palordrolap

His life is in Jeffpardy. Irrelevant video

Same, with two caveats: I used BBC Micros at school before getting a home computer and did some BASIC on those so that might count as my “start”. And second, my C64 was a C64C. MOS Technology 65xx family FTW though.

Can a narcissist admit to being a narcissist? As in, wouldn’t their brain simply prevent them from being able to understand the notion let alone say it.

Related point: Once a therapist asked me if I was a perfectionist and my brain locked up. I have perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionism is generally considered a negative trait. Perfectionism thus prevented me from admitting perfectionist tendencies, but I was required by perfectionism to answer the question perfectly. segfault in brain (core dumped).

for((i=0;i<$(grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo);i++)); do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null & done

killall dd if you want to kill them

Caveats: Runs on my machine. Might not work on yours. If it does, you accept all responsibility for any system damage from running it or any version with typos.

Other notes: This doesn’t actually lock each process to a specific processor, but the system ought to spread the load anyway. taskset --cpu-list $i before the dd if you absolutely have to have that.

Chromium is still Chromium. Would I rather that Mozilla got off their AI kick and didn’t have to take Alphabet’s dime? Sure.

But at least I’m not using a Chromium.

My emergency browser is the MiniBrowser that comes with the WebKit packages on Linux.

As for speed, I don’t see any issue. Maybe I might if I switched between browser engines on a regular basis, so I don’t do that.

I was once humiliated in a room full of IT peers because a colleague stuck his Apple laptop in front of me and I’d never used an Apple touchpad before that meeting. Two-finger swiping was such an alien concept I never would have guessed that’s what I needed to do.

Also consider that Apple mice at the time only had one button, so that would exclude using two anything on any Apple pointer controller, right? Nope.

Was this you?:

Seems much of Lemmy is still married to Firefox despite all their slop and Alphabet funding

Your wording appeared to imply a solid dislike for Alphabet which I then took to be transferred onto their own browser - Chrome - and the browser who takes Alphabet’s dime - Firefox.

I can see that there might be other ways to interpret that sentence and get the true shade of meaning you intended, but I’m not sure which one it is if it isn’t the one I thought it was.

What browser do you use? If you hate Chrome and Firefox, that’s really going to limit your choices. Derivatives of both of those must be forbidden too because all of those would cease to exist if the base browsers vanished.

Something WebKit based? Or are you using something based on the Goanna fork of Gecko?

“Explored the world for spices but decided we didn’t like any of them.” is the usual one.

“A nation of Baldricks and Blackadders” might also work.

The conversation in panel two should be:

Tuesday’s coming. Did you bring your coat?

I live in a giant bucket.

IYKYK

Religion is a convenient excuse for what people were going to do anyway.

OP, was that your own computer/profile that you emptied the Deleted Items from?

If tech support stories are to be believed, many users use that folder as a one-button-press archive and the idea that things might actually be deleted from there is both incomprehensible and then horrifying to them.

It also might explain why the icon is an old one because Microsoft’s quality control teams probably use the feature this way and never once saw that icon, leading to it never being updated.

The problem, as always, is one of money. Either a local council has to provide them for free at cost to taxpayer or they need to be pay toilets. And if you want clean public toilets, you also need at least one full-time attendant (or equivalent).

The first thing to go - if there was ever one in the first place - is the attendant because the council sees a £20+k a year bill they can save and instead send one person around in a van to all the public toilets. “Only one person and one dirty mop required! The public will never notice!”

Then the serious vandalism starts because there’s no permanent presence to discourage the vandals. And then: “Oh no, who would have thought this would happen? These toilets must be in a vandalism hotspot and need to be closed permanently!”

This leaves pay toilets, and guess what? The companies and councils that run these still hate having to pay attendants because its a case of wanting to keep that money for themselves, and/or else the price has to be jacked up so high to cover the running costs that people wouldn’t want to pay to use them.

