Aaron Rainbolt

👋 I'm a Christian computer programmer and Linux enthusiast. I love Bible studies, religious debate and discussion, and Christian music. I'm currently a Lubuntu Developer and Ubuntu Community Council Member, I maintain SWORD, Xiphos, and BibleTime for Fedora Linux, and I sometimes help with the development of theWord Bible Software.

Public Key

npub1kajdlnj8g3usaj46s5djntm82rrq5fxn0y4pf2y3yqulp76mancsdqdh8c

NIP-05 Address

arraybolt3@theres-life.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstwexleer5g7gwe2ag2xef4an4p3s2ynfhj2s54zgjqw0sldd7eugpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43q0xxzd2

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1kajdlnj8g3usaj46s5djntm82rrq5fxn0y4pf2y3yqulp76mancsdqdh8c

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Last Notes

2025-11-27 05:58:29 UTC

I was today years old when I learned that WIndows *may* corrupt the GUID partition table for no particular reason, rendering all Linux installations on the same drive unbootable. Thankfully, booting into a live USB and doing `sudo fdisk /dev/nvme0n1` followed by `w` fixed the issue.
#windows #linux #recovery

2025-01-28 04:15:02 UTC

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@nprofile…hck6 yh, u gt m.

2025-01-24 15:17:44 UTC

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@nprofile…phzv Yep, Kdenlive is packaged by a KDE developer. If you trust KDE, you can just the Kdenlive Snap.

2025-01-24 15:07:14 UTC

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@nprofile…phzv If the software is an official package by the developers of the software, or if it's packaged by a well-known community member,, it should be safe (assuming the upstream developers are not malicious themselves). Look for a checkmark or star next to the publisher name. If you don't see either of those, your should proceed with caution - anyone can upload a Snap to the Snap store with no or very little supervision, so it shouldn't be treated as automatically trusted.

2025-01-22 03:08:36 UTC

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@nprofile…8lwp @nprofile…fexj I don't remember off-hand, it's immortalized in chat logs on IRC most likely though so I could find out if needed.

2025-01-22 03:07:29 UTC

I sincerely wish web browsers would not frantically grab for the status of "default browser" every time I run them. I use multiple browsers for different things, I'm happy with my default!
#linux #web #browser

2025-01-22 02:43:19 UTC

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@nprofile…6mjr This is really cool! I'm not exactly a cryptographer, but I am curious, are you preventing a man-in-the-middle attack with your encryption mechanism, and if so, how? (Every E2EE implementation I've ever seen requires the involvement of some sort of out-of-band shared secret to secure the connection, but I'm not seeing the out-of-band secret mentioned above.)

2025-01-21 22:22:33 UTC

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@nprofile…9vce A lawyer would probably be a good first contact. It can be very tempting to just say "you can't use my project for X, Y, or Z" and call it good enough, but those who do so *very frequently* create licenses that accidentally forbid any kind of use at all (VeraCrypt IIRC), forbid uses that you actually wanted to allow (ftpparse, before I talked the author into open-sourcing it), or forbid so many different kinds of use that the software is effectively useless (Llama, alright this one was probably crippled intentionally but you get my point). It also becomes very easy to mix in bits of other projects in a way that unintentionally violates their licenses, something I as a license auditor have seen traditional open-source projects do multiple times.
I don't mean to be the naysayer you didn't want here, but there's a reason ethical source hasn't taken off very much. In a way it's more closed even than closed source, because trying to obey the clauses of such a license is a legal minefield no one wants to navigate.

2025-01-21 21:49:03 UTC

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@nprofile…fexj I'd just stick with Chromium. I've tried Vivaldi, it was nice, and then the sysadmin for a FOSS project I contribute to informed me that my browser was leaking info most likely from my other tabs to the project's main website and Sentry was picking it up. Don't remember the details, not sure what I misconfigured if anything, but that was one serious scare and I ended up changing all my passwords and moving back to Chrome.

2025-01-21 19:33:02 UTC

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@nprofile…gt2w I can't seem to access that website, DNS is broken.

2025-01-21 18:30:18 UTC

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@nprofile…827z I can't tell if I think this is awesome or tragic.

