R.L. Dane :Debian: :OpenBSD: :FreeBSD: 🍵 :MiraLovesYou:

@tripplehelix

#meme #AVIF

@matthew @negativeprimes

#XFCE has some sweet themes, and they're easy to modify.

New #blog #post: Mind the Shards

https://rldane.space/mind-the-shards.html

552 words

Mild #CW: I'm discussing mental health, and briefly, faith.

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #podcasts #MentalHealth #MandyPatinkin #frailty

@golemwire

Dang it, mine is still in its box. 🤦‍♂️

#ADHD, yo.

@fionescu @daftaupe @cienmilojos

I wonder if #OpenBSD will ever get a modern fs. They even jettisoned FFS softdeps because IIRC they said that Kirk McCusick was the only one who understood the code (which very well may be true).

I don't think we'll ever see #ZFS on OpenBSD; the resource usage and code complexity is kind of anathema to them, and I totally get it.

I wonder if HAMMER2 would be a good fit, then? I must confess that don't know anything about it.

"It's now safe to turn off your computer"

That gave me a nostalgic chuckle.

Also, how the heck does Firefox have better mouse handling than QEMU or any vnc client I've ever used? :o

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=9front

#9front #v86 #TheFrontFellOff

@sotolf @paul @joel @dm @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

Oh, for sure. I was just talking about what was default or selectable in the default install between Ubuntu 2010.04-(ish) and the most recent Ubuntu Mate at the time.

I suppose if someone really wanted to, they could just yoink the theme files off the classic Ubuntu iso. ;)

Honestly, with a decent launcher like #rofi, Mate could be quite a nice little environment.

@ruari

Huh, it sounds like Slackbuilds is really the "package manager," then, and base Slack is a lot like #OpenBSD base, just much bigger.

What percentage of Slack users use Slackbuilds, would you wager, and how "official" is it in relation to the distro's organization?

You're getting me curious about Slackware, first person in 26 years to do so!!! 🤣

@ruari

That's interesting. I've noticed that #FreeBSD also does not have a -dev split. If you install a package, you get the headers and everything.

@neineon77

If I may present the opinion of an owner of a pair of not-so-gently-used eyeballs, the dotted lines are kind of hard to see, but the text is pretty clear.

I do prefer #000000 on #FFFFFF, but that's just because my eyes need the contrast. XD

@profoundlynerdy

$99/mo (regular price) is pretty high for an MVNO.

I would also check their ToS very carefully for an #BindingArbitration clause or other gotchas. Phreeli, another privacy-first carrier has one in theirs. 🤦‍♂️

Trying to sign up with a patient portal and it wants my full SSN.

Good flipping grief. NO.

P.S. I was able to just skip the SSN! How about that!
But then it wanted me to accept their TOS with #BindingArbitration. Eff you, I want to talk to my service provider, not install a Harkonnen Heart Plug for an effing corporation.

@GeePawHill @randomgeek @dabeaz @robpike

*PLONK*! ;)

#Fedi servers should really prevent super-new accounts from posting, or block them at the receiving end. :P

(The @pachli android client has this as an option)

Hmm, seems #OpenBSD 7.9 will support blocking HT/SMT cores, but the syntax has changed a little:

From https://www.openbsd.org/79.html:

Various kernel improvements:

• Introduced a mechanism to manage CPU cores with different speeds in the scheduler. The sysctl(8) variable "hw.blockcpu" takes a sequence of 4 letters: S (for SMT), P (regular performance CPU), E (efficient CPU, generally 80% to 50% as fast), and L (lethargic CPU) which are even slower. Set this to select CPUs to kick out of the scheduler (SL by default). Currently works on amd64 and arm64.

@rusty__shackleford

Whoa, we've got a real, live Rusty Shackleford on #fedi! 😄

New #blog #post: Package Manager Tier List

https://rldane.space/package-manager-tier-list.html

1521 words

Note: this is a very off-the-cuff tier list, using speed as the main qualifier, but the article explains exceptions to that as it goes on.

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #DeadLikeMe #Linux #BSD #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Debian #Arch #pacman #AUR #Fedora #homebrew #flatpak #snap #OpenSuSE #RPM

@ics

Also, #UnpopularOpinion, but:

Iron Man 2 > 1 >>>> 3

(two is better than one, which is WAY better than three)

I liked the premise of Extremis, but the idea that his new modular suits would just fall apart at the drop of a hat was just silly.

