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.)
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?
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.)
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: 12
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.