palordrolap

I made sl on my computer a bit more literal. It takes the output of ls -l and reverses every line, including any wrapping within the column width, and pads it to the right of the terminal. One day I might get around to fixing it so that it forces, parses and correctly reverses the ANSI colour codes too.

In /usr/bin, I get lots of lines that “start” with spaces and “end” with things like toor toor 1 x-rx-rxwr-

US English dialects mainly, though there may be pockets in other Anglophone places.

The basic functionality of sponge can be emulated with an AWK or Perl script, so most people who needed it in the past almost certainly rolled their own.

I get what they’re going for with the arrow coming from the process to STDIN, but I still feel like it should point the other way.

And shout-out to the sponge and tee command-line tools for those situations where the memory buffer won’t cut it.

“I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

@[email protected] @[email protected]

It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).

This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn’t post notices in public places.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.

Lucky you had a motherboard with a CMOS battery. Without that*, you needed to enter the time and date every time the computer booted / rebooted.

* Or a capacitor instead.

LMDE’s system is the same as regular Mint. I’ve been on LMDE for a few years but was on regular before that.

YSK/PSA: If you’re on Mint, Mint’s apt is not Debian’s apt and while they work similarly for common use cases, they diverge pretty quickly beyond that. Both are installed by default but Mint’s takes precedence.*

Case in point: I was looking for which package - specifically one that was not yet installed - contains a certain command line tool and Mint’s apt search does not find it. Debian’s does. **

On the other hand, Mint’s apt has way more subcommands than the default one, which have been useful on occasion.

* Mint’s is at /usr/local/bin/apt and Debian’s is at /usr/bin/apt; The default user $PATH puts /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin.

** FWIW, the tool is/was sponge and it’s in the moreutils package.

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.)

I haven’t used Windows in earnest since Win 7. No wonder they want to force people to upgrade to new hardware.

Oof. That must be a single core laptop from 2010 or something, which if true, that sucks.

I have a 13 year old computer around here that had no problems with LMDE6 when last I fired it up. It was relatively high spec when new which takes some of the edge off, but I never had an input lag problem anywhere except maybe badly-written websites.

Just how limited is your computer?

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?