A lot of people didn't like the fact that 2 had two villains, but I think it worked 🤷‍♂️

More thoughts on #CachyOS...

• btrfs has some noticeable hesitancy at times, even on a fairly fast (8th gen i5) machine
• if you're (understandably) avoiding the AUR, the proper pacman archives feel a bit slim at times:

rld@prometheus:~$ pacman -Ss |grep "^[^ ]" |cut -f1 -d' ' |cut -f2 -d/ |sort -u |wc -l
16057

-- compare with #Debian (actually RasPiOS, in this case) --

$ for x in {a..z}; do apt-cache search $x; done |cut -f1 -d' ' |sort -u |wc -l
74416

(Not sure if that's accurate, but #DistroWatch says Debian has over 50,000, and Wikipedia says almost 70,000)

• I've had to come up with a couple bespoke "daemons," one to refresh the xrdb every 10 seconds (NO idea why xrdb forgets everything so often on this box), and one to refresh the keyboard brightness (I use symlinks in my home directory for this) every two seconds, so that it retains the setting after resuming from sleep.

UID          PID    PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
rld         8035       1  0 May11 ?        00:00:00 sh -c while xrdb < ~/.Xdefaults; do sleep 10; done
rld        25572       1  0 04:19 ?        00:00:01 sh -c while grep -om1 [0-9] .kbd_backlight |tr -dc 0-9 > ~/.kbd_backlight-sys; do sleep 2; done

rld@prometheus:~$ file .kbd*
.kbd_backlight:     ASCII text
.kbd_backlight-sys: symbolic link to /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/brightness
rld@prometheus:~$ grep . .kbd*
.kbd_backlight:2
.kbd_backlight-sys:2
rld@prometheus:~$ 

Gotta say I was a weeency bit disappointed when I booted Fedora 43 into Linux kernel 7.0.4 and wasn't greeted with THIS... 😁

cc: @dm

#Linux #Kernel7 #System7 #ClassicMac

New #blog #post: Breakfast at Der Waffle Haus

https://rldane.space/breakfast-at-der-waffle-haus.html

1013 words

#cw: deals briefly with loss/mourning but in a light manner

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #DeadLikeMe #loss #mourning #humor #absurdism #absurd #breakfast #waffle #WaffleHouse #DerWaffleHaus

Google Drive: "Your storage is 95+% full!"
Google Drive: "Would you like to empty your trash?"
YES.
Go to Trash
Select all
Google Drive: "There's 3GB of files to delete!"
Delete them!
Google Drive: "You cleaned up 307 MB!!"

WHAT. HOW are you this inept?!?

#Google #GoogleDrive #GDrive #Slop

Maaaan, #Insync seriously pooped the bed.

This is such a mess. 🤦‍♂️

8000+ duplicate "foo (1)" files.

Ugh.

Guys, kinda serious...

Could we just... like... reboot I.T.?

Like, start over with the 6502 and 300 baud modems and build towards something elegant and unixy or #plan9-y?

'Cuz what we have now is freaking horrid, and I'd totally learn 6502 assembly and how to live with 64k addressing and no floating point if it meant restoring some sanity to dis shiz, brofam.

Does anyone know if the new #Pebble smartwatch is supported by #GadgetBridge? I'd really like to get back into sleep tracking.

I just don't want to hand my data over to anyone.

@fionescu @daftaupe @cienmilojos

I've been meaning to give #DragonflyBSD a try at some point!

"Hey, what should I call a package that provides a binary 'foo'?"
> "Usually just 'foo'."
"Oh, of course."

"Ok, what do I call a package that provides a library 'foo', or libraries for 'foo'?"
> "Usually 'libfoo'."
"Ah, ok, thanks."

"Ok, what about a package that provides a graphical version of 'foo'?"
> "Uhh, we usually name it something like 'gfoo', or 'foo-gtk', 'foo-qt', or 'foo-tk', something like that."
"Ah, of course, of course, thanks."

