danielquinn

My father is 75 and not very capable on a computer. He's got an old MacBook Air at home behind a typical ISP router for which he has no access controls (so no port forwarding).

My immediate need is actually not his machine at all, but the Raspberry Pi I installed at his house before I left the country and forgot to enable cron on so it's not doing what I need yet. However, it would be really nice if I could also do one of the following as well:

• VNC (or something) into his computer whenever something "isn't working" rather than doing the talk-him-through-it dance over Skype.
• Install a new OS (the Mac is no longer supported by MacOS). I don't know how plausible this is though.

My current plan is to email him a shell script that should create a reverse SSH tunnel to a server in Montréal or something and then I can shell into his Mac through there. It's not ideal though since we're still talking shell scripts and he's easily frustrated.

I know that in Windows land there are all sorts of tools scammers use to take over a machine remotely. Does Mac allow for the same thing? Note that I only have Linux machines available to me on this side of the Atlantic.

I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

I've got a very simple Kodi setup:

• Arch Linux on a laptop behind the TV
• Media files on a server upstairs, shared over NFS

I've been running Kodi quite successfully on this machine for years, but with the Omega update, videos play without audio for about 10seconds, then freeze. Sometimes if I wait a while, I see subtitles for the episode while the video is frozen. Music doesn't play either. The interface freezes too, to the point where I have to kill -9 it. Switching from Wayland to Xorg hasn't had an effect.

I tried deleting ~/.kodi and restarting, but nothing changes.

Has anyone else run into this?

A break from the usual in this community, but I trust it'll be appreciated. I think this is very solarpunk: using technology to improve the lives of all creatures.

I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4 over the holidays. I started and finished the Nuka World DLC (killed all the baddies), made it to level 90, etc.

Today I was playing on my Deck as the battery got a little low (11%) so I saved my game, exited the game, and went to shut down.

As it was shutting down, the Deck displayed a message, something like "Syncing to Steam Cloud" as the logo was spinning.

A few hours later, on a full charge, I booted it back up, started Fallout 4 again and... some of my old saves are there, but only about 30% of them, and critically not the most recent ones.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Is this a known issue? Can I fix it, or report it? I've basically lost interest in finishing the game now.

His original post , titled I can't sleep, is some brilliant writing. When we talk about the chilling effect that criticism of Israel creates in industries everywhere (including ours) this is what that looks like.

I needed something for a presentation I'm doing on advanced Linux, so I thought something like this might be appropriate.

Annoyingly, I can't seem to get Bing to generate an image that isn't square.

[For reference, I'm talking about Ash in Alpine Linux here, which is part of BusyBox.]

I thought I knew the big differences, but it turns out I've had false assumptions for years. Ash does support [[ double square brackets ]] and (as best I can tell) all of Bash's logical trickery inside them. It also supports ${VARIABLE_SUBSTRINGS:5:12}` which was another surprise.

At this stage, the only things I've found that Bash can do that Ash can't are:

• Arrays, which Bash doesn't seem to do well anyway
• Brace expansion, which is awesome but I can live without it.

What else is there? Did Ash used to be more limited? The double square bracket thing really surprised me.

I'm working on a little program that'll launch different browsers based on the content of the URL passed and I'd like to set it as the default Web app in this list (under Settings → Default Apps). I've written a .desktop file based on the epiphany.desktop file, but it doesn't show up when I hit [Win]+o+p+e and it doesn't show up in the default apps either, so I'm hoping that someone here can explain what I've done wrong.

Here's the contents of the opening.desktop file:

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/opening.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Opening
GenericName=Web Browser
Comment=Open links in the right browsers
Keywords=web;browser;internet;opening;
Exec=opening %u
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/daniel/.local/share/applications/opening.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;application/xhtml+xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;multipart/related;application/x-mimearchive;message/rfc822;application/x-xpinstall;

Any criticisms are much appreciated!

They must get turned into streaks to be eaten somewhere right? It'd be nice if every morning that I have to ride my bike through their wet piles of shit, I can think to myself: "at least I'll get to eat you at ________ in a few months".