palordrolap

Let me save you a few characters: %Y-%m-%d can be shortened to %F

For visualisation’s sake I also like to put a space before the %F so that the year and the file size are separated a little more, but that’s more of a taste thing than anything else.

(Caveat: %F’s year is explicitly four digits in some libraries, whereas %Y is always the full year. If you’re planning for your code to last 8000 years you might want to consider that.)

alias name-here yields the line alias name-here='contents-of-alias-here' as output, and if you want just the part between the single quotes from that, sed, cut or, come to think of it, related shell tricks that do the same thing, would be needed to capture and convert it.

${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a name for what’s only between those single quotes.

For example, I have a lot of preferences built into my alias for ‘ls’. Occasionally I want to run watch ls -l somefilespec to watch a directory listing for changes to a file. But commands fed to watch don’t go through the alias mechanism, leaving the output somewhat different to my preferences.

It’s wordy, but watch ${BASH_ALIASES["ls"]} -l somefilespec mostly* achieves what I want.

* Unfortunately, watch also causes the stripping of colour codes and I have --color=auto, not --color=force in my ls alias, so it’s by no means perfect - I have add the latter if I want colour - but I don’t have to type the rest of the preferences I have in there.

FWIW, my ls alias is currently:

alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style="+ %F %T"'

I have an alias called save_aliases that does alias > ~/.bash_aliases. alias on its own just dumps all the existing aliases to the terminal in a format that can be parsed by Bash.

I felt especially clever when I came up with that and used it to save itself.

Bonus fact: ${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a way to get at the contents of an alias without resorting sed or cut shenanigans on the output of the alias command.

Because LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition

Interesting. LMDE seems to be more like MS Windows in that things like kernel updates insist on a reboot, and certain other things are easiest restarted with a reboot too, for example, X.Org changes.

I’m sure there’s still a way to bootstrap a new kernel on the bare metal without needing to reboot, likewise for restarting X.Org, but I foresee problems with any programs and daemons that were children of the original processes. For example, convincing them not to exit when their parent does and then getting them to play nice under a new session.

I mean, I guess you could just not update, or have a long period where they’re unnecessary and that’d work too. That could well be what this meme is getting at. Can confirm sessions (caveat: with standby and hibernate) that have lasted well over a month.

But this all raises the question: Does anyone actually not reboot when system changes happen, and what’s the workflow for bootstrapping without rebooting there?

It’s also my experience that KPatience doesn’t skip unwinnable games. It also occasionally generates one where it can’t determine whether the game is solvable or not, which is probably due to search space limitations. I’ve won a couple of those, but they’re risky to start in the first place!

I can see the logic for not skipping unsolvable games.

KPat uses a seed system (called “Numbered Deals”) to “shuffle” the cards before a game. The seed can be generated (pseudo-)randomly, which is the default, or entered manually. In theory, a manually-entered seed could be unsolvable, and there would then need to be completely different logic flow for random and manual seeds after the shuffle and deal.

It’s way simpler to just generate a new game seed randomly as necessary and then have the rest of the program be clueless as to whether it was typed in or not.

You do not want to see an old-school greybeard dressing like this.

You might think you do when you first imagine the concept, but no, you really don’t.

Source: Am at the very least greybeard adjacent.

This was surprisingly kind to all users mentioned.

man locate

How common it is across distros I couldn’t tell you, but it’s been a staple on Mint for a good long while and ought to be available everywhere. Basically wherever I’d use find I try locate first, unless it’s for a file that’s expected to be very new and hasn’t been indexed by the daemon yet.

YouTube change things on the back end so frequently that I bet there’s always at least one bleeding-edge distro that has an outdated yt-dlp in its repository.

But if you’re on a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time without the stand-alone version.

Once upon a time, my computer’s hostname was 1x4x9. The case was a black tower, the first non-beige PC case I’d ever owned, so the name seemed to fit. Unfortunately, that hostname went out of use in 2010, long before I switched to Linux at home.

*Confused LMDE noises*

(The funny answer is that I’m somewhere up Mount Stupid, but if I am, it’s a bit like Everest base camp and there’s a nice fire going. I think I’ll stay here for a while.)

Either that or this thread and others like it have caused the hug of death from well meaning visitors. Whoops.

For the lazy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

It’s working for me right now. Unsure if Tobias happened to visit during (or shortly after) maintenance, or if he’s region locked.

The Mastodon thread explains it. GNU.org was being attacked by a botnet and the automated protection excluded many legitimate visitors. They’ve since dialled it back.

Edit: unnecessary word

I once heard about someone accidentally pouring tea from a teapot into a mug with instant coffee in it rather than hot water.

Your laptop has the GPU equivalent of that drink.

As someone who is firmly in the greybeard mould, I ain’t shaving my legs for this.

I seem to remember having little to no trouble with the 5 to 6 transition on my old system, so I’m inclined to believe that.

I just need to get my head - and backups - in order for the day I decide go ahead with 6 to 7, just in case it doesn’t go smoothly.

The SI prefix thing stems from a joke anyway. Allow me to trot out the etymology again:

Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was created a program for reading ELectronic Mail called Elm.

Someone created a rival mail reader called Pine, which followed both the tree pun as well as the fact it was a recursive acronym: “Pine is not Elm”.

Pine had an editor called the Pine Composer or Pico for short. Pico is both a typographical term as well as an SI unit. They may have been going for both. Too perfect a pun to pass up, perhaps.

Due to licensing uncertainty, someone else created a from-scratch clone of Pico called Nano, cementing the continuation of puns, but in the SI direction.

And then apparently someone else has decided to get on the bandwagon with Micro.

At the risk of invoking the ire of two communities, why shouldn’t we think of Micro as Emacs but with Lua instead of Lisp?

Well that’s something to keep an eye on.

That said, I’m on LMDE6 which is firmly stuck on the 6.1 LTS kernel branch, so I might not see any problems until I upgrade to LMDE7 and get 6.12 (or go nuts and install something else entirely).