"Ok, so we've got a program called 'qalc', that has GUIs written for qt and gtk."
> "Okay."
"So, I'm going to call the packages 'qalc', 'qalc-gtk', and 'qalc-qt'."
> "No."
"What??"
> "It needs to be 'libqalculate', 'qalculate-gtk', and 'qalculate-qt'."
"WHY!? Why would the package that provides the command-line tool be a 'lib*' package?!?"
> "I said so."
"You know what? You're NUTS, man. I'm going back to Debian."

https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=qalc
https://openports.pl/search?file=qalc&descr=&path=&pkgname=&category=&maintainer=
https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=qalc&stype=all&sektion=all
https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&keywords=qalc

#UnixJoke #Unix #Joke

It's funny that I didn't think to create this shell script until now:
https://codeberg.org/rldane/scripts/src/branch/main/spongebob

I initially was trying to write it in #POSIX #shell without any external dependencies (for speed), but the lack of ${var^} and ${var,} mean HUGE case statements, but I could generate those in bash and paste them in, lol.

Then I came to the lack of ${var:i:1} for splitting variables, and I just kind of gave up.

I guess I could have munged some way of converting a string into an array somehow, but it was so much easier to just write it in 23 lines of bash. :P

#Shell scripting: 'It'\''s fine, really. ;)'

@thesaigoneer

Actually, I did. Well, it was the default. ;)

It's... slow? Feels slow. But that's ok.

btrfs is absolutely "WE HAVE #ZFS AT HOME" and that's ok. 🤣

@neauoire

#BeOS' metadata chops were legendary.

Other OSes still haven't caught up.

@peteorrall @gumnos

Well, there's a little variation in formatting because I'm copying and pasting it from the website, and some of the websites add a bunch of spaces and such. Other than that, the 3 major BSDs have slightly different histories, so it's possible that there are minor revisions of the manpages there.

As far as #Plan9 goes, their manpages tend to be a bit on the brief-and-to-the-point side of things, and probably haven't had as many changes, as they tend to like minimalism and their own sense of tradition, I think? (Not knocking it, it is what it is, and I appreciate the uniqueness of all the various interesting OS traditions)

And then there's debian, which packages GNU ed, and the GNU ed manpage, which is little more than a stub to make you read the Info page, which I... loathe. XD

#Canvas Cyberattack: When will we learn that technical monocultures suck?
Also, I remember when every university developed their own IT stuff in-house. It might have been janky or ugly, but it bloody well worked.

If your university can't come up with a student portal, maybe they shouldn't be teaching #CompSci?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#scubrats #privacy #KingOfTheHill #RustyShackleford #AVIF ;)

I was exited to see a glorious collection of #vinyl at my local #HalfPriceBooks, but I don't have a phonograph, and wouldn't know where to get an acceptably good one for a good price.

I literally haven't touched an #LP since the mid-90s at the most recent. XD

Various #FOSS OS communities' reactions to joining them:

#Linux: "Hey, welcome to the fam! Here's a stack of CDs I burned, see which one boots for you."
#FreeBSD: "Hey, we're glad you're here! Here's an amazing handbook to get you started, holler if you need a hand!"
#NetBSD: "Of course it runs NetBSD! Welcome! :D"
#OpenBSD: "Don't expect a lot of hand-holding, but we're all having fun with it, and hopefully you will enjoy the process, too."
#9front: "Are... you... sure you want to do this?"

😆

(For the record, I love them all. I only regret I haven't had much of a chance to play with #Haiku, or interact with that community, yet!)

#TIL (ok, yesterday ;) that rsync --delete only works if you're specifying a directory to copy, not individual files.

So

rsync -rvt --delete /path/to/dir user@server:

will work, while

rsync -rvt --delete /path/to/dir/*fileglob* user@server:

will not.

#PSA ;)

@fbievan

If you like #KSP, "The Odyssey by Bill" videos by Bradley Whistance usually knock me right out.

