ttj - Tom Jones

cost around 2500 GBP(2023). bought 4 initially boots into windows. horrid, it starts talking to you in robot voice ships in card box. lenovo could learn something about experience from apple covered in stickers. sticker of fingerprint over the fingerprint sensor three camera eyes? two seem to be coverable by the slidy thing, tho cover could be transparent, the other not? In any case, red dot is probably annoying to have directly above display ugly intel vpro sticker. why do this? both usb-c ports are on left. one on right would be nice BIOS warns you if using generic usb-c power supply, even tho works fine, have to press ESC. annoyances to boot debian installer cd from usb optical drive:  annoying: power button hold for power off has been 10 seconds instead of 5 seconds for several generations now. too easy to suspend by mistake hold power button for 10 seconds press power button press enter to interrupt normal startup loud 1980s beep, then you're up against the clock to choose som...

  I've tried using Coutts (CD) online banking for the first time, several times, but always get a message that it's "currently unavailable". My contact assures me that it has high availability. This does seem to leave open the possibility that they are doing some kind of browser detection, and instead of saying "we don't like your browser", they express it as "currently unavailable".   So far, the number of times I've successfully used the service is: zero.

In various OSs, holding a windows button modifier from the bottom row and hitting L locks the user session. In fvwm, assuming you have a prog `lk` in your PATH that locks the screen, you can set up this key combo as follows, in `.fvwm/config` or one of the other fvwm config file locations:     Key l A 4 Exec lk The "A" is for any context.  The "4" means X thinks it's mod4, and the way you work out which one it is is: $ xmodmap xmodmap:  up to 4 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses): shift       Shift_L (0x32),  Shift_R (0x3e) lock       control     Control_L (0x25),  Control_L (0x42),  Control_R (0x69) mod1        Alt_L (0x40),  Alt_R (0x6c),  Meta_L (0xcd) mod2        Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3       mod4        Super_L (0x85),  ...

Although Debian 12 has not so far been useful for email, a couple of things have just worked nicely. Wifi now works without having to go thru some bizarre firmware ritual. The printer in my cowork just came up in the printer list, without me doing anything, and printing to it worked.  This is the first time I've experienced such a thing in a linux. Thanks Debian folk.

The Casio F-91W can go into 12h mode by mistake, because the button to change it is on the hand side. To change it back, just press the "Alarm on-off/24hr" button, which is the one in the bottom-right. Better design would be to have 24-hour mode only.  Silly settings do not need to be settable or possible.

Running email programs used to result in things like email happening. Running "mutt" now gives this: whereas kmail gives:   Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString) Cannot rename log file '/tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error' to '/tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error.old': Cannot open /tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error for input org.kde.pim.akonadicontrol: ProcessControl: Application "/usr/bin/akonadiserver" stopped unexpectedly ( "Process crashed" ) org.kde.pim.akonadicontrol: Application '/usr/bin/akonadiserver' crashed! 1 restarts left. Cannot rename log file '/tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error' to '/tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error.old': Cannot open /tj/.local/share/akonadi/Akonadi.error for input org.kde.pim.akonadicontrol: ProcessControl: Application "/usr/bin/akonadiserver" stopped unexpectedly ( "Process crashed...

Have you ever wondered what goes on in your fridge when the door is closed? The answer is probably not that the light secretly stays on, but that the temperature fluctuates biglier than you expected, and over a longer period (and the humidity plummets along with temperature while the refrigeration runs). Using logging bluetooth temperature-and-humidity devices, specifically the Sensorpush HTP.xw, I have measured this for three domestic fridges.  They all showed something like the above, which is for a Bosch unit left in a kitchen by a previous owner of a house. The sensor was placed on a shelf, near the top, and near the back, but not touching. The temperature ranges, with period of around 5 hours, from around 2.5 degrees to around 11 degrees.  This is a big range, 8.5 degrees, and the max, 11 degrees, is too hot.  I would be happy with a range of, say 2-5 degrees, but even that seems big.  What's the startup cost to the "refrigeration circuit", or, why would enginee...

I thought I'd already written about this, but can't find it. It's useful to concatenate PDFs.   For example, Kraken's incompetent compliance department can only accept a single file for source of wealth.  So dozens of documents have to be rolled up together into a single PDF.   For another example, when printing a letter with enclosures, it's simpler to keep track of what was sent and enclosed by rolling it all up into one file, rather than having to maintain records of multiple files printed and enclosed together.  It also saves time on the ctrl-P-ing. Pretty grim interface, but this does seem to work, and qpdf does come with debian:    $ qpdf  --empty --pages 0.pdf 1.pdf 2.pdf -- output.pdf or to use real life example: $ qpdf --empty --pages 2023-05-30.letter.sure.my_invoice_for_unauthorized_toilet_emplacement.pdf 2023-05-30.letter.sure.my_invoice_for_unauthorized_toilet_emplacement.bundle/2023-0* -- 2023-05-30.letter.sure.my_invoice_for_un...

Fixed penalty notices for parking in Guernsey are issued in yellow special envelopes and put under the wiper.  The envelopes are weather-proof plastic on one side, and paper on the other side.  The paper side usually faces up.  If it rains, the rain gets thru, and the paper inside is destroyed.  An intermediate state can be reached where the paper is damaged and the writing runs, but is just about legible.  It rains a lot in Guernsey.  This is silly.  To make it sensible, tickets could be issued in weatherproof envelopes. It is not possible to pay the fine until after mid day the next working day.  You are not told this on the ticket.  The "pay it" web page does say.  If you phone to pay, they will tell you. The time when people are most likely to pay is immediately after receiving the ticket.  By having it disabled until midday the following working day, the government ensures that a lot of people who would have paid it, do not pay...

In a Unix shell, you can background a command with an '&'.  If it's running in the foreground, you can suspend it with ctrl-Z, and then background (unsuspending it) with the "bg" built-in shell command. That's nice, but even nicer would be if you could do it one go.  Foregrounded to backgrounded in one go doesn't sound like too much to ask, and seems like an obvious idea. I don't see any need for (Unix) signals in the new feature.  Suspend involves a signal, but we are not doing the suspend.  Is there a ctrl-something available for the user interface?  Do we need to involve the terminal (emulator), or can this just be done in the shell?  Is it already a feature that I don't know about in some shell, or has anyone done it as a demo?  Those are all the questions I can think of. Incidentally, I've been wondering about trying some pair-working mini projects, defined as: in the first 3 days, set objectives so that the two of you can, with 95% pr...

I don't often say this, but there is a new feature that's quite nice in debian's default shell / xterm setup. I don't even know if it's the terminal emulator or the shell doing this yet, but the effect is: when pasting in (middle mouse button) text with a newline, instead of just doing it, something catches it and displays the text in the terminal highlighted, and the user hits return to make it go in for real.  Or, what ctrl-c to not.  Given X's unreliability in filling the clipboard with the right thing, and in any case, this is a nice defence against copy-and-paste accidents. The intermediate state looks like this: