palordrolap

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.

Are you sure that’s not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost’s shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.

Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn’t one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)

Lucky you had a motherboard with a CMOS battery. Without that*, you needed to enter the time and date every time the computer booted / rebooted.

* Or a capacitor instead.

LMDE’s system is the same as regular Mint. I’ve been on LMDE for a few years but was on regular before that.

Actually yes, but I didn’t expect they’d go down the same avenues with the Pi.

I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I’m of that same generation, but I couldn’t justify the expense.

YSK/PSA: If you’re on Mint, Mint’s apt is not Debian’s apt and while they work similarly for common use cases, they diverge pretty quickly beyond that. Both are installed by default but Mint’s takes precedence.*

Case in point: I was looking for which package - specifically one that was not yet installed - contains a certain command line tool and Mint’s apt search does not find it. Debian’s does. **

On the other hand, Mint’s apt has way more subcommands than the default one, which have been useful on occasion.

* Mint’s is at /usr/local/bin/apt and Debian’s is at /usr/bin/apt; The default user $PATH puts /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin.

** FWIW, the tool is/was sponge and it’s in the moreutils package.

Edit: It has come to my attention that it isn’t actually the people behind the Pi doing this. I really should read more rather than jumping to conclusions. There’s a few obvious rewrites I could make, but I think the prediction at the end is still valid even if the route I took wasn’t the right one.

This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.

Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.

And now a computer in a PC-like case.

Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.

Knee-leeks and spear-leeks. Delicious.

The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren’t needed.

As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

Pros: Little screens on every key!

Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!

Get one today!

Let me save you a few characters: %Y-%m-%d can be shortened to %F

For visualisation’s sake I also like to put a space before the %F so that the year and the file size are separated a little more, but that’s more of a taste thing than anything else.

(Caveat: %F’s year is explicitly four digits in some libraries, whereas %Y is always the full year. If you’re planning for your code to last 8000 years you might want to consider that.)

Yeah. Right Control should be where Fn is for sure.

And as an ISO keyboard user, I need my right Shift key, so that Control has to be a Shift instead. On ISO, left Shift is small and right is large. For that and other reasons I use the right one way more than the left. And if that’s not possible for deep technical reasons, hard-wire it to the left one bypassing all of the trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time a keyboard did something like that.

… and what do you know, there’s a even little space there with no key where they could put the Fn key omitted by those changes.

Everything else I could deal with. Even the otherwise US layout. It’s been a while since I used one, but occasionally there’s a hiccup and I’ll reach for double quote or at-sign in the opposite places, so that muscle memory is still there, maybe waiting for mangling into typing on something like this.

I haven’t used Windows in earnest since Win 7. No wonder they want to force people to upgrade to new hardware.

Oof. That must be a single core laptop from 2010 or something, which if true, that sucks.

I have a 13 year old computer around here that had no problems with LMDE6 when last I fired it up. It was relatively high spec when new which takes some of the edge off, but I never had an input lag problem anywhere except maybe badly-written websites.

Just how limited is your computer?

As it stands, it doesn’t look like there is one. It appears to be a recreational mathematical toy for the creator to learn things more than it is for others to play with. It’s kind of neat nonetheless.

I think I might have made different choices for the reversal calculations, but I haven’t really thought about how I’d implement those choices, nor about nigh-insurmountable edge cases, and I’m only vaguely thinking about the “c = a OP b” case, not anything more extreme. The creator may have wanted to make the same choices but found themselves forced down a different path.

Verbatim from the creator: “it is imperfect”.

I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.

It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.

That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.

… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

alias name-here yields the line alias name-here='contents-of-alias-here' as output, and if you want just the part between the single quotes from that, sed, cut or, come to think of it, related shell tricks that do the same thing, would be needed to capture and convert it.

${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a name for what’s only between those single quotes.

For example, I have a lot of preferences built into my alias for ‘ls’. Occasionally I want to run watch ls -l somefilespec to watch a directory listing for changes to a file. But commands fed to watch don’t go through the alias mechanism, leaving the output somewhat different to my preferences.

It’s wordy, but watch ${BASH_ALIASES["ls"]} -l somefilespec mostly* achieves what I want.

* Unfortunately, watch also causes the stripping of colour codes and I have --color=auto, not --color=force in my ls alias, so it’s by no means perfect - I have add the latter if I want colour - but I don’t have to type the rest of the preferences I have in there.

FWIW, my ls alias is currently:

alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style="+ %F %T"'

I have an alias called save_aliases that does alias > ~/.bash_aliases. alias on its own just dumps all the existing aliases to the terminal in a format that can be parsed by Bash.

I felt especially clever when I came up with that and used it to save itself.

Bonus fact: ${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a way to get at the contents of an alias without resorting sed or cut shenanigans on the output of the alias command.