The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I’ve seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I’ve heard no longer than a year. I’ve heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I’ve heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I’ve most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

It’s “I am working” not “I be working”.

From how it’s used and understood, it’s a lot closer to, “I am in a situation where I find myself working from time to time”. “I am working” suggests you’re doing it right now, “I be working” does not. This example is a unique, condensed way to convey a very specific idea that your idea of “proper English” cannot convey without a boatload of extra words.

If that’s still bothersome to you, well, I guess have fun kicking that proverbial land-crawling fish back into the sea if that’s where you get your jollies. IMO some prescriptivism is okay to get people on the same page, but the moment you use it as a cudgel to beat people who are very clearly already being understood, you’re being a prude.

I’ve heard this one phrased: “Newbs deserve a helping hand. Noobs deserve a kicking.”

For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it’s because they aren’t different.

They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application’s name. It’s literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.

Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.

It’s also part of what makes FOSS niche.

why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??

There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe

Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.

Fellow tattooless here. Uh, neither?

I simply don’t see the appeal of putting on something I can’t easily take off if I wanted to, for its own sake. Yeah, tattoos aren’t permanent, a removal process exists. But they cost money and require an appointment to be rid of, on top of the investment of time, money, and pain to buy in. The barrier to entry and the barrier to exit are both too high for my liking.

Ideally you get a tattoo and enjoy it for life. I can’t commit to that kind of decision. Not for a funny body picture. If I need a memento to cherish memory of a thing or event I’ll get a tchotchke or something.

I have no complaints about others’ tattoos. They’re more often than not incredible works of art.

There are exactly three kinds of manpages:

1. Way too detailed
2. Not nearly detailed enough
3. There is no manpage

I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I’m grateful for them.

But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand. grep helps if you already know the switch, which isn’t always.

You could argue commands like this don’t have “arguably most common usecases”, so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.

Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was “do one thing, and do it well”? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it’s flustering.

I drive Linux for a similar reason to why some people prefer driving manual transmission cars to automatics.

Automatic transmission cars are ideal for a certain kind of driver that has no interest in how the machine actually works, they just want the machine to do its job as smoothly as possible without them having to think about it. Not bothering with the details is the whole point.

For those of us who do have an interest in knowing how the vehicle works, automatics become kind of suffocating. They’re designed to only ever behave in certain specific ways. If there’s a weird niche thing that we know is possible for the machine to do with manual control, but the automatic system doesn’t support, you’re just SOL. You can’t. This starts coming up in all sorts of annoying little ways, increasing in frequency as your knowledge increases. Death of a thousand cuts. You start feeling like you’re not really driving this car, you’re being taken for a ride.

Windows is like the automatic. It is a black box designed to allow people who don’t care how the computer works to use the computer. To prevent morons from breaking the internal components, they put up barriers around everything and tell you to keep out.

Linux is like the manual. Yes, it does demand more finesse and active knowledge about how the computer works to drive properly. But you’re in maximum control of it. If you want to pop the hood and tinker with every facet of its innards for whatever reason, it does not attempt to stop you. It’s all open, laid bare for you to do whatever you want with it.

Linux has a lot of options available to make it more automatic like Windows, if you want it. The difference is that the automatic-ness is completely optional in Linux. Imagine a car that can be automatic most of the time when you don’t care, but can become manual at the drop of a hat when you need it. Linux can be that if you want it to be. Windows can’t.

The meme format implies she catfished you with the promise of “Netflix and chill” at her house only to pull a gun on you.

In particular, she wants you to review and merge that goddamn pull request she made to your open source project repo two months ago that finally fixes that one really annoying bug.

It’s speculated that the patent in question (or one of) is one that essentially protects the gameplay loop of Pokémon Legends Arceus.

https://ipforce.jp/patent-jp-P_B1-7545191

Running the first claim of the invention through Google Translate yields this massive run-on sentence description:

The computer causes a player character in a virtual space to take a stance to release a capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected based on an operation input of pressing an operation button, and causes a player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a second category group including a plurality of types of combat characters that engage in combat is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on a directional input, and further selects the capture item included in the first category group when the first category group is selected, and the combat character included in the second category group when the second category group is selected, based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button , and causes the player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button, A game program which, based on an operation input of releasing the operation button pressed when having the player character perform an action, has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected capture item in the aiming direction if the capture item is selected, and has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected combat character in the aiming direction if the combat character is selected, and when the capture item is released and hits the field character, makes a capture success determination as to whether the capture is successful, and when the capture success determination is judged to be positive, sets the field character hit by the capture item to a state where it is owned by the player, and when the combat character is released to a location where it can fight with the field character, starts a fight on the field between the combat character and the field character.

Essentially, Nintendo has a patent on video games that involve throwing a capsule device at characters in a virtual space to capture them and initiate battle with them. In other words, they have a patent on the concept of Poké Balls (as they appear and function in Legends Arceus, specifically).

Palworld has “Pal Spheres”, which are basically just Poké Balls with barely legally distinct naming.

If this sounds like an unfairly broad thing for Nintendo to have a patent on, I’m not so sure I agree. It’s not like they’re trying to enforce a blanket patent on all creature collectors. Just the concept of characters physically throwing capsule devices at creatures.

If you think about it, that’s kind of the one thing that sets Pokémon apart from others in the genre. If there’s anything to be protected, that’s it. It’s literally what Pokémon is named after–you put the monster in your pocket, using the capsule you threw at it.

Palworld could have easily dodged this bullet. They claim they aren’t inspired by Pokémon, and that they’re instead inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved. Funny, then, that Ark doesn’t have throwable capsules, yet Palworld decided to add them. I’m not sure I buy their statement. And if this is indeed the patent being violated, I don’t think a court will buy it either.

I’m not trying to be a Pokémon apologist here. I want Palworld to succeed and give Pokémon a run for its money. But looking at the evidence, it’s clear to me Pocketpair flew a little too close to the sun here. And they’re kind of idiots for it.

I’m just surprised they aren’t getting nailed for the alleged blatant asset theft.

The primary thing I hate about them is that every snap package appears to your system as a separate mounted filesystem. So if you look in your file explorer, you can potentially see dozens of phantom drives clogging up your sidebar.

Debian Testing.

Learning about the xz backdoor was a fun week.

Surprised how, of all the people who took the bait, not a single one of them complained about systemd.

My beard isn’t long enough to have an opinion about systemd. All I know is all my homies hate systemd for some reason.

The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.

Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.

I mean, yeah, kind of. In the same way pilots fly planes out of a stubborn sense of pride for knowing what all the flight deck controls do.

[aggressive ruler-slapping in the distance]