palordrolap

To distinguish two Firefox profiles that I run simultaneously, I use different themes on each. For Firefox this might actually be the best way.

For a file manager (I assume the Dolphin you’re talking about is the file manager), the closest I remember seeing is a red toolbar on the unrelated Nemo file manager when it’s run as root.

If Dolphin is per-user theme-able, then you could do what I do with Firefox. If it supports other kinds of plug-in, then maybe there’s one that does what you want already.

To my knowledge, windowing systems can’t override the title of an application’s window, and even if they could, the application could change it back again at any time, creating a race condition, or a very ugly situation where the system picks and chooses which windows are allowed to modify their titles and which ones aren’t.

Therefore, I think you’d have to write your own plug-in (if they’re a thing and the API permits title modifications), modify Dolphin’s source code yourself or submit a feature request to Dolphin’s developers, cross your fingers and wait.

“UNEXPECTED_EOS” is almost certainly “unexpected end of stream”, that is, the file is missing the end or there’s data corruption and the unpacker has interpreted the bad data as meaning the file should be longer than it is.

Redownload the file, or try to download it using a different tool (e.g. wget or curl rather than a browser). If that still gets a truncated file, try a different source / mirror.

That looks like it might be the monitor’s own on-screen display rather than anything Puppy related. My guess is that the monitor hasn’t been detected properly and Puppy is putting out a resolution that the monitor can’t deal with.

Since the message says 1280x1024, either the monitor is 1280x1024 and can’t deal with anything else, or it’s not 1280x1024 and is being sent 1280x1024 resolution and is complaining about it.

(Or worse, it’s a clock frequency error which was a real problem back in the early days of Linux.)

As for how to fix, the answer is going to be different depending on the age of the base Linux under Puppy and the graphical subsystem.

For X/X11/Xorg it’s probably going to need use of the xrandr shell command, perhaps to delete the mode that is causing the problem. For Wayland, it appears that each window manager has its own xrandr equivalent. I see talk of a gnome-randr, for example.

To get to a shell in the first place, try the Ctrl+Alt+F1 key-combo. If the computer isn’t frozen, that might get a text-based console login prompt. (Puppy might do things differently here though. Not sure.)

Alternatively, look up how to boot to a single-user shell by modifying GRUB options, that is, if no such option is there already.

Caveat: I am no expert. Take this under advisement. Also try web-searching some keywords. It might be there’s a really simple fix for this that I don’t know about.

I don’t understand quantum mechanics.

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” ­-- Richard Feynman

“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” – John von Neumann.

The latter quote didn’t occur in response to Feynman, which might be hinted at by the subjects not being aligned, but together they serve my point.

Both these men were terrifyingly intelligent and worked as physicists at least some of the time. If they couldn’t understand quantum mechanics, then we mortals don’t have much of a chance.

Hmm. That Catholicism line needs to take a sharp turn to the north at Brittany rather than shoot off into the Atlantic.

There are Protestants in Ireland, even in the heart of capital of the Republic (i.e. Dublin), but Catholicism is still the Christianity of the majority over there as far as I’m aware.

(Irish folks feel free to correct me on this.)

Begins planning a coconut / computer wedding.

Recursive chmod (or chown) has been breaking things since before systemd was a thing, so even if systemd is now responsible for stopping things from working, it can’t have been that previously, especially at the time I might have done something silly.

As for repairing permissions only, I suppose it would be possible, assuming the system still works (or can somehow be encouraged to do so) to copy only the permissions (or at least infer them) from a backup or something rather than the whole files.

Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.

One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called “root”, but that wasn’t the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new “root” with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell “root” that it was UID 0.

The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.

Just because you can…

Theoretically yes, but yes, in that order.

I’ve worked with Linux for decades at this point and I’m still not 100% sure exactly what breaks; it’s a mistake you make once, if at all, and you’ll only get a little way into even trying to figure out how to fix things before you throw your hands up in disgust and reinstall / restore the OS (or whatever subdir was affected).

If I was to hazard a guess, it’s the kernel itself that balks, but there are other, almost as fundamental things (lib*.so files and the like) that may also be deliberately fussy.

