qupada

They’re waiting for you Gordon… In the test chamber

My favourite - and I’ve gotten into arguments with people about this who clearly never just tried it to see what happens - is it never executes things with the shell you think it will.

So many people assume that just because their script says #!/bin/bash at the top that cron is going to run it in bash. The reality is without ALSO setting SHELL=/bin/bash in the crontab file, you’re getting your system’s lowest-common-denominator shell (ash/dash/sh/whatever other gross abomination).

So much time wasted debugging. And I’m generally pretty good at avoiding shell-specific syntax, I’ve seen the abominations of shell scripts some people write.

The one thing I do wish systemd timers offered is cron syntax backwards compatibility, rather than just its ISO8601-style time patterns. An every-5-minutes job that used to be */5 * * * * is now OnCalendar=*-*-* *:0/5:0 and I’m just not sure that syntax is universally an improvement.

Twice in the last couple of months my bus has “crashed” during my commute.

The fix both times: rebooting it. While it was immobile in the middle of the street blocking traffic, of course.

Both the joy and the pain of EVs, potentially.

Further to this, as well as the source of the water often being the local city’s drinking water supply (as we’ve found this puts a strain on that supply), evaporative cooling systems concentrate the minerals / contaminants in the water, meaning a smaller (relative to what is evaporated) of now highly-concentrated runoff water also has to be constantly disposed of. This likely is also going into the city’s wastewater systems.

Radiators for closed-loop systems do also occupy more space (for the same cooling capacity) versus evaporative cooling towers, and are more limited in the range of climates they can be deployed in.

On balance though, the closed-loop cooling should always be the first choice; if it works for the deployment it will never be the wrong choice on a long-term / total cost of ownership basis.

It’s far from the oldest, but The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) deserves mention for still regularly being shown in movie theatres, over 50 years after its original release.

You and me both.

Sometimes I wish nutrition pellets had become a thing, but that I could continue to enjoy the ritual that is cooking (which I still do enjoy), but convert the result into a form that didn’t require so much (if any) of my attention to consume.

A few of my friends understood this concept when explained to them, but it remains foreign to many.

I’ve encountered this, as if it’s somehow a problem to be disconnected from your ancestors’ country.

Guess what? I visited Scotland (where 2/4 of my grandparents are from) a few years back. Had a great time at my favourite whisky distillery. Zero strong feelings for the place otherwise though.

I realise this came across a bit combative, but I would never bemoan anyone for anything that’s based on their lived experiences.

Unfortunately it is somewhat human nature to dislike what we don’t understand, and I think that applies to both ends of this conversation.

People that had a predominantly negative experience with Christmas will almost certainly - when their circumstances allow - either cancel it outright, or create their own tradition they do want to be a part of (it seems we have a few of those people in this thread, which is awesome).

Everyone else, for whom not even wanting to participate in Christmas is such gross contrast to their own experiences that they can barely comprehend it are bound to have some difficulty in adjusting to that.

Neither side are remotely wrong, they’re both just viewing the world through the lens of their own life.

Now you have.

Christmas can - and I simply can’t over-stress this - fuck right off.

Pro tip: talk to child-free people estranged from their parents and/or siblings. High chance they want nothing to do with any of it, likely because it dredges up unpleasant memories (which frankly stand a good chance of also being the source of their eschewing of religion).

Rather than having to buy gifts other people don’t want, and pretend to be happy about receiving the same, I just buy the things I want when I want them, and encourage those around me to do the same.

I will add that it’s not helped by living in the southern hemisphere, where a bunch of misguided people insist on emulating northern hemisphere traditions, making everyone around them miserable by serving a three-course roast dinner in the height of summer.

I said this to someone once and they accused me of being “elitist”. The simple fact is when I learned how to do this stuff, there was no such thing as a GUI for any of it. You did it on the CLI, or not at all.

(Almost the exact same experience with git, funnily enough)

I 100% agree though; the bones of the setup of my NAS (admittedly mine is Ubuntu, just because everything else I run is too) was done once 18 months ago, and most has never been touched again. Just software updates every now and then and ignore it the rest of the time.

I don’t feel like I’ve lost any functionality doing things this way, either. I discovered when a disk died that it even uses SES to light the error LED and turn on the annoying beeping noise on the JBOD, and I didn’t have to do anything to set that up. I call that a win.

I thought this said “we have a duel”.

Your way works too, I suppose.

Step 1: blender

Step 2: ???

Step 3: profit

Windows is more of a “your socks must be damp at all times while on the clock” policy.

Not exactly going to prevent you from getting your work done, but unpleasant, and you’ll be miserable the whole time.

You wrote this all a lot better than I could have, but to expand on 2) I have no desire whatsoever to have a “conversation” (nay, argument) with a machine to try and convince/coerce/deceive/brow-beat (delete as appropriate) it into maybe doing what I wanted.

I don’t want to deal with this grotesque “tee hee, oopsie” personality that every company seems to have bestowed on these awful things when things go awry, I don’t want its “suggestions”. I code, computer does. End of transaction.

People can call me a luddite at this point and I’ll wear that badge with pride. I’ll still be here, understanding my data and processes and writing code to work with them, long after (as you say) you’ve been priced out of these tools.

Not that I know of, which means I can only assume it’ll be a timing-based attack.

With strategic use of sleep statements in the script you should stand a pretty good chance of detecting the HTTP download blocking while the script execution is paused.

If you were already shipping the kind of script that unpacks a binary payload from the tail end of the file and executes it, it’s well within the realm of possibility to swap it for a different one.

That, or the aspiring rich arsehole.

Not even a beneficiary, just a grossly misguided individual who hasn’t yet realised that will, in fact, not be them some day.

“Method and apparatus for insufflation of oxygen into a body by means of flexible permeable membrane”

Thoughts and prayers 🙏

A Touch of Cloth.

What if we took a British-style police procedural and made it not just a comedy, but a full-blown parody/spoof. And also it was created by Charlie Brooker, of Black Mirror fame.

Packed with wall-to-wall sight gags, terrible puns, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it jokes.

There are three seasons, each two 45-minute episodes.

Links (for those outside the US or EU): Season 1, Season 2, Season 3.

Seriously.

Open-plan office dwellers everywhere: “Tell me more about this ‘cubicle’. Walls, you say?”