ttj - Tom Jones

root@bob:~# time !! time puppet apply cm/debian-cd.p   Notice: Compiled catalog for bob in environment production in 0.01 seconds Notice: Applied catalog in 0.01 seconds   real    0m0.853s The 0.01 and 0.01, implying a total of 0.02s, are from puppet(8).  0.02s is below the bound for instant interaction, roughly 0.08s. The 0.85s is from time (for some reason here a bash shell builtin), and is an order of magnitude longer than "instant interaction".  Why does puppet lie about how long it takes, and why is this debug-type output printed by default anyway?

In /etc/screenrc or ~/.screenrc :    escape ^Tt   startup_message off # reduce GNU browbeating while we're at it Because ctrl-A clashes with go-to-start-of-line in readline (including shells) and emacs, and so on. Don't know why you need Tt , rather than just t , but it didn't work when I tried just t . Surprisingly hard to work out from manpage or by searching web, so put here.

Here's a kick up the arse to finally migrate off google services: they've made my account authentication two-factor, with the second factors inevitably being shitfrastructure elements.  There was no way to prevent it happening. Losing my phone is probably annoying.  If everything else depends on it, and thus stops working at the same I lose my phone, then it's way more annoying. The available "second steps" are: SMS to a mobile number I may not have for much longer confirming on an android device I am currently evaluating and do not want to be tied to, and can not carry in my pocket because it's so huge generating a one-time code on same android device So my access to email, calendar, contacts, documents, and a load of other stuff is now contingent on temporary shitfrastucture elements still being in place. This kind of thing must be "best practice", because everyone does it.  It must be hard to argue against a legal argument that the service provide

Gimp makes the hard things maybe possible, and the easy things very difficult. Symptom: you want to select a part of the image, in this case with the rectangle-select tool.  Instead of allowing you to make a selection, the application taunts you by drawing a no-entry sign, a cross-hairs, and a little rectangle.  If you are paying attention, you may see the text "Cannot subtract from an empty selection" in the status bar, which gives a clue about what's gone wrong. In the tool setting area is "Mode", with 4 possibilities.  These are labelled with hieroglyphics, not text.  The normal mode, replace, is the left-hand one.  Choose that, and gimp may deign to allow you to make a selection in your image. My screenshot program doesn't capture the mouse cursor, so here's a photo of it:

As a person moves around the world, they encounter local languages where they go.  That is obvious.  Should a person's personal computing devices also switch to the local language?  Should their smartphone menus be in French when in France, German when in Germany, and Japanese when in Japan?  What about web sites? Someone engaging in full immersion to learn a language might choose to do that.  Everyone else expects to be able to move around, and for their own computers to continue to talk to them in their language. Web sites are especially bad at this.  They use geo-ip, make assumptions about the language based on the country, and present stuff in that language.  This extremely stupid technique might have been acceptable were there no other ways to determine the user's language. HTTP has a header Accept - Language for this purpose.  And every request from major browsers tends to contain it.  That should be used with precedence over geo-ip.  But it's not --- not by Google, o

Email doesn't work.  The main issue is that spam gets through, whereas legitimate messages get blocked.  This is not fixable -- it is built into email by design. I thought by using gmail, things would "just work", but it's worse than ever.  Receiving corporate notifications from "noreply" addresses about "omg you've logged in from somewhere", or "you've ordered this product" mostly works.  Conversations about individual business enquiries can not happen because messages either get misclassified as spam by gmail, or rejected by the remote server, or otherwise fail. Just as the web is a totem for saying "I tried this on your web site, but it didn't work, and what I want to do is ..", so the email is a totem for sending it by post, saying "I tried to email you, but it didn't work, and this is what I wanted to write to you". In this case, it looks like Sure (the business name) is using an email gateway filt