Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • 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.




  • 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.)






  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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.