palordrolap

joined 6 months ago
[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 6 points 7 hours ago (5 children)

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool's errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it's cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

No. They were espousing some unclear but potentially bigoted beliefs that I took to be the sentiment I parodied with the first sentence, but those were not their words. They might have even been going for sarcastic/ironic espousal of the same beliefs, I'm really not sure.

I've added an explanation to my original comment to try to avoid any confusion.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 11 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

(Edit: The first sentence is not a quote of the original, now deleted, comment, merely a restatement of what I believed to be the same underlying sentiment. I might've been wrong. Kind of hard to tell.)

"Their sexuality and their conception of gender is different to mine, and I know it's wrong to mess with kids, therefore they must be a danger to kids."

"I like ice-cream and I don't like the idea of punching small children in the street, therefore people who don't like ice-cream must like punching small children in the street."

These two sentences use the same logic.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Is "actually Earth" some idealised version of Earth where the greedy and the corrupt don't inevitably end up ruining everything for everyone but themselves? Because otherwise "actually Earth" and Hell could well be the same damn thing.

Or if you subscribe to the Catholic fanfic that is Dante's Inferno, we can talk about circles of hell, each one worse than the last. And where we are right now clearly isn't the bottom one. It definitely feels like it's dropped a layer or two in recent years, but we haven't hit rock bottom.

I could add a "yet" to that, but for some in this wondrous circle, it definitely already feels like it, and some feel like they're thundering towards it with no way to stop it.

But, I guess I'm feeling philosophical at the moment, because this just occurred to me: If there's a fly in the ointment, it means we have ointment.

These words will probably ring hollow in a few days when the ointment catches fire. (I'm not sure what that means in terms of translating back from metaphor into reality, but ointment catching fire definitely feels like something that could happen.)

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn't mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I'm not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro's package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can't vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn't need internet access to work.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 8 points 1 day ago

There's that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were "too human" looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 6 points 1 day ago

Probably a side gig as the hat man.

That's a weird phenomenon to read about if you haven't heard of it/him.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 18 points 1 day ago

Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can't see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.

Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago

Instead of compiling a kernel, try to make do with what your distro provides whenever there's an update. Yes, there's compilation, but it's all done automatically. Then come to realise that the last two updates have had a subtle problem that caused the graphics driver to have a debilitating stroke whenever you try to watch a video in VLC, and have the whole system to go unresponsive as a result. Everything else works fine. YouTube. Games. But a cat video downloaded from Discord because (foreshadowing) the video won't play in-browser for some reason? Too far, man. How dare.

Booting with another of those kernels is when you find out that's also broken despite having used it for a while previously. Learn that, by sheer luck, one still-good kernel is still installed.

Hope that someone with more brains and energy with a similar setup will be able to report the problem properly to wherever that needs to be reported so that the next update doesn't have the same problem. Things like this have been magically fixed before. You wait.

(Search the error message from the logs online. No close matches. Learn a bit, but the only advice was "try a different kernel". You already thought of that)

In the meantime, remove the problem kernels and update GRUB with boot USB on standby in case you hose the system. Manage not to need it.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 14 points 2 days ago

Japan and Germany were strange bedfellows the last time this all happened, if you'll recall.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 3 points 3 days ago

Sometimes it takes years for this message to even to begin to sink in. Worse, one solitary success through blind luck can undo years of progress on that score.

Source: Uh. I don't like looking in mirrors, but when I do...

 

Edit: Welp, I'm an idiot. After posting, I stepped away and realised that the name of the config file had to be the answer.

The game is literally called colorcode. Found and installed it and lo and behold, the game's author is someone called Dirk Laebish, which explains the directory name.

Ah well. I'll leave this here for posterity


Looking through an old backup, I've found what appears to be the config file for some game or another at the path ~/.config/dirks/colorcode.conf, but searching the Internet (DDG and Google) turns up nothing for this, and searching apt, Synaptic (yes, I know they're basically the same thing) and even the online "wayback" part of Debian's package archive also gives no result.

The reason I think it's from a game is that the config file, despite its name, contains entries like GamesListMaxCnt and HighScoreHandling.

The only think I can think is that "dirks" is an acronym of some sort, which is why it's not showing up in past or present packages.

Based on the sort of games I usually try out and play, it's more likely to be a simple in-window puzzle or card game than a 3D game.

File dates seem to suggest 2021 as the last time I played / used it, whatever it was.

It would have been under some version of Linux Mint or LMDE, if the Debian commands didn't give that away.

Anyone have any idea what it might be?

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