They need to take into account that their survey is horribly skewed. That is, it was only presented to people who had even heard of Nushell and were in the right place and right time to participate.

I strongly suspect that their ~50/50 split is closer to 90/10, where 10 is their usage compared to bash, fish, zsh and whatever else is in use these days.

(An interesting comparison might be between the number of Nushell users versus the number of current (t)csh users. Nushell might win that one.)

Note that this isn’t a criticism of how well (or not) Nushell works. I don’t know enough about it to make that judgement, and definitely haven’t used it. Until this post I hadn’t heard of it (or had but then forgot it), which is why this comment exists in the first place.

If you’re using find all the time, check to see if you have or can have some variant of locate installed. It indexes everything* on the system (* this is configurable) and can be queried with partial pathnames, even with regex, and it’s fast.

Back in the 80s/90s there were keyrings that would play an alarm if they heard a whistle at a particular frequency. You’re basically playing Marco Polo with your keys.

I assume they lost popularity because the batteries tended to run out at inopportune times. Batteries are better now. Maybe it’s time those things made a comeback.

At that point I’d be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It’s then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.

There are even awk repositories, but I’m not sure there’s a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.

A dumb idea that probably doesn’t have an implementation: Set Thunderbird to play a sound on mail arrival, but have the sound file actually be a pipe that when read from also pushes a system notification. This is kind of like how randomised .signature files were often set up in the old days.

Other alternatives: 1: There might be a purely mail checker out there that can log into mail servers to see if there’s new mail there but not be able to read or download it.

2: Run your own mail server that pulls mail from other servers. Then it’s “merely” a matter of checking for file update times on your own machine. Ancient tools like xbiff were designed for this.

Testing on my own computer, one workaround appears to be to use unmodified PrintScreen, leaving a hand free for the mouse, and quickly right-click for the context menu after the keypress but before the Save pop-up appears.

A PITA to be sure, but it does capture the context menu.

As for cropping down a full-screen capture, I tend to use PhotoFlare for jobs like that (find it in Software Manager) assuming you haven’t anything else installed that does the job.

It’s not recommended to alias a command, especially a common one, to something that fundamentally changes the behaviour like this. The reason is that one day you might be on a different system - or a fresh install - that doesn’t have the alias in place.

And suddenly files disappear without the now-expected prompt.

By all means set up an entirely different or unused command name. rmi might be ok, but then again, you could miss the i and still be in hot water.

The usual exception to this is aliasing commands like ls to include user preferences that only change output behaviour. On a different or fresh system, the worst that happens is the user doesn’t quite see what they’re expecting, but will see something close enough and no files go missing.

If you’re on a GNOME or GTK system, check if you don’t already have the gio command. It has a trash subcommand that puts a file into the desktop trash/rubbish bin. It can also be used to resurrect files from there. gio help trash shows the usage.

You might even want to incorporate it into your existing script.

This unlocked a memory for me. I wanted a newer version of some software or other than was available by default (smart people might already see where this is going), so I added a repo for a newer upstream distro than my own. (Oh no.)

Suddenly, lots of updates available! “Where’s the harm?” I thought, uncertainly. Many, many, many updates installed. Half excitement at the prospect of a shiny new system, half suspicion that the whole thing was an enormous mistake.

The whole memory hasn’t come back to me, but I suspect it involved a dependency-broken or unbootable system, then a boot USB and judicious use of Timeshift to get back to a working state.

For monospace, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Was set in my terminal already, but I’ve just switched Firefox to it as of this comment because I forgot to after a recent upgrade. The default was Liberation Mono, which I don’t have much of a problem with (hence me taking so long to do anything about it), but the serifs on BVSM are a bit less severe.

Liberation Serif as the default browser font is fine. Most sites define their own proportional fonts these days anyway, but less so for preformatted text.

For the OS in general, usually the defaults are inoffensive. There was a push a while back to use the Ubuntu font that I really don’t like, and there I think I actually substituted it for the non-mono Bitstream Vera Sans, or some other similar font.

Vera is a Verdana-like font, which you’ll know if you prefer the Microsoft options.