palordrolap

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.

Add more colours a button that turns it into a slot machine. Three sevens and you win a prize.

(a redirect to a picture of a duck)

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.

The GPL doesn’t control how guilty I’ll feel if I don’t.

Most of my stuff is badly hacked together “runs on my machine” code. If I released any of it onto a public repository, I’d then be on the hook for maintaining it and making it run on more than just my machine, or else examining, deconflicting, and merging pull requests where other people have done the work. I really don’t have what it takes for all that.

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.

IIRC, the devs of at least one of the forks - thought I forget which - have said they’d be forced quit if there was no upstream Firefox to constantly rebase from.

I wonder how many of the forks (or rather, their dev teams) would be able to handle the load of becoming ‘The Main Project’ if Firefox-proper went away.

qed was also a line editor but pre-dated and inspired ed, so that’s pico to nano or ed to ex again, just even further back in time.

sed and grep grew out of commands within ed (or equivalent) so I guess you could say they’re each kind of a knight’s move two to the side and once backward from the direction of ex to vi. Backwards because they’re simpler, but two to the side because they’re not interactive.

As to what would be “backward but one to the side” in that analogy, that’d be something like a tool that asked questions about every line in a file and made changes accordingly. I don’t think there’s any such standard tool, but I can think of at least a couple of ways to write one.

Comparison time!

ex is to ed as nano is to pico

That is, it’s an editor that works in almost exactly the same way as the original, but it’s by somebody else.

ex is to vi as vi is to vim, or C to C++.

That is, the latter grew out of and improved upon the former, but you can still use them like their forerunners if you really want, which is why vi has an ex mode and why you can still use pointers in C++ if you’re sufficiently warped.

If your system has vi or a clone, try vi -e, or, if the symlink is set up, ex. Technically that’s vi in ex mode, not ed per-se but it’s about as similar as you’re going to get without a lot of pointless bother.

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 Cinnamon desktop environment found in Linux Mint uses JavaScript on the back-end. My knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond that (other DEs, and what they do, nor the full extent of JS in Cinnamon), but I did look at it at one point.

Makes me wonder if OP was talking it about that in particular or if there’s some other project with a bundled JS interpreter they decided not to work with.

Me, looking between a picture of Bjarne Stroustrup and OP: … are you sure about that?

Reminds me of dev.null as an e-mail address, but perhaps the service is more useful(?). I had access to the back-end of the mail server in question and it literally had /dev/null in the configuration.

And yes, it ate any e-mails sent to it.

It should be a plug-in, or add-on as they’re called these days. And it should be something people have to go find and install rather than it being there by default. Make the opt-in as deliberate as possible.

Then see how popular it is.

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.