Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 58

Time for the quarterly hard drive cleanup.

"Cleanup"

I mostly just move everything in the Stuff and Downloads folder to my external drive without any attempt at organising it.

One of these days, I will teach a Bayesian classifier what to keep and where to put it...

@rpcutts In many respects, the only thing that's different about Trump is that he actually tells people what he intends to do...

@rpcutts To be honest, though... Even the seemingly smart politicians do a lot of things that have unintended consequences. These consequences are often very obvious, and you find yourself wondering what the hell they were thinking. Oh, and of course you only find out what the politician in question did a couple of years after he leaves office, leaving his successor to take the blame...

@Tarale @rick_777 @Posty Where are the bits of rubbish and the heaps of dirty clothes?

Man, the sun is low in South Norway right now. 12.29º above the horizon, according to a calculator I found. According to the same calculator, 19.09º is the highest it will go today. Compare that to July 15, when 51.30º was the highest point.

For comparison, the figures for Paris are 62.33º on July 15 and 30.40º for today. They lose 1/2 of the sun's altitude by late October, we lose 2/3, so even Paris gets kind of dark in the winter, I guess.

My take on Postnord, in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish...

My take on Postnord...

Someone is probably going to object to this assessment and point out that "Actually, Obama introduced <large number> pieces of legislation only <small figure> months into his presidency, while Trump has only introduced <tiny number> in the last <large figure> months of his." and my response is: Yes, but is that how the public perceives them? Doesn't Obama just *seem* more hesitant than Trump? I mean, he even did it when talking, the constant little moments of hesitation.

You can say a lot about Trump, but he will leave a legacy. If anything, he will be remembered as remarkable. Remarkable in the sense that he is worthy of remark, no matter what you think of him. He will also be remembered as the US president who got things done and let everyone know that he did them. Whether they were good or bad things is open to debate, but you can't really claim that Trump is passive and hesitant. Obama? Yeah, he was afraid to act. Too worried about his legacy, probably.

They're portraying Trump's desire to pull out of that denuclearisation treaty with Russia as yet another one of Trump's moves, but in this case, they'd be wrong. Obama wanted to pull out of it too, but hesitated.

Haha, I'm picturing a pale, somewhat fat 35-year-old guy with unkempt hair dancing to Caramelldansen in front of his TV with extreme determination, with arm movements, locks, intricate legwork and so on. 😆

...but I still had to step in and help him deal with a couple of issues. When we first installed SMPlayer, we removed the other media players we weren't going to use. This inadvertently caused SMPlayer to stop working, because it depends on either MPlayer or MPV to function, but doesn't actually have any of them as a dependency in APT, so when we removed MPV, SMPlayer mysteriously stopped working.

I've been a Linux user since 1998 or so, but there's a reason that I mainly use it on servers. Recommending it to non-techies is a dangerous game. I won't risk my reputation on that, and I don't want to handle all the technical issues that would inevitably follow.

In the case of my roomie, he's not alien to editing a config file to tweak an indie game he's playing, and he knows how to use Computer Management in Windows, so he won't be completely helpless if he faces problems...

But from the user's perspective, all of this is just excuses, since it doesn't help him in any way.

Being a Linux tech, I of course know that the Synergy devs are probably reluctant to attempt stuff like that because of the fragmentation in the Linux desktop space. Gnome probably doesn't read its startup items from the same location as KDE or Xfce, so in order to even make that feature work, it has to be implemented 3 times (or more, because there are more desktop environments than just those three).

Synergy worked fine, but we had to manually put it in the Gnome startup items, since Synergy made no effort to do that for us. I know you can't blame Linux Mint for this neglected detail in Synergy, but that doesn't really matter to the user. If the user notices that the Linux versions of all his programs are kind of shoddy, that puts Linux itself in a bad light, since what he cares about is the Linux experience as a whole.

We tried adding a Google account to my roommate's new Mint install using Gnome, and when he tried to browse his Drive files, it just sat there forever trying to sync and we had to close the window. Also, we were unable to use copy and paste in the dialog box that logs you into Google Drive, so we had to fiddle around with the auto-type in KeepassXC to make it work, since he uses extremely long autogenerated passwords for everything.

Linux GUI stuff is still just barely hanging in there in terms of offering an experience that won't confuse the hell out of a Windows or macOS user. Yes, the basic stuff in Mint works out of the box without much hassle, but the moment you need something specific, it gets complicated real fast. Basically, it's fine for non-techies and command line ninjas, but kind of falls apart for the power users.

@bamfic I found GoSync but am immediately put off by the fact that it only syncs every 10 minutes instead of installing hooks to monitor the file system. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.