Notices by Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)

@lanodan

I have indeed used

$ miscreant.prog | cat

or

$ cat | miscreant.prog

(or both) to lie to programs that behave poorly when isatty() returns true. I shouldn't have to, and the `TERM=dumb miscreant.prog` sometimes does the job.

For just color aspects, some progs respect `$NO_COLOR` (https://no-color.org/) which might be enough.

But yes, staaahp it with the unbidden progress-bars and twirlers and whatever.

@cks

@mwl

@mwl

@bsdnow Hey, wrapping up #605, Tom accused nvi(1) of lacking multiple levels of undo. Just to clarify, nvi does have multiple levels of undo, but you have to `u` to undo once, and then use `.` to keep applying additional levels of undo. If you instead hit `u` a second time, it undoes the undo (effectively acting like a one-deep undo like `ed(1)` offers). Here's hoping it improves his vi experience ☺

https://www.bsdnow.tv/605

@silverwizard

Similarly, as the primary grocery-shopper, while I have a pretty good mental inventory of what comes *in* to the house, the struggle here involves getting the *rest* of the house to participate and keep me apprised of things getting consumed. The boy pulled the last shampoo from backup; the daughter snagged the penultimate roll of TP; my sweetheart made herself a sandwich and now I lack sufficient bread for kids' school lunches in the morning.

Fortunately, my beloved does a lot of Lean at work, so we usually communicate my intended "kanban" levels of backstock and she'll usually let me know if we get low enough that it's time to restock. But tracking the *out* rate is as important as (and more difficult here than) tracking the *in*.

@xahteiwi

@xahteiwi

But then you need scanning-stations at all consumption locations. In each bathroom for the TP/soap/shampoo; in each bedroom when the respective box of tissues runs out; in the study because someone used the last of the printer-ink or white-out.

I wish you luck, but if your experiences will be anything like mine, you're in for a long uphill slog 😛

@silverwizard

Horrible idea my brain won't let go of:

implementing a nethack-/rogue-like in Excel.

You have the arrow-key navigation. You have the cell-based layout. You even have VBA for scripting if you need.

Okay, now that I've poisoned your brain too, back to my regularly scheduled activities.

A = IPv4 DNS record
AA = battery size
AAA = automobile association
AAAA = IPv6 DNS record
AAAAA = me yelling about DNS issues

@cks I played around with xfontsel(1) but it doesn't seem to let you put arbitrary text. Then fiddled with xmessage(1) but it doesn't seem to take font-resources.

Here's an uuuuuuuuuugly (and there aren't enough letters there to express the extent of the ugliness) hack, but it seems to work for me:

$ xclock -digital -strftime "This doesn't need to be an actual strtime format string" -face Sans-24

@feld

My understanding was that there are a limited number of signals—one for each bit in a 32-bit integer, and I recall reading that Linux chose to use that particular bit for some other purpose (SIGPWR).

@q66 @lispi314

Recently came across the Lynx² JavaScript project and was frustrated at their choice of names. The lynx(1) web-browser¹ predates this upstart by *decades*. As a twist of the knife, because lynx(1) doesn't support JavaScript, you can't even make use of LynxJS in lynx(1).

While naming things is one of the classically hard problems of computer science, please choose a different name, folks.

⸻
¹ https://lynx.invisible-island.net/
² https://lynxjs.org/blog/lynx-unlock-native-for-more

blarg, got suckered into a substack article (they had their own domain rather than substack dot com, so it wasn't obvious).

Opened the tab to a full-covering "hey, subscribe to this person posts!" Dismissed that and started to read the article. Didn't make it more than a screenful or two down the lengthy article, before another "subscribe to mail notifications!" slid into view, obscuring the article text.

Two annoyances for a page that could have otherwise been a SSG site (plain HTML + CSS + a few images) without all the substacky annoyances. 😑

And for the record: you can get low-end VPS instances for $1/mo¹ (or shared-hosting for static sites is even cheaper) that will more than adequately handle such a site. No need to subject your readers to substacky abuses.

⸻
¹ https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

@nixCraft

A BlueTooth vulnerability¹?

Meanwhile, #OpenBSD users everywhere:

⸻
¹ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/undocumented-backdoor-found-in-bluetooth-chip-used-by-a-billion-devices/

@jpmens

@robn @dexter but in my experience, the problem stems from Outlook (or Gmail) 🤬ing with otherwise-standard protocols.

(side anecdote: at $DAYJOB where I do contract work, they finally cut off password-only-auth-IMAP access to my work mailbox, and neither mutt/neomutt nor OfflineIMAP/mbsync qualified as one of the approved apps with some app-id token needed to access the auth, so I went from checking in on my email dozens of times throughout the day (because it was right there when I was checking personal mail, so 0 effort) to 1–2 times per day when I made an intentional effort to connect to the VPN/remote-desktop and check in. Their "security" measures had a side-effect that wasn't what they wanted, but I was quite fine with that 😉)

@solene oh, that day was loooooong ago here. It started as the occasional gray/white hair in my beard/stubble, and before I knew it, they'd multiplied like rabbits 😑

@nixCraft

@tevo I'll support you on that one.

And even as annoying/verbose as XML is, at least it's not YAML ☺

@teajaygrey
amusingly, my brain first tried to parse your curse-word abbreviation as a Usenet group hierarchy 🤦