2025-01-20 16:53:03 UTC

Ran into an amazing song on r/ChristianMusic on Reddit. Wanted to share it here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wxKF4hpqV4
#music #christian #jesus #gospel #acappella #acapella #pop

2025-01-20 16:30:31 UTC

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@nprofile…qtg4 I don't really use it for its normal intended purpose, but I do oftentimes use it for mounting virtual QEMU disk images. qemu-nbd lets me bind arbitrary disk images (qcow2, raw, and probably others) to nbd devices, where I can then partition, format, and even install Linux to them as if they were a normal drive. Then I can unmount it, detach it, and boot it in a VM. It's awesome.

2025-01-20 00:48:56 UTC

I rly dnot undstnd why C is alws wrtn lik ths. It jst mks it impsbl to rd, u spnd 90pct of the tme figrng out hw to dcrypt acrnyms, abbrevs, nd partial wor
#C #programming #rant #linux

2025-01-17 15:51:39 UTC

What all the AI music people are missing is that music isn't just pretty, enjoyable to listen to, etc. 50% of the point is the passion and (hopefully) profound realizations of the *human* who wrote it, another 45% of the point is the passion of the *human* who performed it. Only 5% is the actual music itself. Knowing that the beauty, intensity, and complexity of a musical arrangement was spit out by an algorithm sucks 95% of the "musicness" out of the music.
Anyway, here's a really good song made by actual humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGqLjb_5kaM
#music #ai #christian #ninelashes #rock #electronicmusic

2025-01-15 18:30:37 UTC

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@nprofile…u99v Well. Now I feel justified feeling slightly terrified every time I run into openssl.

2025-01-14 03:03:39 UTC

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Found one that I liked, under an Attribution-NonCommercial license. https://flic.kr/p/vM56Jz Thanks to Bryant Olsen for this!

2025-01-14 02:34:55 UTC

I hate to be a cheapskate, but does anyone have a good recommendation for a source of, for lack of a better term, open-source or source-available **landscape** photography? My neck of the woods has tons of good landscape photography opportunities, but I don't have any good camera to capture them. I want a landscape picture as a desktop background, and every time I see something legitimately breathtaking, it's also impossible and illegal to download. I don't have anything against people who want to sell their photos (or even just keep them, it's their photos and capturing those is extremely hard work I'm sure), but I don't have the means to buy them.
I'm perfectly fine with licenses that prohibit commercial use. I just want something I can legally throw on my desktop and look at when my windows are minimized. (Also, I'm specifically interested in landscape photography only.)
#landscape #photography #free

2025-01-13 23:53:08 UTC

I wish GitHub would give you a notification on their website when they were having an outage. Getting `git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).` when trying to pull a repo just about gave me a heart attack thinking someone had hacked me.
On the bright side, I have my credentials rotated out now, so that's good I guess :P
#git #github #programming #linux

2025-01-13 23:52:56 UTC

2025-01-13 03:43:30 UTC

TIL Linux lets you bind-mount individual files, not just entire directories.
Mind = blown.
#linux #til

2025-01-07 23:57:59 UTC

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@nprofile…qjvw hmm... maybe you have a sha512sums file that has absolute paths inside of it, or maybe your sha512sum command works better than mine.

2025-01-07 23:56:20 UTC

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@nprofile…qjvw Yes, because postgres is a well-behaved command that actually obeys absolute paths. sha512sum on the other hand expects the files it verifies to be in the current working directory, even if you explicitly tell it the file with the hashes is somewhere other than the current working directory. Thus if you can't access the directory your files are in, you can't `cd` to it, and thus sha512sum will never find your files.

2025-01-07 23:51:22 UTC

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@nprofile…qjvw Trying to run `sudo -u otheruser sha512sum /path/to/directorymy/user/cant/access/but/otheruser/can/SHA512SUMS`.

2025-01-07 23:37:20 UTC

New fear unlocked: Linux commands that assume you're in some specific directory even if you pass an absolute path to them.
So far only `find` and `sha512sum` have bitten me this way, but they bite *hard*!
#linux #bash #programming #posix #unix

2025-01-06 03:10:12 UTC

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@nprofile…9n98 Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS, which (for practical, technical, and policy-related reasons) is only able to ship Plasma 5.27.11. If you want Plasma 6, you could switch to Kubuntu 24.10, or, if you're feeling really adventurous, you could compile Qt, KDE Plasma, and the KDE apps yourself using KDE's build tooling (there's public documentation on doing the latter, I've done it before, be warned that it is NOT a walk in the park).

