Bye bye, nytimes.

When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”.

But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again.

Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking.

I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.

Dear lazy-web - question time.

I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent.

The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.

Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.

Anyway.

I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).

Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”.

And I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?

And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me.

And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.

I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.

Edit: clearly I should have specified that I’m not interested in yet another “runs in a terminal” editor, or some even older editor (ie “real” emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years.

Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are…

We have a brand new family car (replacing one that was twenty years old - just to clarify that this is not something very common in our family). The wife is taking it up the mountain for some late spring skiing, so even though the season is pretty much over, it wants proper traction tires.

No problem. I’ve done this before, even if it’s been a few years. Order tires from Costco (they aren’t in stock, since what idiot would install traction tires in March?), and have them install them.

They call back half an hour after I’ve dropped the car off, because the new car has locking lug nuts. I’ve never heard of such a thing, didn’t know my car had them, and have absolutely no idea what a lug nut key is, much less where it would be.

So I go back to the tire center, google what said “key” is even supposed to look like, and try to find it, eventually just give up and say “let’s reschedule”.

In their defense, the tire techs keep a straight face, and don’t laugh in my face for never even having realized that my car has such things.

As I drive away, I light goes on. I have a manual. It tells me exactly where said lug nut key is (It’s under the carpet in the frunk, in case anybody wonders).

I drive back, feeling really stupid. But at least the car is ready for skiing now.

Moral of the day: RTFM.

Pet peeve of the day: all the people talking about how ChatGPT is not “conscious” and how it does not “understand” what it is saying, but just putting likely-sounding words together into likely-sounding sentences.

Extra bonus points for using an example of a math problem as a way to show how these AI chat-bots talk about things they don’t really understand.

The irony. The lack of self-awareness. It burns.

It’s Sunday, which means no more cat pictures, and instead just the usual -rc release.

Prize for odd bug this week goes to an otherwise harmless off-by-one buglet that then in turn confused clang sufficiently to generate bogus code that our ‘objtool’ checks then (correctly) complained about it.

This is the kind of exciting lives that us kernel developers lead.

Replying to all the random individuals that seem to think that I’m “endorsing” one of the Fediverse products over any other, and seem to be making a big deal over #akkoma vs #mastodon etc.

That’s not the case. I’m actually a horrible MIS person, and I would never want to maintain my own server. I’m a programmer for chrissake!

The same way you should fear me if I hold a soldering iron, you should be very very nervous if I were to do any server management.

So all credit (or blame) for the choice of Fediverse platform goes to @monsieuricon, who maintains kernel.org and just made it really easy for me to try this out.

… and on a similar note: not only am I not much of a MIS person, I’m also not much of a social networking person.

I foresee a lot of disappointment in the future of any followers of this account 🔮.

Random first trial post: today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement.

Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them.