Giver of skulls

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Joined 101 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • You can convert a running ext4 system into BTRFS and even move back to ext4, but to optimise the file system there are quite a few tricks to run as well. They come down to “remove the ext4 metadata (can’t go back after that), defragment, balance, maybe defragment again” and there are tools out there that make this stuff doable though the GUI, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach I novices.

    The cleanest switch would be to reinstall. Not just because of the steps above, but also to make sure the right subvolumes are set up with the right properties. This too can be done from a (mostly) running system, but it’s an absolute pain in the ass to have to do manually, especially if you’re not an expert in command line stuff.

    ext4 works fine if you don’t want to deal with all of this, but you’ll have to keep an eye on things like backup sizes just a bit more often


  • If you can’t take advantage of Timeshift’s BTRFS support, you’ll probably need to keep an eye on disk space regardless.

    All the .deb files are installed across system directories like /usr and /etc. If you only want backups of your files, just exclude everything outside /home and your data drive. This makes it more difficult to recover from a failed upgrade Windows System Restore style (as you exclude the system components from the backups) but hopefully you’ll never need that (or will be willing to reinstall and restore from backup when failure does happen). You may also want to exclude folders like $HOME/.cache and $HOME/.var if they’re present on your system. I think Chrome puts some of its cache in $HOME/.config as well, though I’d back up most .config folders myself.

    If your storage is that limited and you’re already familiar with Timeshift, you may want to consider switching to BTRFS. It’s not very friendly when it’s almost full, but compression and deduplication can save a lot of disk space, especially with tools like Timeshift. Other filesystems also offer these features, but Timeshift doesn’t make use of anything but BTRFS as far as I know.


  • I get skin irritations regardless of how clean my smart watch is after my wrist gets wet. Not entirely sure why, but something to consider if cleaning doesn’t help.

    Check the manual to see if there are specific cleaning instructions. You don’t want to accidentally damage any rubber seals with soap that’s too aggressive or scrub off a protective coating somewhere.

    My watch came with instructions to wipe it down with clean water, then some standard disinfectant alcohol. If that doesn’t work, soap-free detergent is recommended (I didn’t know that existed in any mild form?), so I’m guessing my watch really doesn’t like soap.

    I wouldn’t mess with stuff like alcohol on rubber/silicone bands without checking if it doesn’t melt the material. Accidentally making napalm by combining plastics and solvents is way too easy!


  • That’s gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars’ dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don’t even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.

    To get back an earth like dynamo, we’d need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars’ insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.

    I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars’ magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.


  • I think terraforming Mars won’t ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.

    We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).


  • A lot of people are afraid of systemd expanding because systemd handles a lot of stuff, so distros are likely to support it rather than the mishmash of tools they personally prefer. It all started with the System-V/Upstart replacement and now very few distros have the patience to customise and roll out the 90s style service management anymore. Their preferences used to align with the mainstream, but no longer do these days, and that causes friction.

    This process pushes people who prefer old tools to fringe distros, and newer software is less likely to work on their setups. They’re still free to use whatever system they like, of course, but the burden for developing and maintaining daemon management scripts is now on their fringe distro or themselves if their distro doesn’t have anything yet. I’d find that pretty annoying too, especially with how convoluted many older system management scripts are and how many moving parts are typically involved. Plus, some stuff like socket activation can’t even be done with some of the older init systems so people have to find alternatives.

    I doubt anyone reeling against run0 was ever going to consider it anyway.


  • sudo had several severe security bugs caused by copying env variables so I’m not surprised run0 isn’t doing much of that. I’ve had to help a whole bunch of people fix the permissions/ownership on their Jo. E directory after running sudo so I can even see the point of jot copying $HOME by default.

    I don’t think it’ll replace sudo necessarily, or doas would’ve done that already. It’s still useful as a shorthand for systemd-run and in some locked down system configurations I can see it being useful (i.e. when minimising the amount of SUID binaries). Maybe some elaborate enterprise setups will switch to it for security reasons, especially if they’re already leveraging PolKit heavily.





  • Because you can’t just boolean search the entirety of the web the same way you do a local database. You’re not getting all results every time you search, that’d be insanely inefficient, so doing full filters like with boolean database search won’t work.

    That said, based on my experience with Google, negations work just fine, as do double quotes. Last time I checked NEAR even worked pretty well. AND is implied, OR used to work but is probably derived from the rest of the query these days.

    People hate it when their query doesn’t return anything. So, whenever you search for something and get very little results, search engines will relax their boundaries to find something that may answer your query.

