Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

I just discovered that the instructions that turn up for opening a Mac Mini G4 are unnecessarily brutal and prone to gouging or cracking plastic. Instead of prying anything, here's the technique I intuited and used:

1. Use one hand to apply pressure between the back I/O shield and the outer frame (like tensioning the cylinder, if you watch lockpicking videos)

2. With a THIN metal spudger/pry tool, work your way around the edge starting at the back, pressing each clip just enough to release it.

How many people who were online in the 90s remember the LiveUpdate Crescendo MIDI player plugin? In case anyone wants it, I finally got around to sharing what I have, including the Windows Netscape variant of version 5 from one of my CD-Rs which seems to be missing from the Wayback Machine. → https://archive.org/details/liveupdate_crescendo

#retro #web #midi #90s

Does anyone know anything that can be done about the Internet Archive being sued by the RIAA beyond this petition? →https://chng.it/K4wzhBHyLF

I don't exactly have money and I doubt the RIAA will notice or care if I start a boycott like the one that had me become a cultural hermit for the entirety of my 20s by neither paying for nor pirating films over the MPAA's "lost sales" nonsense and attempts to 1984 the Internet.

Huh. So the fr-ca (eg. Quebecois) listing for support files for this >10-year-old hand-me-down HP Pavilion is still up and in search results, despite the HP site refusing to let me into an English listing because it's "too far out of support".

...the newest UEFI they offer still doesn't fix the refusal to POST with GeForce cards new enough to be UEFI GOP-native (i.e. 7xx-series and above), but at least now I know .

For anyone who upgraded their non-GNOME *buntu and discovered that one of their scripts suddenly has a very out-of-place libadwaita-style Zenity dialog popping up, `yad` is in the package repository and only differs by the --info/--question/--warning/--error arguments according to their compatibility wrapper at https://github.com/v1cont/yad/blob/master/data/misc/zenity.sh #linux #scripting

@brauner @Conan_Kudo No, actually. hfsfuse explicitly says they don't support the non-plus variant (common for mac-only or hybrid CDs) and I can vouch for the hfsutils package they point to being buggy and under-documented and, because it predates FUSE, it's built around an annoying CLI FTP client-esque uncanny valley reinvention of your usual suite of shell commands.

@Dustwin The problem is that, while incompetence is better than malice, it's still unnecessary and frustrating to be running into an equivalent of Microsoft's constant attempts to reset the default browser to Edge, multiple times over. Contrast that with Flatpak, where I update without a second thought because I trust the downgrade functionality to be present, reliable, and easy the next time a crash bug slips into a release build of Inkscape.

@Dustwin For example, why did upgrading 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS uninstall Audacious Media Player on the machine where I'd forgotten to switch from the APT release to the Flatpak release? Why did it remove `mpv`, install Haruna, and push SMPlayer to the bottom of the file associations priority list? Why did it uninstall XSane and install Skanlite, just for me to reverse that decision after the upgrade was done. etc. etc. etc. I dunno... but it doesn't engender good feelings.

@Dustwin Not "can't trust" in the sense of "they'll attack me". "Can't trust" in the sense that "I have to budget time and effort around the assumption that a major version bump will reset an uncertain number of my user preferences to their defaults when all I wanted was to keep receiving security updates". As a UI/UX guy, I firmly believe that's either bad policy or a failure of QA.

Just updated my mother's PCs from Kubuntu 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS and then had to manually remove the unwanted apps they added and install Flatpak replacements for half of the not-yet-Flatpak'd apps they removed as part of the update process, then laboriously go through, re-setting all the file associations. This sort of nonsense is why I run LTS distros and put off major upgrades as long as possible. I just can't trust distro maintainers as much as I'd like. #kubuntu #ubuntu #linux

PSA: If you're using Windows Backup with a network share to backup your Windows 98 SE retro PC, it'll stop at 4GiB and insist you swap disks and won't be appeased by moving the .qic file from the far end. Probably best to partition your drive into volumes of 4GiB or less for simplicity, FAT32 or not. (And leave compression on to ensure there's enough room in the file for the backup metadata.)
#retro #retrocomputing #win95 #windows95 #win98 #windows98 #windows

In case any fellow Canadians wish to express their displeasure with Elongated Muskrat: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-5353

Tip: If your 3000-series nVidia GPU's fan has started to develop a rattling/ticking noise and you either can't afford a replacement fan or can't wait, try going into nvidia-settings, taking manual control of the fan speed, and ramping it up in 5% increments until you find a speed where it goes away and stays away. Then, leave it for a few hours before turning auto-speed back on. (I left it overnight.)

That shook the fan on my RTX 3060 back into idling quietly at 30% speed.

PSA: Because of how Python's enum.Enum implements nominal typing and how Python imports work, it risks seemingly mundane refactorings causing var == FooEnum.Bar comparisons to start to mysteriously fail when PyQt and Qt Designer's "Promote..." feature are involved. If you don't need such strict nominal typing, using enum.IntEnum to relax the equality comparison will avoid that source of footguns.

#python #programming #pyqt #qt

@kmeisthax @foone ...or Glob-top Chip-on-Board if you want to go by what Wikipedia calls them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_on_board

I just noticed Inkscape's new context menus and I'm frustrated. How is it that GNOME devs continuously find new ways to make non-GNOME GTK applications with no viable replacements increasingly alien on non-GNOME desktops?

Put a pin in this for future sharing → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO46CNftRDs

"Actually, it's not asteroid bacteria... we discovered that bacteria managed to evolve to eat the cleaning products we use to sterilize clean rooms" is one of the most intuitive examples I've seen for why people shouldn't leap to assuming fantastic answers like UFOs or cryptids.

Tip: If you're using WinSCP's synchronize command in a script but you don't edit your script very often and your new exclusion pattern seems to be getting ignored, check if you're trying to name a directory without including the trailing slash.
#windows #winscp #scripting