2025-01-05 04:39:08 UTC

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@nprofile…t66q @nprofile…z446 Word guess: Creation
(hoping that maybe the eight blue dots were a word length clue)

2025-01-05 04:26:53 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh You're going to be using your files, apps, etc. on Kubuntu, right? If so, just select the HDD in the "Select storage device" dropdown at the top of the screen like it looks like you've done, then select "Erase disk" in the menu at the middle, and click "Next" at the bottom right. Don't mess with the "Bootloader location" settings. This will wipe *everything* on your hard drive, then install the OS to the drive. You'll have all of the space on the drive that isn't consumed by the OS for storing your apps and files (the OS itself will only consume somewhere around 10 GB of space).
Note that if you have important files on this drive, you *need* to save them to some other drive first, or they will be erased when you do this.

2025-01-03 15:06:03 UTC

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@nprofile…z6ey Neat! I've been using Xiphos as my primary bible software for a while now. I've also tried experimenting with making my own SWORD frontends but haven't gotten anything generally usable yet.

2025-01-01 18:59:15 UTC

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@nprofile…h9qy What kind of machine was this for, some sort of mainframe terminal? I don't think DOS ever had a use for the F24 key :P

2025-01-01 17:55:14 UTC

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@nprofile…wyg9 That sounds legitimately horrible.

2025-01-01 05:50:34 UTC

Well this is a new take on "I will take the stony heart out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh". (Ezekiel 36:26) Music is awesome, words are awesome though you may have to look up the lyrics since they're a bit hard to make out in some parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Vb3qAjKM0
#christian #music #rock #hardrock #ninelashes

2025-01-01 05:32:16 UTC

Hey #QubesOS using world! Don't be me and try to install a template rpm file directly using dnf! You Have Been Warned. Use qvm-template instead.
#longstory #wellthatdidntwork #howtobreakyourcomputer

2024-12-31 16:14:37 UTC

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@nprofile…y63h I have to do this thing, I've had quite a few VMs where the update speed was abysmal.

2024-12-31 15:11:59 UTC

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@nprofile…klhc Like for real, avoiding awful crud even on Mastodon is not easy.

2024-12-31 07:28:46 UTC

I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; It shall not cleave to me. (Psalm 101:3)
May we remember to live by this. In Jesus' name, Amen.
#bible #christian #psalms

2024-12-31 02:03:20 UTC

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@nprofile…ddfm I mean, forgive me for stating the obvious, but is LibreOffice just totally unsuitable here? The formulas in LibreOffice are pretty similar, and if you're into macros there's LibreOffice BASIC (which also has some VBA support, though it's not complete).
If you really need real, actual MS Office, WinWorldPC has both Windows 2000 and Office 97 installation media. That is *extremely* old though, and both are still under copyright so you'll want to make sure your use falls under fair use law or your country's equivalent thereof (assuming your country has an equivalent thereof).

2024-12-31 01:55:37 UTC

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@nprofile…wyg9 I thought this was a computer joke at first - the white text on a black background on the materials tag looks like a UNIX shell if you aren't paying attention :P

2024-12-23 20:45:07 UTC

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@nprofile…sq98 Oooh, I knew about moving the window with Super + left drag under KDE, but didn't know about Super + right drag for resize! Thanks for the tip!

2024-12-23 20:20:49 UTC

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@nprofile…t3sr I don't think tmux can have its control key (Ctrl+B) changed. Vim, maybe, but I use Vim on enough different machines that I can't trust them to be all configured the same. I have a hard enough time distinguishing "normal Vim" from "my workplace's super fancy configured Vim", I'm not sure changing a shortcut like that would make things any better.

