@palordrolap@fedia.io

palordrolap

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating 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 (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn't brought the jinx with him.

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

member since 13 Aug 2024 19:40

comments

"People who live on a volcano are more worried about it erupting than the rest of the world."

on Americans Are a Lot More Worried About AI Than the Rest of the World in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7h ago
In my experience, this works about 25% of the time and is cause for extreme nervousness about what will happen if it tries to call a function that isn't actually present in the version it has been fooled into accepting.

It's never actually formatted my entire system even when it's gotten me a little further, perhaps to a different sort of crash, but that fear is always there.

on I'm gaslighting them for the greater good in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 8h ago
[Despite best efforts, c]harts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve.

Were I the devs, I'd be opening those files read-only by default and having an "unlock to edit" option somewhere obvious. When clicked, it would pop up a dialog box with the yellow triangle / exclamation mark warning icon saying that things would not be preserved beyond that point.

LibreOffice already does something like this when saving in formats that can lose information, but I'd move that to right up front.

I might even include a dig that the document was created by software that does not follow open document standards.

on LibreOffice developer explains why it cannot display some Microsoft Office charts in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago
TL;DR It's copyright.

Apparently the archive's crawlers have been able to access material that is paywalled in a regular browser and that's got copyright holders' panties in a bunch.

on Spain Orders Blocks On Archive.today And Its Mirrors in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4d ago
Given the reference, it would have been a decent burn if you'd said Mint or Ubuntu.

I'm an LMDE user which is a sliver more advanced, but not by much. The song might even fit better. I can point at and name parts of the system and maybe even work with them, but most of the time someone else is looking after me.

on dating tips in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 5d ago
My body order is head, shoulders, knees and toes (knees and toes). I have no idea how that flags me as a Linux user.

on dating tips in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 5d ago
" 'I was only following orders' [...] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness

No, I've no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it's a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.

on Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Sep 2026
In an ideal world, she'd win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.

She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.

on Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Sep 2026
There's an old saying: "If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

Tables still work and probably always will, whether they're meant for layout or not.

CGI on the other hand, has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. If you need that, you'll have to learn something new. Or find a very amenable host.

on Why Personal Websites Are Coming Back in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Sep 2026
Semantics, semantics.

If you manage to run TempleOS on the bare metal, your CPU and fans will be stuck at 100% until you turn it off or your CPU overheats.

Run it in a VM and you won't have that problem.

You can argue that anything above Ring -3 is virtual, but "if I do this my CPU's going to die" is a pretty reasonable dividing line between "technically" and "actually".

on A Head-to-Head Comparison of Windows vs Consoles vs Linux in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 16 Sep 2026
Class of '99 here.

There's at least a decade between the beginning of that list and people regularly using punch cards and tape. Maybe two.

Magnetic tapes and actually floppy floppy disks were the medium of choice in the interim.

on Blew My Mind Into Orbit in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
I actually did this for a laugh a very, very long time ago. I had upgraded my 75MHz Pentium machine from 8MB to a whopping 40MB, so since I knew it would run fine with just 8, I installed a TSR RAMdisk and told Windows 3.1 to put its swap on that drive.

It worked great, but I decided I'd rather use the memory for other things.

But in more modern times, I've literally forced browser caches into memory-based tmpfs to take the load off system disks, which is basically the same thing. And it reduces wear on my hardware.

on Stop Doing Swap Partitions in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
I was being a silly goose and pretending I was more clueless than I actually am.

(Probably not by as much as I'd like to think.)

on It's all about those little file mode bits in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
False. It's a shell synonym for /home/ah-ha-ha-nice-try-you-are-not-getting-my-real-homedir-name

... it's a PITA to type out longhand, let me tell you.

on It's all about those little file mode bits in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
Wait until you learn what the other seven parts of a byte are called when the first one is called a bit.

on Bites & Bytes in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 10 Sep 2026
I forgor the tilde and its taking a long time. wat do

on It's all about those little file mode bits in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
These things should not exist, but if they must then they should be put to this sort of use.

Enjoy your levitating cat.

on US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
Is it worth getting?

Maybe someone else will have a better answer. I used it once in a blue moon to naively hack at some audio, and will install it or Tenacity to do the same in future as and when the need arises. In fact, I'll probably end up going for Audacity and a wary eye for telemetry opt-ins because Debian seems to have a native package for it. Tenacity seems to be Flatpak-only.

on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4 Sep 2026
I worked for a company that sold third level domains. The company got bought out a few times as it kept going bust and the market consolidated, but unfortunately, the final owners did not understand what they had - I'd long left by that point - and they let the root domain lapse.

Perhaps as a saving grace, no-one had been maintaining the infrastructure (I was one of the last), and it ceased to function at a technical level long before the domain ended up lapsing. That gave people an unpleasant kick up the rear end to move their important stuff elsewhere if they hadn't already. (The price we sold it at compared to actual domains ought to have been a hint that it wasn't for important stuff, to be fair.)

