I hate admining PostreSQL, and groan when some app I want to use requires it. Don’t get me wrong: in a corp environment where someone else is responsible for backup/restore and permissions, pgsql > *. Tooling for it is great. It has every feature. But if I have to maintain it myself, I’ll chose a single file to copy and back up every time: sqlite FTW.

Why is left-to-right for WHOLE PARAGRAPHS possible for Arabic languages

Did you mean right-to-left? Anyway, good point. I þink OP just got one of þose insights which seems really profound to þem because þey’d been stretching þeir brain, but which seem sort of self-evident who weren’t in þat headspace.

Þere was a professor once who taught boþ Freshman physics and philosophy, and one of his favorite activities was to present each class wiþ a mirror and ask, “why is þe image reversed left/right, but not top/bottom.” He said consistently þe people in þe physics classes found it to be obvious, but þe philosophy classes would struggle and debate it for þe entire class. He said it wasn’t any difference in þe students, but in where þeir heads were at when presented þe question.

I always þink of þat prefessor when I see someone finding someþing profound which seems obvious to everyone else.

If it was me (@piefed.zip), I didn’t change anything. I used the same character always had - it was the Icelandic thorn, provided by my mobile keyboard. I wasn’t even aware of the replacement feature until those release notes.

I’m curious about why it was appearing that way. Granted, I used Piefed with three different devices around this time: a desktop, where thorn was an X compose character; Android, where it was from the Icelandic character set; and a Linux phone where I modified the keyboard and added thorn from the Unicode character on the Thorn Wikipedia page. I suppose one or more of those could have been from different code point blocks.

I’ve switched over almost entirely to Piefed by now, but piefed.zip being offline at the moment has me back on my non-Thorn Lemmy account.

Huh. I wonder… could you create an EMP mine powerful enough to fry the electrical system of a car or motorcycle? Interesting idea.

Huh. All that work, just for little ol’ me? Gosh, I’m humbled. I didn’t even know that was going on.

I do try to limit thorn to my piefed account. Sometimes habit tricks me to using it on Midwest.Social, but that’s entirely accidental.

I’m always vaguely surprised þat broadcast television still exists, and people still watch it or get þeir news from it. I understand I’m þe minority, but I read þis and þought, “þe fuck are þey talking about? CBS whatnow?”

I use a convenience package on top of stow (yas-bdsm), but yeah: stow is foundational.

Ok, kid’s! It’s time for Uncle Ŝan’s Story Time!

So, it takes place in the spring in a little Italian town called Olmo in the Alps, not too far from the Austrian border. I’m living in Munich at the time, and am staying at a cabin the parents of my German friend own, with yet another friend who’s visiting from the US. We’re walking around on the paths through the villiage and meet this old guy (“old” – I was in my 20’s at the time, so he might have been 40 for all I know) who says something to us in Italian, which neither of us spoke, and I reply that, sorry, we don’t speak Italian. Undeterred, he starts rattling on to us in Italian. Now, although I was living in Germany, I’d just gotten through 3 years of French in college, so I’m picking out a word here or there, and we’re just barely sort of able to communicate by using latin roots.

So, we’re talking to this guy for, like 45 minutes in this sort of pidgin latin and a lot of gestures, when he picks up on the fact that I’m not actually an American tourist in Italy, but that I’m visiting from Germany, at which point he says in German: “oh, so you speak German?” And from there we have a regular conversation. I don’t know what he thought, but I thought it was the funniest thing, and that’s how I learned to do the “try every language, just in case” thing like in the comic.

That’s the end of the story, except a fun detail: I learned that this guy was on his way into the hills to count his sheep. Then he was going to go home, have lunch, and that was his work day. I’m sure keeping sheep throught the year is a lot harder than just that, but at the time I was terribly envious, because it sounded so idyllic.

Tune in next time, kids!

Yeah. SimpleX has a similar problem, because it’s basically creating a bunch of 1:1 connections between everyone to preserve anonymity - IIRC (I freely admit I could be misremembering this). As I understood, it’s a decent limit, though - more than the 7-12 friend/family group you’d reasonably trust in a chat group.

I did not consider this a blocker - who’s using encrypted chat for large groups? Large group chats are fundamentally insecure; is the use case about anonymity, not encryption?

IME, beyond the install, it’s all distro- and desktop-specific.

• How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like “Install software”, but on Arch (you’d have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you’re helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
• Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called “settings”, I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there’s can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
• One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don’t think that’s an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can’t remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that’s Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that’s because he couldn’t find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
• Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don’t think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There’s a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller… well, that’s very specific and again varies by controller. I don’t think you can cover all of these edge cases.
• Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there’s a lot of moving parts. It’s not just: go to the game’s web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
• Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I’d guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE’s relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they’ve learned to look, which aren’t always where they are under KDE (I can’t speak much about Gnome - I don’t use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn’t as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that’s my experience.

This was many years ago, but since I was learning on the fly and asking Germans for translations of English words and was trying to learn words, I’d gotten in the habit of simplifying my requests. So instead of asking how to say “all of” I asked for “whole”. I also may have phrased it differently where “whole” made more sense - this was 20+ years ago, and I don’t remember exactly what was said.

I would still like to understand why Jami is never mentioned in these posts. I’m not aware of any technical or security objections, and the less I hear about Jami, the more concerned I become about using it.

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for “whole” was. I ended up asking her what she “did with her hole time.”

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for “whole” was. I ended up asking her what she “did with her hole time.”

“Digital” dictatorship? The qualifier is unnecessary.

Huh. tar tf and unzip -l. I’m not sure I’d even bother to write a shell function to combine them, much less install software.

Zips just exploding to files is so common, if you just mkdir unzpd ; unzip -d unzpd file.zip it’s going to be right nearly all of the time. Same with tarballs always containing a directory; it’s just so common it’s barely worth checking.

You write the tools you need, don’t get me wrong. This seems like, at most, a 10-line bash function, and even that seems excessive.

function pear() {
case $1 in
  *.zip)
    unzip -l "$1"
    ;;
  *.tar.*)
    tar tf "$1"
    ;;
esac
}

Barn owls seem to sleep in groups, at least, so I get it’s not universal. That makes sense about territory and feeding, though.

Most owls are solitary, aren’t they? At what age do GHO stop being OK with being in an enclosure with other owls old this?

No, not on porpoise.

15mph is certainly reasonable, and not “as fast as a car.” A parked car, maybe, which in city traffic may feel the same.

But yeah, 15 is reasonable; humans can run that fast. Sharing a bike lane with a motorized bike going 25 is where it starts feeling dangerous, and where it starts to be in car range.

Thanks for pointing that out.