Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

    Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

    Bon appetit


  • Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

    For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

    The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.


  • Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

    However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

    (Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)


  • I’d suggest “Spicious Linux”, but it’s a 5/10 pun at best, and too similar to “specious” which means “sounds legit but isn’t”; not necessarily a good look.

    “Opus” borrows letters and sounds good, but speaking of sounds, it’s the name of a sound codec, so maybe not a good choice.

    “Abstruse” has similar problems to “specious”…

    “ChameleOS” is the name of a dragon in a game.

    I figure if I run through all the bad ideas here, only good ones will be left… but that might well be specious.



  • This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

    At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

    Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.


  • Lawful good is asking for trouble. Before they know it, they’ll be inundated with e-mails to their personal company address with poorly worded help requests. They’ll spend half their time making and updating tickets on the user’s behalf that would have been mostly automatic if they’d gone the Lawful Neutral route. They need to insist requests are sent to the main support address. I’m assuming that’s tied directly to the ticketing system.

    When I was being Lawful slightly-better-than-neutral, I’d create the ticket and then put a paragraph in the reply telling them to please not e-mail me directly in future, because one day I might be unavailable and their e-mail could go unseen for hours or even days.

    Repeat offenders would eventually do it at a time when things were busy too, so I’d be concentrating on the tickets and not things to my personal address, so that slight delay often helped it sink in.



  • Listen, I don’t even like Flatpaks, but at least they’re multi-platform and non-proprietary.

    But the original poster is probably of the opinion that “pro-consumer” means something that “just works”, and if it’s a walled garden, so what?

    “Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?” “Don’t worry about it.”