kbal

(Apparently it’s Dave Cutler, who wikipedia reminds me is the crazy VMS guy “known for his disdain for Unix.” Apologies to both of them.)

Is that Donald Knuth? If so, “three guys taking a photo with Donald Knuth” might be a better title.

True enough — but for those few who enjoy such things I must point out that debian makes kernel builds very easy to do. When mesa gets too old there will usually be a backport.

Come on debian, maybe we can make it back into the top 5 when trixie gets an official release.

Eraserhead

It’s the game of Go. Also known as baduk, weiqi, igo. It’s a board game known for being pretty old.

autokey — a recent “autohotkey” sort of thing for linux. It comes to mind since I recently had to find a replacement for the one I’d used previously which died of bitrot. Mostly I just use it for app-specific key remapping for Firefox so that I can disable its ^W which I only ever hit accidentally when it was possible.

GNOME continues its long journey from being the one-time linux standard to a occupying a quirky little niche for masochists and corporate IT departments.

This would’ve been great news to hear about if not for the stupid opinion about DEI being included to completely undermine any faith we might’ve had in the competence or judgement of the person responsible.

I am a debian user, and was just wondering whether to try 6.16 now or wait until next week.

To counterbalance the dryly pragmatic lack of enthusiasm for software freedom shown in this article, here’s another bit of writing from a recent covert to linux with fewer technical details but a more emotionally satisfying approach: https://alisonwilder.com/not-the-linux-audio-post-you-want/

It’s in Ubuntu, but if you go to the OBS website it doesn’t mention that and tells you to use their PPA instead.

1. finds a bug
2. can’t figure it out instantly
3. reinstalls entire operating system.

Yep, definitely a Windows user. One who would go out of his way to use actual Google Chrome rather than Chromium. He seems to be starting to catch on, by the end of the week. I wonder if he’ll keep going.

I was a user for a while. Never did figure out if they were just a small team of well-meaning people who didn’t know how to run a business properly, or a front for something. Good prices though, and reliable service for the time I was there. Their web page seems to indicate they got acquired by Malwarebytes, I’m not sure if that makes them less trustworthy, or more.

du -sh * | sort -h is a thing I type frequently.

There’s someone out there to whom the existence of ping -i 30 is news.

The idea of using >file instead of touch file — or cp /dev/null file if it already exists — is new to me, though it doesn’t seem all that useful.

By the way, don’t forget to make a good backup before you start messing with backup scripts. Also, if the reason you’re keeping twelve different backups is to see how things changed over time, put it in git instead.

I was going to give some suggestions, but it’s easiest to say it like this:

if ( ! test -d ~/Backups ) ; then exit; fi
cd ~/Backups
count=`ls -d Main-* | wc -l`
if [ count -gt 11] ; then 
    rm -rf `ls -rtd Main-* | head -$((count - 11))`
fi
rsync -aL ~/Main Main-`date -Ihours`

You’d run something like that every six hours. Don’t expect it to work, but maybe it could help get you started.

or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, –++Linux+±-

Computers? Fun!? Whatever, nerds.