2024-12-23 20:16:03 UTC

Vim: Uses Ctrl+W followed by an arrow key for pane switching
Tmux: Uses Ctrl+B followed by an arrow key for pane switching
Me: Keeps trying to use Ctrl+W in Tmux and Ctrl+B in Vim
My work: Keeps getting messed up
#linux #tmux #vim #terminal #frustration

2024-12-23 18:48:48 UTC

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@nprofile…lptk There's something sort of similar specifically for bootloader issues called boot-repair-cd. (https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/) It doesn't do everything though, and it has some potentially dangerous telemetry stuff in it that was designed to help people share system info with others for fixing problems, but can include sensitive info like LUKS headers.
Might be a fun side project to make something like that, probably based on Debian Testing...

2024-12-22 21:02:07 UTC

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@nprofile…p7he Because some of us actually like Snap.

2024-12-19 16:59:34 UTC

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@nprofile…rxx3 @nprofile…5krp Yes, it is free and open-source, by definition. The fact that they have a rather pushy donation model doesn't change that, and FOSS devs need to eat too.

2024-12-19 07:01:49 UTC

Verison's most recent smartphone ads I've been seeing show someone burning a cherry pie, asking Google Gemini what to do with it, and being told to turn it into cherry cobbler.
I knew AI was going to try to kill us and take over the world, but this is a strange and cruel method of accomplishing its task...
#ai #google #gemini #slop #thisisfine

2024-12-18 20:20:28 UTC

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@nprofile…h9qy You're giving me anxiety. I have most of my files on a secondary XFS partition...

2024-12-18 06:35:54 UTC

Wow. This is one of those songs that get better almost every time I listen to it.
Kutless - Your Love Awakens Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZJ2Er5j6Fk
(This is a cover of a Phil Wickham song - the original is really good too, but this is spectacular if you like rock music.)
#christian #music #kutless

2024-12-17 00:24:41 UTC

Wow, I just discovered pyuic from PyQt, and I'm instantly loving it. I thought making Qt apps in Python was an exercise in pure anguish until finding this.
#python #qt #linux #programming

2024-12-16 21:48:40 UTC

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@nprofile…hyy8 I read this as "sqlite-based development" at first and was very confused XD

2024-12-13 02:42:11 UTC

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@nprofile…vdyk Please tell me this is a joke.
This is a joke, right?
This probably isn't a joke.

2024-12-12 01:44:43 UTC

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@nprofile…r0kn You singlehandedly took down the whole service?!

2024-12-11 23:35:58 UTC

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@nprofile…zqch From what I understand, it *can* be forked or self-hosted, but many of its features like SMS support require that you have various accounts with various services so it can integrate with them, thus self-hosting or forking is a pain. I *think* Session is at least based on Signal's code, though I'm not entirely sure. @nprofile…fprp is that correct or am I inaccurate here?

2024-12-11 22:58:58 UTC

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@nprofile…95tk "Hi"

2024-12-11 00:35:51 UTC

Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. (1 John 3:7-9)
Christ didn't just die to free us from the consequences of sin. He died to free us from sin. (John 8:34-36) If we're still struggling with sin, we can pray for His guidance, to help us overcome sin, or find the way to overcome it.
#bible #christian #jesus #sin #righteousness

2024-12-04 15:14:43 UTC

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@nprofile…2lya You're using a VPN-like thing provided by Apple, and apparently it doesn't like your Internet connection.

2024-12-02 02:00:49 UTC

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@nprofile…r0kn Photon?! That's the whole lightning bolt! (At least, my collection of felines sounds like thunder when they all get in a playful mood at the same time.)

2024-12-01 18:36:51 UTC

This snippet of code sums up how I feel about working with locales and keyboard layouts under Linux.
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/thereslife/media_attachments/files/113/579/006/437/604/051/original/5792624ac6d87c5e.png

2024-12-01 04:17:05 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh There's probably no need for that, and it may not fix it.
OK, so you're using a BIOS system. Next, can you share the output of this command:
sudo fdisk -l
The output will be a bit lengthy, all of it is relevant. This will tell me what disks are in your system, and what their partition layouts look like. More importantly, it will tell me what disk you installed to.

2024-12-01 04:09:06 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh OK, if you're booted into the USB again, that's good. I'll be around for a while longer, so let's try some commands to troubleshoot.
What's the output of this:
ls /sys/firmware/efi
(Note: It's fine if this returns "ls: cannot access '/sys/firmware/efi': No such file or directory". I just need to know what it says.)

