ttj - Tom Jones

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...

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:

My latest failed Debian installation attempt is Debian 11 on a thinkpad x1 nano gen 2. Initial installation succeeded with accepting almost all defaults from installer.  There was a big delay on startup, during which time "DPC: RP PIO log size 0 is invalid" was shown on the screen. When I reinstalled with disk encryption, luks, set up in the installer, the installation process apparently succeeded.  But on first boot, the same message "DPC: RP PIO log size 0 is invalid", with its big delay, is now enough to cause something waiting for the (decrypted) root file system to appear, to time out with "Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems: " [...].  At this point it drops into a busybox shell.     Previously, with no disk encryption layer in use, this waiting thing was perhaps not activated, or perhaps "/" was already mounted by this stage, and the waiting thing was happy. At least it's somewhat clear what's going wrong i...