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 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • This is going to vary by program and no solution is guaranteed to be perfect even if tailored for a specific time-sink program (TSP henceforth).

    Would you be OK with the TSP being force-closed and potentially losing all progress and/or work, like a grumpy parent yanking a power cord?

    What’s to stop you from simply re-opening the TSP again? Or opening the TSP outside the control of whatever’s supposed to tell you “no more”? (Related to “snooze” and “don’t even bother setting the alarm” hacks for more regular alarm clocks!)





  • I wash them whenever I’ve dirtied enough for a full load, and if I don’t, I’ll often throw the bathroom mats in there with them. Frankly though, still nowhere near often enough. If they pass the sniff and squint tests (smell and look fine), I’m usually OK using them again. And again.

    There was already a towel wash pencilled in for this week or next, oddly enough, before this question showed up, or else it might have shamed me into considering it. Other laundry is first in the queue though.

    As for throwing them out? Never had need in the 20+ years I’ve had my own towels, and some of those were hand-me-downs.

    I remember one particularly large brown bath towel starting to fall apart at my parents’ house long before I moved out, and I still kind of miss it, which is kind of funny.

    Now, washcloths made of towelling material - I’ve ruined a fair few of those with careless wringing. PSA: Don’t fold them diagonally before wringing them out.




  • On the one hand, Hungary has remained somewhat different from its neighbours because it’s surrounded by mountains and hard to get in or out of by land so it would seem a safe bet for a swap, but on the other, it’s the 21st century and mountains aren’t so much of an obstacle any more. Would we really want to give Putin an airstrip in the middle of Europe?

    It would be foolish to assume Putin’s expansionist plans are limited to Ukraine. It’s just that Ukraine is proving a bit more difficult than he expected and he’s had to concentrate his efforts there.


  • I still backup my files the most basic way, that is, create an archive locally, connect external storage and copy it there. Then disconnect external storage. The archive is made onto a separate internal drive and I keep the most recent one there, so I don’t even need the external one for minor accidents.

    I think only once in the last decade or so have I wanted (but never needed) to pull something back from external, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

    The main downside to this method is that it doesn’t de-duplicate, so keeping several takes a lot more space that it would do otherwise.




  • In Britain, especially from the 1970s to 2000s, there was always a race to be the #1 charting song at Christmas, and songs with a Christmas theme often won out, even if they were otherwise secular pop songs. This means that over the years, we’ve ended up with probably a hundred of them ranging in quality from terrible to great.

    America have followed suit. Or else, they might argue they started it with songs like “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells”.

    This is largely down to the more permissive secular and Protestant Christian societies where irreverence is tolerated if not encouraged.

    The Catholic and Orthodox churches are less tolerant of those sorts of things, so people in countries with heavy influence from those churches - like yourself - won’t have had anything like it.


  • The French word is more akin to the English C word, at least etymologically, which makes me wonder how high it ranks in terms of French profanities.

    I think most English speakers know where the B word falls with respect to the C word (and say, something like the worst racial slur), but I have no idea where on that scale the French word falls.

    Either way, I’ve definitely heard both English translations be called misogynistic, and I think that would qualify those words for “slur” status. I can’t imagine the French word is thought of any differently.


  • Well, the Celts got distracted by the influx of Germanic tribes and as such had more immediate things to worry about and hate than the Romans, but I figure if the Franks, Saxons, Vikings, et. al. decided to stay home, the modern Britons would still grumble about the Romans occasionally.

    I mean, the Germanic invasions started over a millennium ago and dislike of that’s still on a low boil, so I figure two millennia isn’t out of the question.

    On the other hand, the Romans did go home. The Saxons, not so much.


  • No. My distro still provides the latest release of the original GNOME system monitor.

    As time has gone on, GNOME have enforced more and more of their own look and feel, completely ignoring any styling that might be provided by other window managers. Some of those might even be using older GTK libraries, but that doesn’t matter.

    Basically if you run a modern GNOME app under KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc., it’s going to look like a GNOME app regardless of what the other windows look like. Very Henry Ford.

    The system monitor is no different. The new version works but the earlier version I found and installed also works fine and fits in. I suspect it’s GTK3 (old) versus GTK4 (new), but I can’t confirm. It’ll be something like that.

    The folks responsible for Linux Mint started the XApps project of GNOME forks to roll back some of GNOME’s nonsense, but I guess they haven’t got around to forking the system monitor yet.

    … and I’ve looked at both Resources and Mission Centre. Neither are to my taste (and are both Flatpaks).


  • That was the first one I tried, but it’s a fork from too far back.

    The two main issues I had with it were 1) It only reports CPU usage in multiples of X%, where X is the number of cores, which was a long-standing SNAFU in the original GNOME version and 2) the usage graphs on the performance screen are light-mode only, even in dark mode, and there’s no easy option to change it.


  • Well, I was going to say GNOME’s System Monitor which has always been the default GUI task manager on my distro, but it’s been getting steadily more and more GNOME-ified with every revision and frankly, I hate how it looks now.

    Might be time to shop for an alternative.

    Edit +44 mins: So, the immediate alternatives all have other things I don’t like about them, but an older version of GNOME System Monitor will still install and run, so I guess I’ll be using that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