2024-12-01 04:02:00 UTC

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@nprofile…vrl0 @nprofile…dt6r I used to daily drive a machine with no internal hard drive at all. Installed from one USB onto another, used it as the hard drive, loved it. That was my setup for a decent amount of time, before I had the guts to install Linux on my main laptop. (That was about four and a half years ago, when I was just getting started with Linux.)

2024-12-01 04:00:45 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh OK, then this is probably just a case of a finicky BIOS. Can you get into the BIOS menu? (Usually you use a key like Esc or F2 while the system is first starting up to do that.) Once you're in the menu, find an option called "Boot Order" or something like that. Where does your hard drive show up in that list?

2024-12-01 03:53:52 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh Yeah, some computers are finicky like that. Did you install alongside an existing OS, or did you let Mint take over the entire computer? (The latter is generally easier and less error-prone.)

2024-12-01 03:52:59 UTC

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@nprofile…vrl0 If you're booted from a live USB, you're not actually using the space on the USB drive. The live image is read-only, and it's using your system's RAM as temporary disk space via overlayfs magic. It only will use part of your system's RAM though, so as to leave you room to do other things.
There's probably a way to make the ramdisk bigger, but what I'd personally do is grab a second USB stick, install Linux Mint onto that second stick, and then boot from said second stick. Then you will be using the USB drive itself for storage. (You can't easily convert the live ISO to a real installation without doing a real installation to a second stick.)
Also, the ramdisk trick mentioned by @nprofile…dt6r may not help unless you can specifically point fwupd to it. It will give you more ramdisk space in that particular directory, but it won't expand space on the overlayfs volume itself. If you can get fwupd to use the specific directory though, then that should hopefully work depending on how much RAM you have.

2024-12-01 03:48:05 UTC

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@nprofile…q0eh The OS on your hard drive isn't being recognized, and it's falling back to network boot (which you don't want to use, it's a very niche thing). Check your boot order in the BIOS settings and make sure that your hard drive is in the list and at or close to the top of the list. If there's a boot menu option that lets you specifically choose your hard drive to boot from, try using that.
What distro did you try to install?

2024-11-28 04:29:59 UTC

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@nprofile…msv9 mmm, my answer varies depending on if you mean closest in proximity or closest as in easiest to reach.
Closest as in easiest to reach: "Wherefore we flee for refuge to thine infinite mercy, seeking and imploring thy grace, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ." (The book identifies itself as "Service Book and Hymnal - Authorized by the Lutheran Churches cooperating in The Commission on the Liturgy and Hymnal".)
#page42
Closest as in proximity: Nonexistent, because the book is the second half of a very large two-volume dictionary and the pages start at 1100 or so.
#page42

2024-11-27 18:41:55 UTC

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@nprofile…q3p6 Ubuntu developers exist on here and can here you :P I won't try to change your mind despite the fact that my Linux workflow lives and breathes Ubuntu, but some people actually do find it much more usable and maintainable than Fedora or Pop!_OS, so it might be handy to list the issues you have with it so people know whether they think other options are more maintainable *for them*.

2024-11-27 17:14:09 UTC

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@nprofile…r0kn git reset HEAD~$(git rev-list --count HEAD); git add -A; git commit -m "squash"; git push -f

2024-11-20 15:58:02 UTC

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@nprofile…yuqa This reminds me of this meme:
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/thereslife/media_attachments/files/113/516/086/478/956/297/original/bdb5438cb999b7e2.png

2024-11-19 22:35:13 UTC

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@nprofile…qsp6 what distro did you try? I hate to be the "just try another distro, it'll work better" guy, but that particular error is something that shouldn't happen unless either you or your distro developer broke something very badly. Ubuntu generally "just works".

2024-11-19 21:07:30 UTC

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@nprofile…w7te If you're looking for a paid support option, there are companies that provide remote help and support for Linux, including my workplace, Kubuntu Focus (though they specialize in supporting Kubuntu running on their hardware, since they do lots of validation work to make sure Kubuntu works on their hardware so that there are as few rough edges as possible). If getting new hardware is an option, it might be worth looking into them.

2024-11-18 15:26:08 UTC

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@nprofile…s7ss Plenty of people are still using it :) There are lots of abandoned channels that have devolved into spam, but many rooms are actively maintained and many of those have strong anti-spam measures in place.