@ploopy

Oooo, how about a true three-button optical mouse for middle-button-heavy OSes like #Plan9 / #9front or #RiscOS? 🙃🙏

@kabel42

@tuxjam @kevie @solusspider

Just FYI, I've now updated the script (as of yesterday) to use the longer (~474 items) list from @distrowatch, rather than just the top 100 ;)

#DistroWatch

New #blog #post: Re-thinking Sci-Fi Space Battles

https://rldane.space/re-thinking-sci-fi-space-battles.html

1306 words

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn @ay

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #SciFi #ScienceFiction #SpaceBattles #StationKeeping #OrbitalMechanics #KSP #KerbalSpaceProgram #KittenSpaceAgency

@NintendoMetro

It's so funny how limitless and expansive #SM64 levels felt to me in 1996 vs. today. ;)

@cyon

I've recently purged a couple years photos on my phone to make room for more podcasts (I abandoned my super-expensive unlimited cellular plan for a much cheaper 15 GiB/mo plan), but I may re-encode them as #AVIF and save a copy on my phone.

AVIF's savings over JPEG are insane:

rld@Intrepid:tmp$ magick test.jpeg test.avif
rld@Intrepid:tmp$ ll test.*
-rw-r--r--  1 rld wheel  1,017,031 May  6 07:46 test.avif
-rw-r--r--  1 rld wheel 20,413,039 May  6 07:46 test.jpeg
rld@Intrepid:tmp$ 

Almost no perceptible loss of quality. Even when zoomed in 200%, it's just slightly softer.

@peteorrall

Or #Aurebesh!!!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_in_Star_Wars

#StarWars

How hard is it for an English-speaking monoglot to learn #Cyrillic?

Just thought it might be nice to be able to distinguish the various Cyrillic-written languages, not necessarily learn any of them in-depth (ADHD, yo ;)

I sincerely love you weirdos. <3

#Fediverse #Mastodon #GoToSocial #snac #snac2 #honk #meme #AVIF

Edit: added transparency to image. Scratch that, GtS seems to not like transparency in AVIF, so I restored the original and uploaded a black background variant as well

@kabel42

Well, yes. The reverse is also true: doing things a certain way only because it always has been.

Reminds me of a story I heard about a family that had a tradition of cutting their Christmas ham in half when cooking it. (Or something close to that; I heard the story a long time ago)

Little girl: "Mama, why do we cut our hams in half?"
Mother: "You know, I'm not sure. We just always have."
A little later:
Mother: "Hey mom, you know how we always have cut our hams in half?"
Grandmother: "Yeah?"
Mother: "Why?"
Grandmother: "I dunno, I guess that's just what we've always done."
A little later:
Grandmother: "Hey mom!"
Great-grandmother: "What? Who?"
Grandmother: "Mom!! It's me!"
Great-grandmother: "Doris? What is it?"
Grandmother: "Mom! Hey, why is it we always cut our Christmas hams in half?!"
Great-grandmother: "Yams?!?"
Grandmother: "HAMS!!!"
Great-grandmother: "Hams! Oh! Well, it was the great depression, you see, and we had this tiny little apartment, and the oven was so small, you couldn't fit a whole ham in at once, so I always asked the butcher to cut it in half for me!"

That said, people who want to reinvent the wheel without understanding how and why it was invented the way it was almost always do a garbage job of it.

It's the reason I get so effing irate with things like shoestring scrollbars and CSDs in #UIDesign. Things were designed the way they were for very important reasons dealing with usability and visibility, and people who say, "Nah, that's ugly," "I think it's prettier this way," or "We don't want it to look like Windows 95 anymore!" royally piss me off. They're placing shallow aesthetics and an addiction to novelty over core design principles that stood the test of time for decades.

"Chesterton's Fence":

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

— https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

#ChestertonsFence #CoreUtils #Rewrite #UIDesign

P.S. Credit for introducing me to this term: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/116517200212865151
cc: @ChuckMcManis

@catsalad

@joyousjoyness, some heavy #blep inspiration for your art. ;)

@darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf

Now I have the perfect terminology to describe the past fifteen years of "progress" in #UIDesign. 😭 :BlobCatItIsFine:

@vwbusguy

I flip back and forth between #HeliBoard and #FUTO.

The only thing keeping me on FUTO is the fact that it fixes the annoyance of #AOSP Android assuming that hyphenated-words are new words and trying to spell-correct them. If Heliboard ever fixes that bug, I'll be on it forever. It's so close to perfect now, it's ridiculous.

I was just lamenting the lack of really good #FOSS keyboards on #Android a couple years ago, and now it's totally different.