I heard talk of a potential lawsuit against the ultimate asset holders, but I don't think anything came of it.

Theoretically, the current owners of the domain could do what this guy talks about in order to try to collect mail for those accounts, but they'd have to know which subdomains to set up in order to do that.

I had one of those domains, and yes I got my stuff onto a proper domain not long after I left.

I also had a couple of accounts with a non-Google free e-mail provider that went under. Unrelated to my employer. The domain ended up belonging to an individual who probably gets a heck of a lot of email for former users of that service.

on .name Termination in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026
Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)

I can't tell if that's the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.

Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you're uncertain, that's always an option.

on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026
Point taken. I have added a qualifier.

on MapQuest’s app surges to No. 1 in Navigation in the Apple App Store, after refusing to rename Lake Ontario in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
Reminder - if you subscribe to the name change - that the mnemonic for the Great Lakes has changed from HOMES to SHAME, with America right in the middle of it. You couldn't make this up.

on MapQuest’s app surges to No. 1 in Navigation in the Apple App Store, after refusing to rename Lake Ontario in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
As I understand it, it's supposed to be a from-the-ground-up reimplementation of NT5 / Windows 2000 with maybe a handful of later tech squeezed in. Historically, it has borrowed heavily from the WINE project, though I'm not sure of the current state of play. It would certainly make sense to have continued to do so.

It's intended to be compatible with any and all Windows software, but the goalposts keep moving and the number of steps they are behind increases faster still. At this point it's barely more than a passion project for the devs, though many of us really want them to succeed.

(See also Haiku, which is a reimplementation and advancement of the contemporaneous BeOS.)

I've occasionally tried to get ReactOS to run in a VM for the nostalgia and to see something like the screenshots, but it never seems to work for me, not that I've tried this new version yet.

on Introducing ReactOS 0.4.16 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
In most cases, the smoke is magic smoke.

on True in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 27 Aug 2026
Quora is (supposedly) where everyone went after Yahoo Answers closed 5 years ago. Prior to that, it had been (arguably) the better of the two sites with significantly better questions and answers.

I had an account on YA because I didn't feel clever enough to have an account there. Maybe I should create one now, ha.

on The Freshman Register in c/technology@lemmy.world · 26 Aug 2026
I didn't say it wasn't a British stereotype, only that that particular British stereotype is not one that says "innit".

There's a stereotype of stereotypes that there are only two English accents: "aristocratic" and "cockney". The film Mary Poppins may have a lot more to do with this than it ought to.

Anyway, the Countryball's appearance is associated with the aristocratic. "Innit" is cockney. (This is overly general to the point of being wrong, but for the sake of this argument, it's close enough.)

on systemGB in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026
The hat, moustache and monocle are not of a British stereotype that uses the word "innit".

on systemGB in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026
Can I pay with photocopies of cash?

on Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty in c/technology@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026
I don't know how many do, but they're fools if they don't.

You'd think that since those links are there, that the information on those links matches what that LLM says, and thus not a hallucination, but at least twice, I've found the information straight up wasn't there, or the LLM had misread / misinterpreted the page's content.

But then I may not be a regular user. I ask a question maybe once every one to two weeks because a regular search finds nothing and, like I say, I prefer to check the sources.

on Reddit Almost Disappears from ChatGPT Answers as Search Citations Drop 86% in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026
I see at least a couple of problems here. The main one is that it assumes that the computer only has one user. This is often true, but not always.

Yes, I know it's a joke, but if you really must, read on...
If this script is run by a child on a shared computer, and that child chooses not to lie, the child and all adults with access to the machine lose access to /sbin/doas. Likewise if one adult chooses to lie that they're a child, they'll lock themselves and everyone else out, child or not, which is an opportunity for malicious behaviour

It also means that something else would need to be done with regard to /etc/enviroment. Even on a one user, two roles machine, that entry really ought to be under /etc/environment.d, but the more robust, multi-age, multi-user solution would need something entirely different to be implemented. /etc/profile would be the wrong place, and editing each user's .profile (or equivalent) and then making it read-only seems like a bad plan too.

on the ultimate age verification implementation!!111! in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
By comparative linguistics, "Twix" is clearly Germanic in origin, and the singular ought to be Onx.

"Unix" is from the parallel Latinate sequence. Unfortunately, the parallel term to "Twix", and the successor of "Unix", ought to be Bix, which does exist, but is only found in Commonwealth English in the compound Weet(a)bix.

Triscuits may seem to be relevant at this point, but are a part of neither sequence on account of actually being an abbreviation of "Electricity Biscuit"

Dubious etymology is fun.

on Unix or something, I don't play Pokemon in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
Curious. I must be a filthy casual with the one desktop PC. There is at least one other PC here, but it's out of action.

It could do with plugging in at some point to see if it still works, but I see no benefit in making that permanent.

on My home server was a totally justified purchase in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 20 Aug 2026
I saw that post about Firefox. If you'd said it was browser games causing issues, I might have linked it. (Or I might have failed and not done that. What ifs are tricky.).

