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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  • 640 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Tricky prospect. If they admit Australia on that criterion, they’d have no good reason to not admit Israel if they asked to join, and that’s a can of worms I don’t think Europe would want to open. Best leave that can at the back of the cupboard.

    Now, if we could find some other criterion, I don’t see why not. Sticking it to Britain by accepting all of the Commonwealth except Britain could work as an argument, and might even be popular on the continent.

    It would have to be couched in cleverer language, of course, for the sake of plausible deniability.


  • Be aware that a lot of distros will be switching from X11 to Wayland at some point in the not-too-distant future and these ancient tools will not work there.

    People have tried to write equivalents (ydotool is one I’m aware of), but Wayland has intentionally been written to make doing such things difficult, for “security” reasons.

    I will be grumpy until I can make my scripts work again, but that’s for future me to deal with.



  • They allow the user to script changes to, and pull information from, windows in the window manager. Like read, if not also set, a window’s title, change a window’s dimensions, move it around, send it to a different desktop, send keypresses, bring a window to the foreground, etc. etc.

    Basically, anything the user can do with the mouse, keyboard or window manager via the GUI, and a little more besides, can be automated.

    The two commands work slightly differently to each other and one can often do something the other can’t.

    As an example, I have a script that resizes the active window to a 4:3 ratio at full vertical height on my 16:9 monitor. I’ve then bound that script to a keypress in the window manager. It’s a lot like having something halfway between window mode and maximised mode.

    Couldn’t I do that with the mouse? Sure. But with the script I don’t have to gauge by eye and spend multiple mouse clicks and movements trying to get it just right.


  • Nah. It’s not, or wasn’t, Redshift. Nor is it a vision issue. I can have the emoji picker on screen at the same time as my comment and they’re definitely very different colours.

    I think the picker uses images, but the on-screen text renderer in Firefox is using the Noto Color Emoji font as a substitution (because the text font doesn’t have emojis) and whatever Firefox has set as the default colours for the glyphs in it.

    My picker clearly doesn’t know how to generate the right modifier sequences to change those, and I don’t think it’s worth mucking around with Unicode zero-width joiners and colour modifiers to try to figure it out.


  • You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?

    This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.

    And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.

    They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.

    Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.

    I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.


  • As someone aware of the ancient lore, but am in fact from the early continuance of the Eternal September: the AOL logo

    In the early days of the WWW, there was an influx of clueless folks - often AOL users - saying “me too!” on anything and everything with little to no further input. It was among the earliest of Internet memes.

    Oh. The AOL logo isn’t an emoji? Then 🔼 and 🔺 are close approximations. I’m not sure what, if anything, can set the colour(s) of those. My emoji picker says the first one should be white on blue, but it’s showing as white on orange as I type in the comment box. The second one is just red.