palordrolap

I still backup my files the most basic way, that is, create an archive locally, connect external storage and copy it there. Then disconnect external storage. The archive is made onto a separate internal drive and I keep the most recent one there, so I don’t even need the external one for minor accidents.

I think only once in the last decade or so have I wanted (but never needed) to pull something back from external, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

The main downside to this method is that it doesn’t de-duplicate, so keeping several takes a lot more space that it would do otherwise.

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.

No. My distro still provides the latest release of the original GNOME system monitor.

As time has gone on, GNOME have enforced more and more of their own look and feel, completely ignoring any styling that might be provided by other window managers. Some of those might even be using older GTK libraries, but that doesn’t matter.

Basically if you run a modern GNOME app under KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc., it’s going to look like a GNOME app regardless of what the other windows look like. Very Henry Ford.

The system monitor is no different. The new version works but the earlier version I found and installed also works fine and fits in. I suspect it’s GTK3 (old) versus GTK4 (new), but I can’t confirm. It’ll be something like that.

The folks responsible for Linux Mint started the XApps project of GNOME forks to roll back some of GNOME’s nonsense, but I guess they haven’t got around to forking the system monitor yet.

… and I’ve looked at both Resources and Mission Centre. Neither are to my taste (and are both Flatpaks).

That was the first one I tried, but it’s a fork from too far back.

The two main issues I had with it were 1) It only reports CPU usage in multiples of X%, where X is the number of cores, which was a long-standing SNAFU in the original GNOME version and 2) the usage graphs on the performance screen are light-mode only, even in dark mode, and there’s no easy option to change it.

Well, I was going to say GNOME’s System Monitor which has always been the default GUI task manager on my distro, but it’s been getting steadily more and more GNOME-ified with every revision and frankly, I hate how it looks now.

Might be time to shop for an alternative.

Edit +44 mins: So, the immediate alternatives all have other things I don’t like about them, but an older version of GNOME System Monitor will still install and run, so I guess I’ll be using that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

Two. kbin.social and kbin.run (which was actually an Mbin by the time it vanished).

The on-board sound died on my old PC a while back. There was a free slot on the motherboard that looked like it might take an old sound card, so I found one for cheap online.

Installed it. Fingers crossed. Linux (Mint in this case) didn’t bat an eye. It worked fine.

My newer PC is budget and has barely any slots on the motherboard (pretty sure there isn’t one that supports the same card), so I’m hoping I won’t need to pull that trick a second time.

Other potential solutions:

Sound via USB or Bluetooth.

HDMI and DisplayPort carry sound as well as video, and there are ways to tap into that.

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.

The posts that I’ve seen so far seem to be lacking context that’s available when visiting the original on the home instance.

That is, these posts look like the first comment made by the OP in a thread below their main submission, but the main submission isn’t visible.

Very disorienting. I hope there’s a fix on the way.

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.