    Search engines in the early 00s had them because they required very specific phrase matches and the experience was horrible. You either got millions or results that didn’t relate to what you were searching for or you got none and had to start over.

    At some point, search engines started interpreting what you mean instead of what you type. For most people, searching for “rain” and getting results about “precipitation” is exactly what they want. Using the 90s/00s search term syntax, you’d need to type “~rain” to also get synonyms, which is obviously a terrible user experience that serves only the most pedantic people.





  • I think the people complaining about this stuff fall into several categories. One of them is depicted well by that GIF. A second group is just upset about environmental regulations existing. There’s probably a third group out there with some kind of hypersensitivity for things touching their face. And maybe a fourth group who hates it when things change even if there are good reasons for it (can relate, was diagnosed as autistic).

    I feel bad for the people with hypersensitivities but the rest should just suck it up already. Maybe some bamboo or metal straws can help these folks get used to the new bottles? They’re available online for cheap.


  • There’s a good reason why many carbonated drinks stopped being sold in glass bottles. When you go over a certain volume, they become bombs. There are videos online or 2L soda bottles falling over and sending shards of glass flying everywhere. I’d rather not have that back.

    Glass bottles are also great at starting fires when they’re left outside by trashy people. Looking at how often I still find plastic trash in the woods, I’m not sure if switching to glass would make that much of an improvement.

    Plus, you’d still have the same problem with the bottle cap.


  • The later seasons let go of some of the Burnham stuff and let characters like Adira have their own plots. I believe Paul and Hugh also had a few arcs though I never got into them myself.

    I just didn’t like early Burnham as a character. I didn’t like most of Sisko either. That doesn’t make a show bad, necessarily, but I felt like Discovery didn’t offer a whole lot of B plot/secondary characters to compensate. Without secondary perspectives to offset Sisko’s heavy moral/philosophical arc, I probably would’ve hated DS9 as well.

    In the later seasons, Burnham became more nuanced by having Book as a sidekick, as well as fleshing out the crew a lot more. They were no longer hurdles in the way of Burnhams’s self redemption arc/current goal in life.

    TNG also had their terrible episodes, but there were just a lot more of them. Season 1 of TNG got 26/22/26/26/26/26/26 episodes versus Discovery’s 15/14/13/13/10. There was also no single overarching plot, so Picard could play a flute and live the life of an alien for a whole episode without derailing any story plans. The “monster of the week” approach also helped inspire some real good moral and philosophical debate that would otherwise never would’ve been written into a single story, but also some of the most cringeworthy TV I’ve seen.

    Somewhere in the middle of DS9 and Voyager, Star Trek started aiming towards broader plot lines. At first they were multiple seasons long (though some of them had to be smuggled past Berman), but with Enterprise they became per-season. This makes it very difficult to compare old and new Trek, or even early and late seasons of the same show, because the dynamic changed.


  • That’d be a problem, because recent research has stretched the the age at which adolescent development stops from 23 to 25. If you’re going for the medical definition, you’ll need to add a few years to your laws.

    Obviously there’s a balance to be struck between 5 years old and 25 years old. The further you push it, the more likely people will use illegal means to drink, but you obviously don’t want 14 year olds to get drunk.

    If your kids are going to drink, you may as well teach them to drink responsibly. You’re not going to send your kid into disability by having them try a glass of wine at a birthday. The risks are much greater when they sneak out of the house to get drunk with their friends, who have no idea how to drink responsibly.

    I think my parents were smart about it, offering me small amounts of alcohol at special occasions only. None of that sweet mixed stuff, just basic beer or wine. The bitterness put me off actually drinking alcohol on my own initiative until I was at least 18 years old and capable of making my own independent decisions as an adult (legally speaking, anyway).


  • Unless you have some kind of knockoff SSD, that ūsung SSD looks like something is corrupted to me. usb 1-10 device descriptor read/64, error -71 might be unrelated.

    This could be a problem with RAM defects or overclocking. If your computer is overclocked, try setting it to stock configuration. Also run a memtest to check if your RAM sticks aren’t going bad. I don’t know what might’ve changed between 6.8.9 and 6.8.10 to cause this, but it could just be a coincidence (i.e. the kernel defaulting to a different RAM page that suffers from corruption for whatever reason).

    These messages are actually part of the systemd startup sequence, so the kernel has already loaded at this point. This means the problem may not be the kernel, but the initramfs installed/generated for your computer. You can try regenerating your initramfs on Fedora by running dracut --regenerate-all as root. Before you do that, you may also want to double check your /etc/fstab to make sure nothing accidentally added a swap device for some reason.