palordrolap

Find a way to call the authorities. I don’t trust my brain at the best of times, and for all I know, I’m the murderer despite no recollection. Because of no recollection. That’d be a sign of some kind of mental problem, right? And if I’m otherwise fine and not responsible, there’s still a whacking great gap in my memory (for how I came to be there) and there’s a murderer on the loose.

I’d also try not to contaminate the scene any more than I had to.

Knowing my luck, the police would pin it on me anyway, but since, as I said, I don’t trust my brain, as far as I know, they might well be right and it might be the best thing for everyone if I am put away somewhere.

There’s another, more DNS-related, reason why it was usually preferred to have something before the domain part. It’s possible to alias a subdomain to another subdomain, but not so with the root of a domain, which must point directly at a single IP address.

If your IP addresses are more subject to change than your hostnames, or your site was hosted on a third party service, then it made sense to point www at a particular hostname rather than its address. e.g. you might point www.your-domain-here.biz at a-hostname.the-hosting-provider.tld. That’s not possible with a root domain. IP address or nothing.

Similarly, it’s possible to point a subdomain at multiple IP addresses (or multiple hostnames) at the same time, which was a cheap way to do load balancing. i.e. For a site a user hadn’t visited before, they’d be basically told one of the listed IP addresses at random, and then their local DNS cache would return that one IP address until it expired, generally giving enough time for the visitor to do what they wanted. Slap 8 different IPs in the www subdomain and you’d split your visitors across 8 different servers.

Root domain has no such capability.

Technically it would be possible to do all of that one level higher in DNS where your domain itself is the subdomain, but good luck getting a domain registry to do that for you.

I haven’t done DNS in over a decade at this point, so things may have changed in the intervening years, but this was all definitely a thing once upon a time.

Me? Probably the leaflet delivered to my workplace that said “Missing a package? Call this (premium rate) number.”

In retrospect I have no idea what I was thinking by calling it. Gonna blame stress, morning brain and the fact I’d been waiting an unusually long time for an international delivery, but I should have seen the big red flag.

Once I went through proper channels, it turned out the seller hadn’t even got around to shipping it. “Stuck in their system” or something like that. Thankfully that in itself wasn’t a scam (seller was a well-known web store) and my item turned up a week or two later at no extra cost.

Calling the number wasn’t a million pound mistake on my part, but over a handful of similarly gullible individuals, the scammers probably made a few thousand profit over the price of a few leaflets.

Someone else? Probably a slick mobile phone salesman signing an elderly relative up to a contract rather than sticking with pay-as-you-go. The mobile phone companies really don’t like PAYG customers because they’re not a guaranteed constant drip-feed of money.

Said relative is usually pretty sharp when it comes to scams, and frankly it’s not that expensive a contract, but still, I’m annoyed about it.

You do realise that even though it’s not one of the official Mint variants, it’s still possible to install Gnome on Mint with minimal fuss?

There are people that still install and run KDE and that hasn’t been a Mint variant for some time now.

Or are you saying that Gnome should be the default variant because it’s “modern”?

The monkey’s paw curled a finger when they took off in that direction. Most old Linux/X applications will run fine under any window manager / desktop environment and, by and large, inherit the look and feel of that environment. Modern Gnome apps say “no” to that and look like Gnome apps wherever they are.

Since the Mint team are forking Gnome apps precisely to avoid that behaviour, I’d say Mint isn’t going to adopt Gnome proper any time soon, but as I said, you can install it if you really want.

They write in Finnish in other comments, but I don’t seem to be able to confirm or deny the law there, at least not with a quick search.

I did find an article that suggested that it’s been ruled legal in Italy, but only if you’re homeless and hungry. I can imagine that if you tried it and had any assets whatsoever, they’d find a way to put a lien on those assets rather than let you get away with it.

There was a whole show about Raccoons in the late '80s & early ‘90s. I still remember Bert Raccoon’s name so he must have been at least somewhat famous. I admit I didn’t remember the other raccoons’ names without looking them up, but it has been a while.

