Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

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

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Is “actually Earth” some idealised version of Earth where the greedy and the corrupt don’t inevitably end up ruining everything for everyone but themselves? Because otherwise “actually Earth” and Hell could well be the same damn thing.

    Or if you subscribe to the Catholic fanfic that is Dante’s Inferno, we can talk about circles of hell, each one worse than the last. And where we are right now clearly isn’t the bottom one. It definitely feels like it’s dropped a layer or two in recent years, but we haven’t hit rock bottom.

    I could add a “yet” to that, but for some in this wondrous circle, it definitely already feels like it, and some feel like they’re thundering towards it with no way to stop it.

    But, I guess I’m feeling philosophical at the moment, because this just occurred to me: If there’s a fly in the ointment, it means we have ointment.

    These words will probably ring hollow in a few days when the ointment catches fire. (I’m not sure what that means in terms of translating back from metaphor into reality, but ointment catching fire definitely feels like something that could happen.)



  • Instead of compiling a kernel, try to make do with what your distro provides whenever there’s an update. Yes, there’s compilation, but it’s all done automatically. Then come to realise that the last two updates have had a subtle problem that caused the graphics driver to have a debilitating stroke whenever you try to watch a video in VLC, and have the whole system to go unresponsive as a result. Everything else works fine. YouTube. Games. But a cat video downloaded from Discord because (foreshadowing) the video won’t play in-browser for some reason? Too far, man. How dare.

    Booting with another of those kernels is when you find out that’s also broken despite having used it for a while previously. Learn that, by sheer luck, one still-good kernel is still installed.

    Hope that someone with more brains and energy with a similar setup will be able to report the problem properly to wherever that needs to be reported so that the next update doesn’t have the same problem. Things like this have been magically fixed before. You wait.

    (Search the error message from the logs online. No close matches. Learn a bit, but the only advice was “try a different kernel”. You already thought of that)

    In the meantime, remove the problem kernels and update GRUB with boot USB on standby in case you hose the system. Manage not to need it.



  • If you go look at the HUD for even older games like Doom and Quake, you can see where that idea might have come from. Usually those “inventory slots” were for fixed items, namely ammo for the various guns, but having different things on different number keys was definitely in use back then. The new part, of course, was making a game mechanic out of changing the things under the number keys.

    Have later games stolen it directly from Minecraft? Sure, but it’s such an obvious concept that someone else would have eventually invented it. In fact I’m not sure if Notch didn’t borrow it from something else that had that extra mechanic first.

    And now it’s become a de facto standard like the positions of the clutch, brake and accelerator in a car. (And if you drive an automatic, the brake is still always to the left.)


  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldIdc
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    9 days ago

    macOS is a derivative of BSD Unix. Linux was a from-scratch Unix-alike. The fundamental core, including the literal kernel, are different even if they act the same in many ways.

    If you’re using “kernel” in a non-standard sense to mean “share some common tools, mindset and behaviour” then maybe, but that’s stretching the definition a long way from what technical people would expect.



  • Sometimes, when something won’t even compile, I have try to compile it a second time - and get the exact same error message(s) - before my brain will accept there is a problem and perhaps begin to see the cause.

    Somewhere in my head must be a gremlin who says, “No! It is the compiler that is wrong!”

    The same can apply to semantic errors (the code is valid but does not do what it was intended to do) but those take longer to track down. To make the trick work, the debugging output has to be in just the right place in order to print proof of the wrong logic and then do the same on the next run, preferably in under a minute, so that I can begin to see the error.



  • LMDE Cinnamon user here. There’s a setting in the power options that tells the computer to switch to hibernate if it remains in suspend for a certain amount of time. Hibernated computers suspend to disk rather than RAM and are basically switched off, so need to POST to come back online.

    It took me a while to find that setting, and it might be the same case with whatever you’re using.

    What’s more, it only took effect if I used the GUI to put the computer into suspend mode. I usually use a keyboard combo to suspend the computer at night, but occasionally I’d use the GUI and come back in the morning to a hibernated computer.

    Thought I’d been taking crazy pills or that there was something wrong.

    My main gripes are that inconsistency between suspend methods and also that there’s no setting for how long to stay in suspend before hibernating. I have no idea if that’s a UEFI thing or something that could be set elsewhere, but I’d probably use that feature if I could set it.

    As it is I’m giving the hybrid option a try. Basically it suspends like normal, but also sets up a hibernated restart for if the power goes out. That hasn’t happened yet, so can only assume it’ll work when the time comes.

    Late edit: The delay between suspend and hibernate is set in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf with the setting HibernateDelaySec=. Manual page reading is required, but even so, this feature is not well documented there or out on the Internet.

    There may be syntax available to specify other units of time with a suffix. For example, my computer’s related SuspendEstimationSec= option is given as 60min in the example and not 3600.




  • That’s the smile of a man who did something incredibly illegal and all the other guys are trying to get him out of there ASAP while worrying about the consequences if anyone finds out.

    As for what that illegal thing was, well, this is just me putting a concept to a picture that might have had no illegal acts preceding it whatsoever, but you know. Drugs maybe. Full on making out with an underage groupie who was loving the experience, but then their dad entered the next room looking for them, necessitating a rapid getaway and a s**t-eating grin. Grabbing a dog’s tail from the inside and, roink, turning it inside out or making an audacious internet comment with a sound effect like “roink”. Those sorts of things.