The last pay toilet I used was 20p and that was a long time ago. I expect they’re 50p or £1 now.

Everything is a package

I mean, pretty much. Or rather, everything is in a package. Back in the old days they were called source distributions or .tar.gzs and you compiled everything yourself. Gentoo, for example, still does everything that way, but uses the name ‘package’ anyway.

The coreutils package, or something like it, contains multiple commands that a bare bones, command-line-only system would need, but some things are built into the shells. e.g. cd is always shell-based. echo may or may not be. ls (dir) is in coreutils.

There are also things like busybox that, in a single executable from a single package, contains a stripped-down version of everything in coreutils, a shell and a handful of other things too.

(Caveat: I’m currently on medication that helps with getting off to sleep, and might also be helping me with anxiety/depression, but it’s really hard to gauge that side of it. Anyway, sometimes I try these if the effects are wearing off in a morning and my mind starts spinning, and used to use them before being on the medication at night too.)

Breathing exercises sometimes work. The old deep breath, hold for a little too long and then let it go in a measured manner. Two or three cycles and then relaxing / applying some or all of the following might work.

Other times, telling myself that what I’m thinking about can wait until morning / later, basically trying to trigger “save and quit” in my brain. I got quite good at that before the change of medication.

Another weird trick is to convince myself that the room is the other way up and if I don’t relax and sink into the sheets and mattress that I’ll fall away from the bed onto the ceiling. I know this doesn’t make any kind of sense. File it under “so stupid it works (sometimes)”.

Practically speaking, try not to be too warm or too cold. A surefire way for me to not fall asleep is to have cold feet. I might not even realise that my feet are cold until I think about it. An electric (under-)blanket that warms both body and feet has proven invaluable, as did the hot water bottle that preceded it.

Finally, if none of these work, get up and do something to distract yourself for a while. Plan to get back in bed 10-15 minutes before a multiple of 90 minutes before the time you’ve set your alarm. Hopefully, you’ll be tired enough to sleep before 105 minutes (15+90) to go, because that’s basically the last chance for meaningful rest. Anything less is a short nap and you’ll probably be groggy when you wake up.

The next advice you need to seek is how to wake up when you’re tired and/or groggy.

Should we tell them about the US Army’s Commander-in-Chief…?

While the palindromic structure of that command is pleasing to mine eye, LMDE basically called me a frickin’ idiot for trying.

I know it always asks Continue [Y/n] and there’s no yes | or echo | to force that, so I was reasonably sure I’d get away with it, but I don’t think I could argue with the sentiment had it actually said that.

(Also, I have Timeshift, so that would have saved my bacon but for the inconvenience of having to go through a rollback.)

Anyway, here’s what it said (scrolling may be required to see the last line which is clearly code for “you’re an idiot”):

REMOVING:                       
  apt       apt-utils          mint-meta-cinnamon  mintsources  mintupdate       sudo
  apt-file  command-not-found  mint-meta-core      mintsystem   python3-repolib

WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  apt

Summary:
  Upgrading: 0, Installing: 0, Removing: 12, Not Upgrading: 1
  Freed space: 52.3 MB

Error: Removing essential system-critical packages is not permitted. This might break the system.

The earliest message I have accessible in Thunderbird is from the 25th of May, 2001. It’s part of a conversation with old work colleagues who I had remained drinking buddies with when I started a new job nearby. (There are actually two messages with earlier dates, but one is an imported message from March of 2001 that wasn’t actually sent or originally received by me, and another that’s an old Usenet post, probably also imported, that doesn’t have a datestamp at all, registering as 1/1/1970.)

If I go digging around in my university backup, I have messages from 1998 in there. I would have earlier e-mails, but quota was limited on the University systems, so I expect I deleted everything at the start of every year.

Whenever it cost £35 for a 256MB stick. The Internet suggests 2003 or 2004 which tracks.

Let’s say Usenet.

When I gained access at university, search engines hadn’t really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn’t know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)

However, the university also provided Usenet access.

Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.