My review: Davey MacManus - Even The Trees Know Karate ►
◄ Iron Maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title reference: I think it's popped up in Dawn of War, Rogue Trader and myriad other Imperium Thought for the Day type sources although Lexicanum cites various edition 40K rulebooks.
Another bits and pieces entry that's mostly about other environments. I want to get some entries about RISC OS and Spectrum era hardware completed and edited but just haven't had time.
I found the setting to turn off battery optimisation for Firefox Android, but it seems that other people have reported still getting issues with the browser refreshing whilst trying to e.g. enter MFA prompts from another app. What FF should be doing, of course, is suspending pages to storage rather than just reloading URLs when refocused.
https://userland.tech/features apparently allows running Linux environments on Android and without root, as an app. I'm not sure what the use case is, but that's interesting to know.
Skimming down https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetKeebs/ I don't get why people fixate on really small keyboards and don't seem to need a row of function keys (or, for that matter, Home/End keys). The idea that there are people who don't reflexively hit those keys to jump position in documents, refresh pages, rename, go to full screen, etc, is a bit perplexing. TKL is as small as I can cope with. Smaller but full functionality. I suppose people who frequently treat a keyboard as a calculator feel the same way about TKL, if there are any of those people nowadays.
Amazon finally gets around to a colour e-ink device with the weirdly named Colorsoft (sounds like a 90s software company) not the first to market but it'll probably now become the de facto widest used. It's really chasing a niche of a niche, though. If you want to read comics on a mobile device you can get a nice large tablet for the same money and keep a smaller b&w e-ink device for text. For instance, HONOR do a 12 inch metal body tablet that Amazon currently lists for £150 that would probably suit most people as a small TV as well. Models that are 14" or larger aren't too uncommon either, although still usually at a big premium as the screen hardware isn't as common.
Word count bookmarklet:
javascript:(function(){var t;if (window.getSelection) t = window.getSelection();else if (document.selection) t = document.selection.createRange();if (t.text != undefined) t = t.text;if(!t || t == ""){ a = document.getElementsByTagName("textarea"); for(i=0; i<a.length; i++) { if(a[i].selectionStart != undefined && a[i].selectionStart != a[i].selectionEnd) { t = a[i].value.substring(a[i].selectionStart, a[i].selectionEnd); break; } }}if(!t || t == "")alert("please select some text");else alert("word count: " + t.toString().match(/(\S+)/g).length);})()
Quickly getting YouTube playlists into a folder in track order:
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 -o "%(playlist_index)s-%(title)s.%(ext)s" {URL}
Interestingly, https://massgrave.dev/ hosts on Microsoft infrastructure such as Github and Azure. Then again, MS sometimes depends on workarounds themselves: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-support-cracks-windows-for-customer-after-activation-fails/
VirtualBox 7 adds TPM emulation but I'm finding Windows 11 incredbly sluggish in a VM and from discussion online I'm not sure what settings that's down to or if it can be adjusted for at all when running on older hardware... I don't think there's any connection with the sort of issues described here about VMs running on Windows hosts. Considering that any Linux DE or e.g Windows 7 or 10 runs acceptably on this desktop machine it's hard to see what 11 is doing differently to e.g. open a menu.
Touch wood RetroBar looks like a usable option for anyone with physical impairments that require a taskbar to not be at the very bottom of a large screen. It's not perfect, and doesn't for example implement Quick Launch overflow menus at the moment and has more issues with W11 24H2, but provides tray icons as well as taskbar buttons. Of course, hopefully MS will back down and realise the optics that their current approach doesn't align with Display Screen Equipment regs or their own claimed support for disability, accessibility and diversity inclusivity and just bloody implement taskbar positioning before W10 reaches end of life.
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