If you want kind of funny, someone posted CSS Quake a while back and that browser game has WASD keybindings and Ctrl bound to movedown / crouch. And if you crouch and move forward, it closes the browser window. And there's no way to fix that.

on linux_irl in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026
There are ways to disable middle-click pasting. A quick web search turns up a few.

Either way, I've never had the need to disable it for the handful of games I play, including a couple where I regularly use middle-click.

on linux_irl in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026
They already do that, sort of. The last I heard, people watching with an ad-blocker also blocked the mechanism that incremented the watch counter. This may or may not have been deliberate. The interesting thing is that the video appears in people's Watch History ad-blocker or not, so there was always an easy fix sitting in plain sight.

They told creators about the watch count problem along with at least one other secret thing that they said they weren't allowed to talk about. Charlie / Cr1TiKaL / penguinz0 said as much as he could about it a few months back.

I think the secret thing was probably "we're working on a way to get those view counts back, but don't tell anyone because we want to discourage people from using ad-blockers and if you tell them they're costing people views, it might convince them to turn it off."

Assuming true, that's all now out of the window because they've "fixed" the problem.

I expect another fierce attack on ad-blockers in Q4.

on YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing in c/technology@lemmy.world · 18 Aug 2026
Start with "NOPLATE", "NCC1701", "XXX" and "NULL".

There might be others that have ended up in the news as a result of human (police or programmer) error, but just those four over fifty States is a good 200 to start with.

on New website lets drivers check whether their license plate has been searched on Flock database - Dexerto in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
Had AI inflation not taken hold, I think most budget builders would still be opting for DDR4, so this headline feels like a non-sequitur to me.

on DDR5 RAM Prices Explode To Nearly 5X July 2025 Levels In Germany As AI Boom Chokes Budget PC Builds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
What's the cactus done to deserve that?

on Sensing He's in Deep Trouble, Flock Safety CEO Says It's All Been a Big Misunderstanding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
It looks like Clickhole either deleted or moved that article ~~earlier this year~~ at some point in 2025. And if they moved it, they didn't update their link in their "best of 2018" post from 2024.

They're also still selling the t-shirt with the headline quote on it.

Anyway, here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250517005853/https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/

on Grok Calls for Assassination of Elon Musk, Accusing Him of Pedophilia in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
Sorry, I never meant to imply you were stupid. Only that you didn't seem to be of a high enough technical level - right now - to be able to solve your PC problems.

As for (non-committal) further advice: Backups, backups, backups. And then a tool like WinDirStat to track down what's using all your space. There are YouTube videos that show you how to use it.

on linux will save your computer in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 14 Aug 2026
I believe they are exhibiting denial that YouTube could possibly be old enough to have videos uploaded 18 years ago.

This denial is being done mostly in jest to cover the true, creeping, dripping, existential despair that so much time has passed, but at the same time to commiserate and laugh with others who are similarly affected. Drip, drip, tick, tick, tick.

Also, the video turns 19 in a couple of months. yaaaaay

on linux will save your computer in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 14 Aug 2026
Given your apparent technical level, I think you need to get your PC to someone who can work on it in person.

If you had space and better technical skills, there are tools you could install to help you track down where all the space is in use, but I don't feel confident that things would go well talking you through that on an Internet forum.

on linux will save your computer in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 14 Aug 2026
It is now my head canon that it randomly chooses a memory location and kills whatever process owns it, repeating as necessary.

The perverse logic of there being a greater chance of hitting a memory hog makes far too much sense.

It can't actually be this though, can it?

on You have lost CPU time privileges in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026
Somehow I am all three of these people at the same time.

on I can't use Linux! It's too hard! in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026
Permit me to repeat what I said to a similar reply:

Oh, I'm well aware. It's just that sometimes I like a cushion on my chair, you know?

on In a universe of enshitification, Linux is one of the few things that consistently gets better. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026
Oh, I'm well aware. It's just that sometimes I like a cushion on my chair, you know?

on In a universe of enshitification, Linux is one of the few things that consistently gets better. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026
That's actually easier on regular Mint than LMDE, but the advanced Synaptic package manager works on both to remove old kernels.

... but they're adding a dedicated kernel management tool for both versions in the next releases if I understand their most recent blog correctly.

Like the native Mint tools, it's basically a front-end to apt and related commands.

on In a universe of enshitification, Linux is one of the few things that consistently gets better. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026
Don't hate, but I actually like the GUI update manager in Mint. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

on In a universe of enshitification, Linux is one of the few things that consistently gets better. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026
They're rolling it out piecemeal. I don't think they've rolled it out to the UK yet, for example, because I can see both old and new interfaces without it requesting a login, but clearly it's requiring login for some people, somewhere.

on Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026
You must be on an old or LTS Debian. The -/ flag was added in the 8.0 release of nano in mid-2024. https://packages.debian.org/stable/editors/ lists 8.4 as the current version for Debian 13 / trixie.

on Why nano gets used in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 10 Aug 2026