palordrolap

GNOME and its applications have been headed in that direction for a while now, but I’m not sure Canonical are behind those changes. If they were, I’m sure they would have done something about GNOME apps looking alien on Xubuntu, for example.

Source

As that link suggests, the Mint team are looking to produce apps that run on any desktop environment, forking GNOME apps that don’t comply with that. Hopefully that keeps the momentum going for that sort of thing.

In addition to other advice here: If you want to save on keystrokes, set yourself up a shell alias that’s short but unlikely to be a valid command anywhere else.

I have one that’s kind of the inverse of yours, called mntStorage (no prizes for guessing its purpose). It wasn’t intentional, but mixing case like that is pretty rare in important commands too.

If you’re using GNOME or a derivative, you should probably be using gio mount to do the same mounting as the file manager would. Then again, you say that the file manager isn’t working, so gio mount probably won’t work either.

I admit I had no idea about the guts of this - and maybe still don’t - but the user who suggested looking at udisks is probably right. It’s always been there in the background as long as I remember (Mint/Cinnamon, many years), and has hooks into something I mounted with gio after the last reboot.

Another search term that might help is “gvfs”, or GNOME virtual file system, which I’ve definitely poked around with before.

Importantly, Nautilus and gio don’t need sudo because they call into what’s already running. They (or the subsystem) automatically create the mount point directory (and remove it on unmount). If the directory already exists, they use the “append a 1” technique you experienced, presumably so they don’t clobber or hide something that might be important.

That probably works for any closely related language pairs. Finns thinking the same of Estonian, some English folks definitely formed that opinion of Scots the first time seeing it in print, Polish and Czech, etc. etc.

No problems here, but I have an ancient PC and card. Distro is recent though. LMDE6 with proprietary legacy driver straight from NVIDIA.

For a few basic things, yes. For a couple of others, I’ve set up a shell function or a script instead.

Obligatory warning before I list a few of my aliases - overriding commands by an alias with the same name can be dangerous, as it can mean that expected behaviour can become destructive behaviour on a foreign system without those aliases. e.g. a common error is aliasing rm to rm -i so that rm always asks if the user is sure. Until that user is on a different machine without the alias and the files vanish without warning, anyway. Oops.

Some of mine are arguably questionable in that regard, but I don’t think any will result in anything particularly destructive if I expect them in the wrong place.

These two override the default which command to deliver slightly more useful output, especially when the command is itself an alias (or an alias override). command is a bash builtin:

alias Which='command -V'
alias which='command -v'

The obligatory ls config override. long-iso formatting ensures that ls’s output is consistent, which is tidy, and also useful for further processing. That said, use of stat is probably a better choice for that sort of thing.). LC_ALL=C setting is so that things sort in “ASCIIbetical” order. My locale mixes upper and lowercase filenames and I’m too old-school for that sort of thing.:

alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style=long-iso'

Some versions of mtr start in GUI mode. -t prevents that. And of course, Windows muscle memory dies hard:

alias mtr='mtr -t'
alias tracert='echo '\''Use mtr, you ninny.'\'''

Hex dump using the ancient and nearly always present od command (the incantation is right out of the od manual):

alias odx='od -A x -t x1z -v'

Process control. Give either a PID and the process will do as it’s told. Usually. :

alias pause='kill -TSTP'
alias resume='kill -CONT'

How many times do I type the wrong thing? Too many:

alias quit='exit'

Setup for fortune. The first one is self-explanatory. The second one shows which of the fortune files the fortune came from (-c) but does some shenanigans to send that header to STDERR rather than STDOUT. This makes the header vanish when fortune is piped into fun things like cowsay.

alias bofh='fortune bofh-excuses'
alias fortune='fortune -c | while read -r line ; do [[ ! "$A" ]] && echo $line >&2 || echo $line ; [[ "$line" == "%" ]] && A=1; done'

I have a load of silly text cipher filters as scripts, but this one came for free with the bsdgames package

alias rot='caesar'
alias rot13='caesar 13'

And of course, every time I create a new alias (which isn’t very often, I admit), I run this one, which dumps all current aliases into a file that some distros set up by default.

alias save_aliases='alias > ~/.bash_aliases'

Two of the inescapable ones* are from the 70s and a couple of others besides, but yes, 1990 is a significant dropping-off point.

Curiously, one Top 40 chart for Christmas songs streamed in the UK, from December 2021 has Feliz Navidad in there at 35, which is kind of funny because that’s above our own band The Darkness. Their '00s Christmas effort tried so hard to re-capture the spirit of the '70s and do well. To some extent it did but the magic wasn’t quite there. It probably didn’t help that it was based around a riff stolen wholesale from Queen’s Brian May (Somebody to Love if memory serves.)

But importantly, that chart does list several others. It’s a fairly safe bet that if you see a song, or band (or both) you’ve not heard of, it’s probably one of our home grown ones that hasn’t made it big where you are.

* 9 and 12 on the linked chart.

What are you using to full-screen the video?

That is, are you using the letter-F key while the video is the active screen element, or likewise, clicking the ⛶ full-screen icon in the bottom right of the video, or are you doing something else?

What it sounds like you’re doing is using something like the F11 key, which is the browser’s own “go fullscreen” key, but that’s not for the video. (I will admit to having done this accidentally once or twice when I’m not concentrating.)

OR Maybe you’re not doing that but something else is hooking into F11 instead??

FWIW, I’ve never had anything like what you describe happening on Mint (LMDE)

Here in Britain we have a whole slew (or sleigh) of others, but, sticking with the theme, very few of those are from the last 30 years.

