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 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • 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.




  • General advice follows. I may be preaching to the choir. Apologies in advance.

    Did take a backup before running the update? If not, now would be an excellent time to reboot to externally hosted media and get what you can off the storage before proceeding any further.

    If you have a backup, be ready to format and install the new OS from scratch then repopulate necessary files from that. You might not need to if you’re lucky and a reboot and retry all goes to plan, but still something to bear in mind if it hangs again. And maybe a third time.

    Also be ready to have to reinstall the old OS if this is a case where the new OS and the old hardware refuse to get along.

    Old man ramble: Back in the old days, it used to be possible to tell if a computer was doing something because the HDD would make noise, but with SSDs that’s all but impossible to do. HDD/SSD lights on the case sometimes give strong hints that something is happening, but, in my limited experience, they didn’t always match up one-to-one with what a HDD was doing, so I assume the same is true with SSDs. Onion on belt, etc.


  • I’ve bounced a few ideas off the limited models currently provided for free online by DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think I have the space or RAM to be able to run anything remotely as grand on my own computer.

    Also, by the by, I find that the lies that LLMs tell can be incredibly subtle, so I tend to avoid asking them about anything I know nothing about, so that when they lie about the things I do know about, I can gauge how wrong they might be about other things.





  • Most of the *fetches (and clones by other names) have an option for showing a different distro’s logo without having to go through any major changes. neofetch, moribund though it is, has --ascii_distro for that purpose (Weird choice of an underscore in an option. Most programs use more hyphens to separate words in long options).

    This did get me to install screenfetch (superseded by plain old fetch but realised that too late for this comment), cpufetch (a year old, still in active development) and archey4 (likewise) after I did a bit of research on similar programs though, so maybe the sirens got me one way or the other.



  • “Just use Flatpak.”

    “But that will use 2GB when a system package will use 34MB.”

    “Duh, it’s not 2GB total. Flatpaks share dependencies.”

    “I don’t have any other Flatpaks on my system.”

    “…”

    “…”

    “OK, so it’ll be 2GB. Your next one will be smaller, though.”

    If I install one and if it shares any dependencies with the first one.”

    “Pff. You’re just a hater.”

    “Yeah, I hate that something that should be small is using 2GB of space.”