If I had any young people ask me for advice (which they aren’t and when I was young I also didn’t) I’d say this: the world is designed to keep you docile and distracted. If you want to do adventurous things, risk things, go far, you must do it now. If you wait it is too late. Everybody going on adventure everywhere is ill prepared. The same is true for any kind of change. People like me tell you that we’ve got it but we don’t – and by the time you realize that everybody is fumbling and improvising and you finally learned how important it is to network and to be sly and all that, to be politically active, to organize, you’re as old as me and still haven’t done a thing. Sure, it’s never too late but if you get started early, there’s still time. And if instead you think, old man, I have done all that and more, what are you talking about? Then I am relieved and my fears are unfounded. Thank you!
If I had any young people ask me for advice (which they aren’t and when I was young I also didn’t) I’d say this: the world is designed to keep you docile and distracted. If you want to do adventurous things, risk things, go far, you must do it now. If you wait it is too late. Everybody going on adventure everywhere is ill prepared. The same is true for any kind of change. People like me tell you that we’ve got it but we don’t – and by the time you realize that everybody is fumbling and improvising...
I have a service file that's enabled and it's file says Restart=always. And yet I recently found it dead. How do I find what I'm missing? There are 195 man page starting with systemd on this system so RTFM isn't going to happen without some pointers…
Today I learned about ts(1), a task-spooler. Useful to not unduly burden a machine. Just do one thing after another. And you can add to the queue as time passes. https://viric.name/soft/ts/
A long time ago, on a different network, I started following journalists and news outlets and felt a lot of anxiety. I vowed to never do that again and instead stick to news printed on paper. That slows things down, has no implied pressure to share, no comments to read, and it’s limited in volume, too. Also, journos get paid an all that, I hope.
Every time I upgrade my system I look at the list of packages and wonder whether I could uninstall some of them. I look at their description and try to uninstall them. That lists all the things that will get uninstalled alongside it and so the process repeats, lots of exploring of packages, and then, eventually, they're gone. And when I reboot, it's my time to cry, maybe… at least that's what I fear. Going to reboot right now to get past that feeling of dread.
Ironically, I started using Sway, and Wayland, and dropped a session or login manager, and felt ready to drop the xserver… When I rebooted, everything seems to work. The terminal. Firefox. But hilariously, dmenu no longer works: "cannot open display".
"Try building something for yourself. Try writing code for you, and you alone. Don’t worry about whether it will look good on your resumé or attract lots of stars on GitHub. Just write something that feels good to you. Explore a weird idea and see where it takes you." https://bvisness.me/luax/
Lemon slices, with a 3:1 mix of salt and sugar, one tablespoon per small lemon, topped off with boiled water. What should I expect? Is this going to ferment and produce gas, so slightly unscrew the jar? For a few days? What do you think?
The feeling when using MS Teams in the office and you type a short reply to a team member trying to avoid the bland phrases the AI suggests you use instead.
XMPP using ChatSecure on the phone and a self hosted server. The server changes certs and I don’t get notified. Open the app per chance after weeks and months, get greeted by a message asking me to trust the new certs. Clearly a notification problem.
DeltaChat on the phone using a separate email account. Open the app per chance after days, get greeted by a new message. Clearly a notification problem.
I am trying to go without session manager or display manager, so the system boots and I am faced with a virtual console. When I log in, the window manager sway is started. This works. Now I want to change the font for that console. I ran dpkt-reconfigure console-setup which changed /etc/default/console-setup, but for it to have an actual effect, I need to run setupcon. I can only do this after I log in. Is there a way to change the font asap?
Some people are comparing man pages and info and … I don't know. I cannot imagine documenting Emacs with just man pages. I think it's cool that Perl is documented in man pages but I also think that a book is cool. I hate the fact that Python is documented as neither man pages no info! That's the worst. Anyway. I like man pages for small to medium tools. I find the bash man page is stretching it, for example.
Pick the right tool for the job.
Also, I try to organise my latest project as a bunch of subcommands so that I can write a man page for each. And already I'm feeling it. How many man pages does this tool really need? Perhaps a book-like hypertext would have been better?
Anyway. I don't think that man is a good ebook or hypertext reader and some things need an ebook or a hypertext. And some command line tools are perfectly documented with man pages, of course!
Except for git subcommands. Those… options… need… I dunno. A redesign. 🔥 🔥 🔥
Some people are comparing man pages and info and … I don't know. I cannot imagine documenting Emacs with just man pages. I think it's cool that Perl is documented in man pages but I also think that a book is cool. I hate the fact that Python is documented as neither man pages no info! That's the worst. Anyway. I like man pages for small to medium tools. I find the bash man page is stretching it, for example.
This article in the @woz interviews Clara E. Mattei who wrote “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” – and it really makes me want to read the book. Like: this talk didn’t start with Thatcher and returning to the year 1945 wouldn’t fix it. Even in the Great Depression workers had already lost much of their power. And instead “bad economic policies” are revealed to be purposefully engineered to keep people poor and working.
This article in the @woz interviews Clara E. Mattei who wrote “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” – and it really makes me want to read the book. Like: this talk didn’t start with Thatcher and returning to the year 1945 wouldn’t fix it. Even in the Great Depression workers had already lost much of their power. And instead “bad economic policies” are revealed to be purposefully engineered to keep people poor and working.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s surprising in the negative way to boost somebody’s reply to somebody else. Like, they are arguing against somebody else and I agree so much I want to boost but also: am I boosting I don’t have to carry the burden of this conversation?
Gregory's Server