2024-11-17 01:13:31 UTC

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@nprofile…y79k um, was there supposed to be an article link here?

2024-11-13 23:47:07 UTC

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@npub18yv…xxyn hmm, in my experience it's very difficult to mute or hide someone based on the keyboard they use if they don't specifically say which keyboard they use. (For those who need to know mine, it's a Logitech MX Mechanical Mini with clicky blue switches.)
🤪

2024-11-13 19:49:52 UTC

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@npub18hd…kf64 I think at this point you have an AMD Radeon machine with an attached ARM-based peripheral board called a Raspberry Pi :P

2024-11-13 18:46:17 UTC

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@npub1eua…jcsu Motherboard replacement pretty much always triggers Windows to need reactivated. If you were using an OEM license, the licenses are bound to the motherboard and can't be reused, so that may be what you're seeing.
Good excuse to get rid of Windows? :P

2024-11-13 16:56:40 UTC

Somewhat obscure Christian song I first heard on a DVD called "God of Wonders". Thought it was worth sharing here. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxT5chb2o9c
#music #christian #praise #worship

2024-11-13 16:54:46 UTC

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@npub12f7…lkxh It probably will have to go through the change proposal process from what I understand. The process of submitting a Change is documented here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/changes_guide/
Also, wait... you can have case-insensitive completion? I may have to enable this on my Kubuntu machine.

2024-11-13 15:32:50 UTC

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@npub1y2h…ahs3 Not to my awareness, no.

2024-11-13 04:20:17 UTC

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@npub1y2h…ahs3 Not sure how COSMIC's tiling works, but KDE has window tiling of sorts. Hit Meta+T, set up your layout, snap windows to it by holding Shift and then dragging your windows into position.

2024-11-12 04:54:59 UTC

At this point I'm not sure who's crazy - me, the computer, or whoever designed the websites I'm trying to parse. All I know is something has gone crazy.
#linux #bash #programming #regex
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/thereslife/media_attachments/files/113/468/178/851/396/658/original/7cc8f4257e6c160e.png

2024-11-10 20:06:43 UTC

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@npub1zqf…r4ty Migration, perhaps?

2024-11-10 05:44:29 UTC

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@npub18a2…9u5x Generally I make my disks 32 GB if I don't expect to use the machine a whole lot (test machines for instance), 64 GB if they're going to be used for real work like building software, and 128 GB if they're going to be used for intensive work and I fear running out of disk space in the VM.

2024-11-07 20:10:49 UTC

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@npub1dxv…y2z8 This looks neat, I assume the inability to translate paywalled pages is to protect Kagi from being sued by someone like the New York Times mistaking the translation engine for an AI scraper bot (or deciding that they don't want their articles translated for whatever nonsensical reason related to intellectual property they come up with)?

2024-11-07 03:36:05 UTC

As a politically right-leaning person, I've intentionally said almost nothing about the results of the US presidential election because I know so many left-leaning people who I think will have their feelings hurt by me expressing my thankfulness and relief that Trump won. Yet these very same people seem to have no problem saying all manner of things about how much they hate how the election went, directing much of that hate at the people who voted and who wanted Trump to win.
I'm tired of it. This was the day I could finally say "Hallelujah, my nation is finally going in a pro-life direction!" and not be in terror that Harris would make federal laws be passed that would provide a right to kill children. But that day has now been littered with people directing hate at almost anyone they can blame, including myself. At the very least, I would have appreciated if people I had tried so hard not to offend had also worked to not offend others in like manner.
I'm probably going to be unfollowing quite a few people. Depending on the responses I get to this, I may have to block people I know and used to enjoy interacting with. I don't mind at all if you have a different opinion or belief system than I do. But if you are going to publicly talk about how much you hate people like me, I will have to let you do that out of my hearing range.