I’m surprised at least a couple of them didn’t catch on in the US. Maybe they’re too whimsical or alien for the average US audience.

Similarly, Feliz Navidad is largely unknown over here. Then again, we don’t have the large Hispanic cultural influence that might have allowed it gain a foothold.

I saw that comic the other day. The answer to this is “It was a Hamas base of operations.”

To over-egg this comment: “What gave you the impression Hamas were there?” “There were Palestinians there.” “…” “…”

C’mon Joe, you’re the guy who said “I’m Irish” when talking about the relationship between Britain and Ireland. The parallels here ought to be keeping you on your toes.

Can’t fully agree with the sentiment there. There are innocents in Russia who very much don’t deserve any of this.

But Putin though? Yeah. Him specifically and anyone who supports him.

Were they sugar free and were they to help him do that thing that we often ask if bears do in the woods?

It’s not like Israel needs any more weapons against a rag-tag bunch of terrorists whose existence they - arguably indirectly - continue to foment.

Yes, I know Israel’s take on the matter is that the existence of Hamas is precisely why cruelty to Palestine is “necessary” rather than the other way around, but at this point does it matter whether the chicken or the egg came first? Those who say yes on both sides - even if they differ about which came first - are using it as a crutch at this point.

The whole thing now is a big kid stomping the ever-loving f**k out of a smaller kid because “he kicked my shin! he kicked my shin!” so that obviously makes whatever they do OK, and in fact, let’s have some other big kids (one wearing a stars and stripes shirt of all things?!) help out with the stomping.

And tomorrow, had this not suddenly escalated, the original big kid would have gone through the smaller kid’s pockets for lunch money, and maybe a house or two like usual.

(Please note that - goofy metaphors aside - I’m not happy about the civilian deaths that have occurred recently, regardless of what the dead might have believed while they were alive. In war, it’s almost always the wrong people who die.)

The Jewish god (and thus that of the Christians and the Muslims because it’s the same guy) was once part of his own pantheon. He even had a wife at one point.

It’s not thought he’s the same god as Zeus/Jupiter, but his name is suspiciously similar if you squint a bit (a bit more than you do to compare Zeus-Piter, Zeus’s “full name” anyway, because that’s more of a “holy shit” realisation if you don’t know). Almost like the name might have mutated slightly under the influence of neighbouring religions.

Consider: When you’re frightened of saying your god’s name even though you think you might know it, it can help to make it sound a bit more like other peoples’ main god, after all. Your god can’t get mad because you’re not saying his name, and the heathens might start to like the comparison and convert.

Another thing to note, regarding pantheons, is that Jewish god is quoted as saying “you shall have no other gods before me”. That, depending on interpretation, could imply that the other gods are still around twiddling their thumbs and playing solo paddle-ball or something, but we mortals aren’t allowed to talk to them any more.

YHWH will pitch a hissy fit if we do.

Edits: Formatting. Typos. The usual.

Hot take

Aw man. If the photo is anything to go by, they might have cured it of racism, which you’d think was a good thing and that I’m a racist asshole, but the fix could actually increase its use for racism.

That is, ironically, a system that’s only really good at identifying one race (usually white people like a large percentage of the people who made the systems) is a bit harder to (mis)use that way.

The only way to (mis)use an accidentally racist facial recognition system is to persecute everyone it can’t identify, and you wouldn’t need an expensive system to do that. And it’s a lot easier to get called out for what you’re doing, either way.

When the system works on all people of all skin colours, this can allow a racist user of it to pick and choose and plead innocence.

Slightly more mainstream hot take

Facial recognition is dystopian and should be yaten into the sun.

Tangential (excuse the pun):

One thing we can do better as opponents of Trump (or anyone else for that matter) is to not go for the low hanging fruit of things the man can’t change about himself. Like his hands. Or the alleged size of, well, you know.

His fake tan or hair are better targets, at least he chooses that part of his appearance, but I’d like to think we can do better than that as well. A grey (or brown) area is his alleged incontinence which, if it’s real (and I really, really wouldn’t want to check that), it’s said he ultimately did it to himself. Could be a target, but also probably best avoided.

Now. His policies. His wrong-thinking. Anything that might harm or put people in danger? Sure. Go nuts. Tear the man a new one.

The low-hanging fruit does have the benefit of riling him and his less intelligent advocates, but as the man himself would do in a similar situation, those are the things to bring out at the end of an argument when you feel like you’re losing or at least not getting through a thick skull … metaphorically speaking. And preferably after they’ve already done the same.

A lot of other religions and nationalities have “customs” going the other way, that is pertaining to the abuse of Jews. I’m sure he’s somewhat less in favour of those.

As am I, disturbingly enough. That is, I wouldn’t spit on, or otherwise persecute him for being Jewish.

For being an abject asshole on the other hand…

Maybe the warming and freezing will cancel out and the much smaller islands that will be left after the sea levels rise will still be temperate and worth living on.

Edit: This is not an “I’m alright, Jack” comment. I’d rather this wasn’t even a vague possibility and that the planet wasn’t warming out of control.

Jeremy Hunt, current Chancellor of the Exchequer, literally co-authored a book on how to dismantle the NHS and replace it with a health-insurance based system.

He was Secretary for Health at one point too, and his policies didn’t exactly rule out that he might be following the game-plan of that book.

There’s no tinfoil hat needed here. The Tories are all but open about what they’re doing at this point.