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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • Don’t go by any general rules. If you are unsure, take it home and sit down with your mushroom guide book and go through all the ways of identifying it and separating it from similar species until you are sure, or you give up and throw it away.

    Just off the cuff here are a couple of examples that violate the advice given above, golden chanterelle is very spicy but perfectly edible; gyromitra esculenta (“false morel”) does not have lamelles, is supposed to be mildly flavoured, but is deadly toxic.






  • Not chmod related, but I’ve made some other interesting mistakes lately.

    Was trying to speed up the boot process on my ancient laptop by changing the startup services. Somehow ended up with nologin never being unset, which means that regular users aren’t allowed to log in; and since I hadn’t set a root password, no one could log in!

    Installed a different version of Python for a project, accidentally removed the wrong version of Python at the end of the day. When I started the computer the next day, all sorts of interesting things were broken!





  • This is likely because docker runs Linux in a VM on MacOS right?

    We’ve had similar problems with stuff that works on the developers Mac but not the server which is case sensitive. It can be quite insidious if it does not cause an immediate “file not found”-error but say falls back to a default config because the provided one has the wrong casing.


  • Well completion-ignore-case is enough to solve this particular problem, the other options are just sugar on top :)

    I’m going to add completion-prefix-display-length to these related bonus tips (I have it set to 9). This makes it a lot easier to compare files with long names in your tab completion.

    For example if you have a folder with these files:

    FoobarSystem-v20.69.11-CrashLog2022-12-22 FoobarSystem-v20.69.11.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12-CrashLog2023-10-02 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.userprofiles

    Just type vim TAB to see

     ...1-CrashLog2022-12-22   ...1.config   ...2   ...2-CrashLog2023-10-02   ...2.config   ...2.userprofiles
    $vim FoobarSystem-v20.69.1
    

    GNU Readline (which is what Bash uses for input) has a lot of options (e.g. making it behave like vim), and your settings are also used in any other programs that use it for their CLI which is a nice bonus. The config file is ~/.inputrc and you’d enable the above mentioned options like this

    $include /etc/inputrc
    
    set completion-ignore-case on
    set show-all-if-ambiguous on
    set completion-map-case on
    set completion-prefix-display-length 9
    




  • People think it’s about Stallman being bitter. But it’s because GNU is a political project with the goal of total user freedom and control over their computer. The software is a step on the way there. But if people use free software without understanding, valuing or taking advantage of the freedom it gives them, the GNU project has failed.


  • I think this is what people mean with it being “unstable”. If you keep the system up to date, things will break at some point, and it’s up to you to sort that out. This is because Arch makes very different promises and tradeoffs than something like Debian. It’s a distro for those who want or need to customize or just like to tinker.

    The reason I left Arch was because I carelessly installed a new major version of my WM which took me hours to get working. This made me realize that while learning how things work is fun, I want my OS to be a tool rather than a project.

    (If you needed to reinstall Ubuntu every six months I guess you were already using it as if it was Arch ;D)