2024-11-06 02:34:51 UTC

If you happen to be a well-known person in an open-source project you contribute to, please consider not responding negatively when you see someone you don't recognize suggesting a big feature in your project. They may be a random user who thinks they have a grand idea that everyone else will implement... or they might be someone who would have been willing to do immense amounts of work to contribute to your project. Mistaking the future contributors for clueless users is how you get great devs to stay away from your project. (And really, the clueless users might become future contributors if you're nice to them.)
#linux #opensource #programming #development #community

2024-10-30 21:24:47 UTC

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@npub1qy5…lav0 @npub1cj2…2fze <-- this guy :)

2024-10-28 17:20:54 UTC

I sincerely wish the Internet Archive had not gone on a temporary stint of blatant copyright violation during COVID by removing the "controls" from their controlled digital lending with their so-called "national emergency library", allowing people to borrow more books than they actually had. They were able to do digital lending for years before then, and no one stopped them it seems. But once they decided to cross the line into copyright violations, they got sued, and now many of their books are entirely inaccessible, denying people like me the ability to research information from books since I lack the ability to get to a physical library. Ultimately I believe this bad decision is why the Internet Archive is now essentially shut down as far as books are concerned.
May this be a lesson to us to do what is right in the long term rather than pursuing what we'd like in the short term.
#research #books #internetarchive

2024-10-27 22:30:55 UTC

Always remember to be thankful *for* God. I can be thankful *to* anyone or anything that does something I find convenient, but I can only be thankful *for* those who I love. We show our thankfulness for God by loving Him and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. (Mark 12:29-31, Deuteronomy 8:10-20)
#jesus #bible #christian #thankfulness

2024-10-22 21:18:53 UTC

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@npub1ynm…7md3 If you mean a religion with an abundance of open-source study materials, may I interest you in Crosswire's SWORD Project? https://www.crosswire.org/sword/index.jsp

2024-10-21 17:10:37 UTC

So `diff -r` cannot be limited to only recurse to a certain depth. Is there any "diff++" tool that acts similar to `diff`, but provides some more versatile options like depth recursion limits? I specifically do NOT want a visual diff tool or an interactive tool.
#diff #linux #ubuntu #debian #bash

2024-10-21 04:25:19 UTC

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@npub1tc7…5uf3 Yeah no. Android is proven to be easy to break into, there's software like Cellebrite for it. Windows is unsafe by default because the entity behind it thinks it's fine to record everything you do on your PC with Recall (which isn't fine even if Microsoft isn't snooping on the data, because it makes WAY more of my data persistent than should be persistent). ChromeOS doesn't use full disk encryption at all, it relies on ext4 file-level encryption which probably actually is decent, but it's file-level, not volume-level, which is worrisome. (I've never used macOS so I don't have much of an opinion there.)

2024-10-21 03:28:49 UTC

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@npub1gq5…yxjq Yep. And yet... all you need it a good `set -o pipefail` to shatter that expectation.

2024-10-21 01:39:32 UTC

Disturbing shell scripting fact for the day - both `true` and `echo ''` can exit non-zero. All you have to do is get in some esoteric edge case that results in a SIGPIPE being triggered.
Guess what I just spent the last thirty minutes of my life trying to figure out.
#bash #sh #linux

2024-10-18 04:27:24 UTC

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@npub1c0m…5s7y I knew this trick, but I hardly ever use it because I virtually always have readline support in my terminal and so I just do "up arrow + Home + type 'sudo ' + Enter'. The way you show is actually less typing though.

2024-10-14 03:28:38 UTC

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@npub1wvu…qw2f ah, that makes sense.

2024-10-14 03:13:55 UTC

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@npub1wvu…qw2f What desktop environment are you using? Also what exactly do you mean by "repeat visual warning"? Windows used to give me a warning at "low" and a warning at "critical" and that was it. KDE does that. GNOME does that. LXQt (when properly configured) does that. What desktop environment are you currently using? It might just have an option for this.

2024-09-16 07:43:57 UTC

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@npub18yv…xxyn when... what? I thought schmalz was chicken fat. I've heard of cultures where chicken is considered a vegetable but this is taking it a little too far...

2024-09-06 02:23:16 UTC

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@npub19wu…nhd6 I initially read this as "I'm the right monster" and was so confused at first :P

2024-09-05 17:41:08 UTC

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@npub1z5f…9tg2 btw can you private message me the full command? I tried to base64 decode that mess so I could reverse-engineer it but it looks like it ran off the right side of the screen.

2024-09-04 22:49:47 UTC

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wait why did [\:space\:] turn into that :P