Looks like many episodes are up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@runwithusproductions/videos

Also, I’m surprised no-one’s said Tom Nook, even though he’s technically a tanuki, not an actual raccoon.

The Chinese AI paradox: Either it will be allowed to criticise the CCP and be ultimately shut down by the CCP because such criticism is not allowed, or it will not, hence being untrusted by anyone who is not a fan of the CCP.

The joke is that they’ve not been given in ISO8601 format, and also that they’re both ambiguous. For the second one, we can’t even tell which of the ends is the year.

My point also covers the excluded category of “doesn’t look like the consumer, doesn’t talk AND is sapient”.

We’re horrible hypocrites, but the vibe implies they shouldn’t be, and yet…

(By “we”, I mean non-vegan humans, of which there are many and I’m one. This may or may not include you. By “they”, I mean the characters in the comic.)

My point was partially that out here in the real world, we don’t care or turn a blind eye and do the murder anyway. In this cutesy cartoon where even plants can be sapient, the same ugly scenario is actually worse and it’s staring us in the face.

You might be thinking of lzip rather than lz4. Both compress, but the former is meant for high compression whereas the latter is meant for speed. Neither are particularly good at dealing with highly redundant data though, if my testing is anything to go by.

Either way, none of those are installed as standard in my distro. xz (which is lzma based) is installed as standard but, like lzip, is slow, and zstd is still pretty new to some distros, so the recipient could conceivably not have that installed either.

bzip2 is ancient and almost always available at this point, which is why I figured it would be the best option to stand in for gzip.

As it turns out, the question was one of data streams not files, and as at least one other person pointed out, brotli is often available for streams where bzip2 isn’t. That’s also not installed by default as a command line tool, but it may well be that the recipient, while attempting to emulate a browser, might have actually installed it.

How do they determine which plants are sapient and which plants are food?

Reminds me of the story of the guy who was told his fly was down, so turned 180° from the people he was with to fix the issue, as is expected. Except in this case, he previously had his back to a much larger group of people (think cliques at a party), so basically zipped up in front of way more people than he would have done if he hadn’t turned around.

The article writer kind of complains that they’re having to serve a 10MB file, which is the result of the gzip compression. If that’s a problem, they could switch to bzip2. It’s available pretty much everywhere that gzip is available and it packs the 10GB down to 7506 bytes.

That’s not a typo. bzip2 is way better with highly redundant data.

Magriftte

As a kid I remember jam (probably strawberry) and cheese (Cheddar or red Leicester) sandwiches being pretty awesome. For manifold reasons, peanut butter was not something made available to me back then, so that would be the closest our house ever got to that.

Because it’s precisely the sort of thing Elon would do.

His fans, including his ego, will call it genius.

Everyone else knows better.

Gonna go retro with this one: Madness’ cover of Labi Siffre’s It Must Be Love

If I remember rightly, Siffre appears in Madness’ music video for the song, so it had his seal of approval too. (I mean, yeah, they wouldn’t have done a cover if he hadn’t agreed to it, but appearing in the video is a force multiplier on that.)

Other way around. Acronyms are a subcategory of initialisms, specifically the ones that can be read as if they’re words.

Suspend, most of the time. I have a two handed Vulcan nerve pinch keybind that does that for the end of the day. A desktop PC doesn’t have a lid, but that keybind is about as cathartic as closing a laptop.

This is actually different from how I have the desktop environment set to do it, which is the hybrid suspend/hibernate option. This gives me at least a couple of options without too much messing around. Quick shutdown: Use keyboard; Hybrid: Use GUI (which can be done by keyboard navigation too if absolutely necessary.)

The reason? There’s a surprising amount of state, such as open windows, browsers, etc. that need to be set back up if coming back cold from a full power off and that bothers me more than maybe it should.

By rights, I should use the hybrid option all the time as it’s technically safer, but it takes longer to power off and it actually suspends then unsuspends for a few seconds as it sets up the hibernation profile, which gives me the willies.

Also, the power grid is pretty stable here. If I was elsewhere I might be using the hybrid a lot more.