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 username) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

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

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

palordrolap,

"I don't have a life or a job"

"FR me too"

"I thought you were a therapist"

~head shrunk into shoulders, sweating~

palordrolap,

Had to check. It looks like the comic actually only ceased production last year after the passing of the (second) artist.

Chris Browne took on Hägar after his father Dik - who drew the linked comic - died, but today I learned that Chris died last year.

As an extra kicker, I also learned that his brother Chance died a couple of months back. He didn't draw Hägar but had taken on another of their father's strips, Hi and Lois.

My denial about getting older can only take so much of this.

palordrolap,

Pretty sure Cinnamon panels are designed to fit to the width (or height if they're attached to the side) of the screen and can't be altered. (The depth/breadth/"thickness" of the panel can be changed, but that's not particularly relevant here.)

The same may also be true of panel-like features in XFCE and MATE too, but I can't easily confirm.

My friend didn't have a great experience with Linux

I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play...

palordrolap,

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I've been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer's been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I've thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I've had an Xorg update. That's more of a "your graphics card is so old Mint doesn't really support it any more" problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren't quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

palordrolap,

You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

They've sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn't provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

Logitech still haven't written their own Linux driver. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don't.

palordrolap,

Let me guess: I'll buy a toaster because my old one died but then I'll get ads for new toasters constantly. You bought one, you must want another. And another. And another. Why aren't you buying more toasters. You bought one. Buy another! Buy twenty!! People who bought toasters also bought microwaves and kettles. Do you want a toaster? Does anyone want any toast?

palordrolap,

Ah! So you're a waffle man! Wanna buy a waffle iron?

palordrolap,

Reminds me of that time in a pub restaurant where I ordered the Cumberland sausage (plus mash, etc.). When it arrived it looked not entirely dissimilar. Thankfully, when I cut into it, it was indeed sausage, not a snail. Or anything else.

(Must have tasted OK because I don't remember hating it.)

palordrolap,

True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it's not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.

palordrolap,

This hen laid a cannon?! That might be worth more than a goose that lays golden eggs to a warring king.

palordrolap,

Do North Americans really give their weight in lb? You'd think they'd short hand it like to like 15 stone or whatever since weight is one of those things that doesn't really need to be exact and will change by a lb or so based on the time of day and what you've eaten.

palordrolap,

No, see, here ounces compare to millimetres. If height and weight fluctuate over centimetres and pounds, and they do, lesser units should be disregarded, right?

palordrolap,

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn't get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn't know what you were doing.

palordrolap,

Surprised they haven't tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.

There's a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven't, and it's still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.

But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling "the public" what avenues have already failed, or that they don't want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone's bound to try it otherwise.

palordrolap,

Ay, there's the rub. Almost no-one's going to pay for the top-notch system, and will instead go for the lowest bidder.

palordrolap,

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user's ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

palordrolap,

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell's manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won't cause an infinite loop.

* And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.

palordrolap,

My guess is a "solution" to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

This "solution" appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it's the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it's there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret... so it's not secret after all.

Unless they're doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can't intercept, someone's getting fired.

palordrolap,

Is it still the norm to go to the dev's office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we're doing, tell them we're shipping their machine to the client because it's the only one that the code runs on?

And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

I'm assuming that this response from 4o isn't real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.

palordrolap,

Not voting, if you're otherwise able, is a tacit acceptance for how things are.

Presumably you don't want to vote for the incumbents, so vote for someone who'll replace them, whether you like that option or not.

Voting out a bad lot is the only legal way we have to protest.

And then vote third party next time if they don't change things to your liking. Then fourth. Fifth. Etc.

Don't like the political parties? Start one.

Think the whole lot should be lined up and shot? (For legal reasons this is purely metaphorical.) Start organising.

But if that's too much for you, vote.

palordrolap,

I appreciate you're trying to make a point about how you're apparently being attacked, accused or persecuted on some platform or another, but, respectfully, your diatribes are not coming across like a sane person has written them.

This is not to say that you are not sane (arguments can certainly be made about my own sanity), only that maybe you're allowing your frustration to get the better of you and that's coming over strongly in your writing.

Or maybe you're writing this way in order to parody the apparent behaviour you're seeing in others(?). It's very hard to tell.

You could take the edge off by Not Capitalising Mostly Every Word Like This Which Is Very Hard To Read, and, well, you don't need to post mostly the same thing every couple of days either, even if the usernames vary.

palordrolap,

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn't have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I've tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn't intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn't need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

palordrolap,

The main reason for the name is that it sorts before both Amazon and Apple in the Big Tech directory. It's literally as petty as that. They obviously chose a word that was related to searching within that criterion, but still.

palordrolap,

They probably want to avoid anything that sounds like it might be Jewish, so Aaron is out. This is not because of direct anti-Semitism, but because of the fear of it. Avoiding such words avoids the subject entirely. (Ironically, the Semitic origins of the word "Alphabet" aren't as obvious.)

Aardvark is too alien and weird. Also, C-levels are deathly afraid of varking too aard.

Abacus might have been a better choice, but it doesn't come with the infuriatingly tantalising closeness of one or two letters' distance.

palordrolap,

"People" are not a learned wizard who really ought to know better.

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