palordrolap

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.)

Perl: You’re an old nerd who remembers before Python was a thing, or else a nerd who really likes funky syntax and symbols everywhere and PHP just wasn’t right for you.

Raku: You’re an old nerd who remembers before Python took over from your former beloved Perl and instead of opting for simpler, cleaner syntax, you decided that being able to go the other way entirely was absolutely for you, or else you’re a nerd who likes really, really funky syntax and Python, PHP and even Perl seem too much like kids toys.

Ada: You’re an old nerd who was taught it at some college or other or else you’re an engineer writing mission critical systems and this is the language everything is written in and no-one will switch to anything else.

BASIC: You’re an old nerd (you might be sensing a theme here) who taught themselves programming at some point in the '70s, '80s or '90s and you’ll get around to learning another language some day, but right now this interpreter you found online that runs in a console window suits you just fine.

Shell scripting: You’re a nerd who really ought to rewrite some of those unwieldy beasts in something else at some point but you’ve learned it this way and don’t have time for anything else right now. Time for another hack.

Powershell: You’re a nerd who’s found something that “really makes sense, you know?”

COBOL: See Ada but exchange “mission critical” for “banking”.

Prolog: You are a nerd who plays Towers of Hanoi in their head for fun.

Haskell: You are a nerd whose flying saucer is a glass dome followed by a function that describes the rest of it, which may or may not be the same function that described the glass dome in the first place.

Lisp: You are a nerd for whom parentheses make you feel warm and fuzzy, if not other feelings that cannot be spoken of in polite company. If you like Emacs, you like Emacs.

Yeah, it’s a DVD now, right?

… Right?

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

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.

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.

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.

Doctor Octopus inspires many.

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

Maybe if he’s a bit of an ass.

Your opinions are valid.

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.)

Do better.

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.)

THEREareWORSEwaysTOtypeTHINGSandSTILLhaveTHEMbeKINDofREADABLE.whoNEEDSspacesWHENweHAVEtwoLETTERcases?

OrMaYbEwEcOuLdEsChEwEvEnThAtAnDjUsTaLtErNaTe.IfThErEaReWrItInGsYsTeMsWiThOuTvOwElsThAtCaNsTiLlBeReAdWhYnOtWrItElIkEtHiSiNsTeAd?

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

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.

$ locate -r '\.so$' | wc -l
4468
$ locate -r '/lib[^/]*\.so$' | wc -l
2488

We’re going to be here a while.

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.