the system (* this is configurable) and can be queried with partial pathnames, even with regex, and it's fast.

palordrolap,

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.

palordrolap,

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.

palordrolap,

Here in Britain we have a whole slew (or sleigh) of others, but, sticking with the theme, very few of those are from the last 30 years.

I'm surprised at least a couple of them didn't catch on in the US. Maybe they're too whimsical or alien for the average US audience.

Similarly, Feliz Navidad is largely unknown over here. Then again, we don't have the large Hispanic cultural influence that might have allowed it gain a foothold.

palordrolap,

Two of the inescapable ones* are from the 70s and a couple of others besides, but yes, 1990 is a significant dropping-off point.

Curiously, one Top 40 chart for Christmas songs streamed in the UK, from December 2021 has Feliz Navidad in there at 35, which is kind of funny because that's above our own band The Darkness. Their '00s Christmas effort tried so hard to re-capture the spirit of the '70s and do well. To some extent it did but the magic wasn't quite there. It probably didn't help that it was based around a riff stolen wholesale from Queen's Brian May (Somebody to Love if memory serves.)

But importantly, that chart does list several others. It's a fairly safe bet that if you see a song, or band (or both) you've not heard of, it's probably one of our home grown ones that hasn't made it big where you are.

  • 9 and 12 on the linked chart.
palordrolap,

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)

subignition, to kbinMeta
@subignition@kbin.social avatar

Is it possible to submit a thread to a magazine hosted on a different instance? I wanted to post to a lemmy.world community but I can't get it to show up in the magazine selector on the add thread page. Is there syntax I am missing here or is it just not possible?

palordrolap,

TL;DR: To create a new post anywhere in the Fediverse, you have to have an account on the host where you want to create it. (As far as I know anyway.)

To participate in comments is slightly different, and in many cases, a comment made on a separate instance (or even platform) will show up on the original instance, provided the admins of each have set up respective federation.

Nonetheless, this can also fail. Consider several people on, say, kbin.social all subscribed to the same Lemmy community on some instance or another.

They'll all see each other's comments as well as the Lemmy users' comments, and be able to interact, but if that Lemmy's admin team decides not to allow external comments to be visible, the kbin folks will be talking to each other and no-one at the Lemmy, even if their comments are in response to, and show up underneath, a Lemmy user's message.

That Lemmy user would be totally clueless unless they knew to access kbin.social and check. And no-one's going to want, or even be able, to do the rounds of all potential Federation sites to see if they have unfederated responses.

What would be nice is if it was possible to log in to one Federation site with credentials for another, or have some non-specific login details that are shared across multiple, but I suspect that's a logistical nightmare waiting to happen.

Since I'm over a thousand characters in at this point, I might as well explain that you're getting this response two weeks late(r) because your post showed up on the kbin.social sidebar for me today for some reason.

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