Can’t vouch for any other distro, but aplay is alive and well on Mint. The package that contains it — alsa-utils — seems to be a core dependency for Cinnamon, even.

So basically, your example runs fine on my machine, screechy sounds and everything.

Turkish has (and maybe related languages have) genderless pronouns, but I don’t know whether that context shifts elsewhere in the sentence structure or not, and how necessary it might be in legal contracts.

Find a way to call the authorities. I don’t trust my brain at the best of times, and for all I know, I’m the murderer despite no recollection. Because of no recollection. That’d be a sign of some kind of mental problem, right? And if I’m otherwise fine and not responsible, there’s still a whacking great gap in my memory (for how I came to be there) and there’s a murderer on the loose.

I’d also try not to contaminate the scene any more than I had to.

Knowing my luck, the police would pin it on me anyway, but since, as I said, I don’t trust my brain, as far as I know, they might well be right and it might be the best thing for everyone if I am put away somewhere.

Me? Probably the leaflet delivered to my workplace that said “Missing a package? Call this (premium rate) number.”

In retrospect I have no idea what I was thinking by calling it. Gonna blame stress, morning brain and the fact I’d been waiting an unusually long time for an international delivery, but I should have seen the big red flag.

Once I went through proper channels, it turned out the seller hadn’t even got around to shipping it. “Stuck in their system” or something like that. Thankfully that in itself wasn’t a scam (seller was a well-known web store) and my item turned up a week or two later at no extra cost.

Calling the number wasn’t a million pound mistake on my part, but over a handful of similarly gullible individuals, the scammers probably made a few thousand profit over the price of a few leaflets.

Someone else? Probably a slick mobile phone salesman signing an elderly relative up to a contract rather than sticking with pay-as-you-go. The mobile phone companies really don’t like PAYG customers because they’re not a guaranteed constant drip-feed of money.

Said relative is usually pretty sharp when it comes to scams, and frankly it’s not that expensive a contract, but still, I’m annoyed about it.

They write in Finnish in other comments, but I don’t seem to be able to confirm or deny the law there, at least not with a quick search.

I did find an article that suggested that it’s been ruled legal in Italy, but only if you’re homeless and hungry. I can imagine that if you tried it and had any assets whatsoever, they’d find a way to put a lien on those assets rather than let you get away with it.

“A 'ISO” where that apostrophe represents hard attack on the vowel sound.

As for what that is, consider the phrase “Paula asked a question.”

If enunciated clearly there’ll be a hard attack between “Paula” and “asked”.

(In this example, some — chiefly British — people will put an R sound between them if they don’t enunciate clearly. The R wouldn’t show up in “A ISO”, but this is to demonstrate hard attack, not get into those weeds.)

¯\(x_x)/¯

Pedant mode rising. “A ISO” is only valid in a few English dialects and this doesn’t read like any of those everywhere else. Also, there’s the missing apostrophe in “lets”.

Imagine you’re a horrible misogynist who has the drive to have sex with a woman, but you don’t like the idea of actually having to touch one. If only there was something feminine but not a woman. Something that could understand a man in the way only a man can, but at the same time is not quite as strong and powerful as a man…

FWIW, most Debians (which includes Ubuntu and Mint) have Ctrl+Alt+T set to open the default terminal program without needing to install anything else. This is usually reconfigurable in the system settings too if that’s an awkward stretch.

But I get that people like the drop-down terminals too, for which see also Yakuake and Guake.

Reminds me of the story of the guy who was told his fly was down, so turned 180° from the people he was with to fix the issue, as is expected. Except in this case, he previously had his back to a much larger group of people (think cliques at a party), so basically zipped up in front of way more people than he would have done if he hadn’t turned around.

It’s a bit vanilla but I like DejaVu Sans Mono 8pt in my terminal, which is where I edit scripts and things

Curiously, I don’t think that looks quite as good at larger sizes, so I’ve been using Liberation Mono 9pt or 10pt elsewhere.

Both of those have distinct glyphs for the usual easily confused candidates. Can’t be having my lowercase L’s and 1s looking similar.

Even the old monolithic sites started out with a lot of tech folks as the initial population. It’s tech. Such is the way of things.

Here maybe the effect is stronger because of the similar ethos between the Fediverse and free software like Linux.

Give it time.

And if you dare take the risk of lobbing a SIGCHLD at the parent process, most of the time, that doesn’t even do anything, and now you’ve been through the stress of signalling a perfectly healthy parent process.

I like to analogise and anthropomorphise signals, but there’s no non-depressing way to do this one. SIGCHLD is basically “clean up after your kids, even if that means tidying their corpses away”.

Often the parent can’t do that or doesn’t know how. It’s hugging them close and they’ll only leave once the parent also leaves.

These things aren’t even sentient and that stings a bit.

As a kid I remember jam (probably strawberry) and cheese (Cheddar or red Leicester) sandwiches being pretty awesome. For manifold reasons, peanut butter was not something made available to me back then, so that would be the closest our house ever got to that.

But unfortunately, apt moo | cowsay does something horrible to the cow in the speech bubble.

Yeah, I was about to go to bed when I was writing that. “Several” or “a few” would have been better.

It’s 1375 and I’m asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.

But let’s assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I’m spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I’m lucky, they’ll think I was sent by God. If not I’m gonna have a real bad time. There’s a good chance I’ll break a bone in the fall, and that’s not going to go well at all.

But let’s assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That’s actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.

Now I’m on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don’t speak any language they’ll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won’t evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we’re talking Chaucer and that’s pretty much opaque.

I’m literate, but not in Latin, and that’s the language of the Church. I’m numerate, but they haven’t got beyond Roman numerals yet.

I’m not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building’s no more than 200 years old. Maybe it’s on the same site. I’d head there for shelter at least.

I know the Lord’s Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.

Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.

And then I’d be burned as a witch.

You want a website and software that does Lemmy and Mastodon at the same time? That’d be kbin / mbin.

In part because of the kbin creator’s real world struggles, it hasn’t really taken off quite as well as Lemmy has, but its successor mbin is in use in a few places. I’m currently on fedia.io which is an mbin instance, for example.

Gonna go retro with this one: Madness’ cover of Labi Siffre’s It Must Be Love

If I remember rightly, Siffre appears in Madness’ music video for the song, so it had his seal of approval too. (I mean, yeah, they wouldn’t have done a cover if he hadn’t agreed to it, but appearing in the video is a force multiplier on that.)

Doesn’t look like it to me. https://www.dafontfree.io/impact-font/ shows lowercase that’s radically different to this. Look at the y for example.

That doesn’t rule out variant glyphs or another member of a hypothetical Impact family, but I’m leaning towards no.