The Computer And General Tech Thread - Software, Hardware, Questions, etc.

[Raphael]

Still doesn't work for me, sorry.

[Raphael]

Still doesn't work for me, sorry.

Oddly enough, however, bradrn's trick does work for my original unabridged file, at least when it comes to exporting it to pdf. Thank you!

[bradrn]

You’re welcome!

[Raphael]

I started following tech security news a bit earlier this year, and I'm still sometimes weirded out by what kind of surreal combinations of words and syllables can make for perfectly valid news report headlines in that field.

[bradrn]

I started following tech security news a bit earlier this year, and I'm still sometimes weirded out by what kind of surreal combinations of words and syllables can make for perfectly valid news report headlines in that field.

What do you mean?

[Raphael]

What do you mean?

Mainly names of various malwares, and of the groups that use them. To use one example from the BleepingComputer section of my feed reader:

Charming Kitten hackers use new ‘NokNok’ malware for macOS

Or another one:

RomCom hackers target NATO Summit attendees in phishing attacks

[bradrn]

What do you mean?

Mainly names of various malwares, and of the groups that use them. To use one example from the BleepingComputer section of my feed reader:

Charming Kitten hackers use new ‘NokNok’ malware for macOS

Or another one:

RomCom hackers target NATO Summit attendees in phishing attacks

Ah, I haven’t seen many of those.

[xxx]

it deserves a good conlanger to get involved...
after all, a word is just a line of code for the brain...
we could imagine one capable of hacking it...

[elgis]

I have a few dozen glosses and fragments of my language's grammar in the form of production rules. I want to check if the sentences are consistent with my language's grammar.

Is there an existing tool that can parse glosses for grammar checking?

[Raphael]

Another gem from Mastodon that I felt I just had to share in this thread:

https://mas.to/@carnage4life/110850691497063871

[Raphael]

And now I saw a Mastodon post by someone from the USA who claims to pay $315 a month for cable TV. Err, what???! Is that considered normal there?

[Travis B.]

And now I saw a Mastodon post by someone from the USA who claims to pay $315 a month for cable TV. Err, what???! Is that considered normal there?

WTF that is crazy expensive just for TV!

[Raphael]

WTF that is crazy expensive just for TV!

That was my reaction to seeing that, too - but I thought "Perhaps that's normal over there". Seeing you react in the same way deepens the mystery.

[Travis B.]

WTF that is crazy expensive just for TV!

That was my reaction to seeing that, too - but I thought "Perhaps that's normal over there". Seeing you react in the same way deepens the mystery.

The only way that makes sense if the person ordered a pile of extra channels and had bundled Internet and mobile, most likely with a ridiculous amount of data.

[Raphael]

I don't remember the exact date, but I first got the computer on which I'm writing this post at some time during the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2013. Of course back then, the idea of using the same computer for ten years would have sounded pretty weird to many people, myself included. I did upgrade the RAM and the hard drive a few years ago, but everything else is still the same as it was at the start. So perhaps I can hope against hope against hope that things will work out for another ten years.

Anyway, this gets me wondering just how much of a troglodyte I am, technologically speaking. It's not just that my desktop pc is ten years old. It's also that I have a desktop pc in the first place. My other gadgets are fairly conventional, too. Aside from the desktop pc and those old phones that I don't use any more, I own a smartphone, an ebook reader, an old and small notebook that I got as a gift a while ago but never used much because I never had much of a reason to, and, together with my flatmate, a pair of landline phones. The there's a modem/router combo that I don't own but rent. The gadgets that I don't own but for which I do family tech support are all either laptops or cellphones.

I don't own any "smart" household items, and while that's partly for financial reasons, I don't think I would buy them even if I could afford them. IMO they're both pointless and risky.

And that's before we even get to what I do with my tech. I don't have the impression that any of the apps installed on my pc or my phone are in any way trendy. Most of them are pretty boring and old-fashioned. There's only one social networking app on my phone right now, and that's a third party Mastodon app.

I generally prefer to do things offline wherever possible. I really don't like web apps, and will avoid them whenever I can as well do the same thing in an offline app. None of my devices are set to synch anything to the cloud (unless I forgot to change any settings on my phone). I do keep cloud backups of important files, but I back them up by manually logging in to the cloud providers' websites and then manually uploading files.

I do sometimes watch stuff on Youtube or Netflix, but I generally try to avoid streaming. Given the choice between streaming something, and downloading a file to my pc or phone and then opening it there, I will generally do the latter. I've never used Spotify or something like that. When I listen to music, I either listen to mp3s, or go to Youtube.

Oh, and did I mention that I have several shelves filled with paper books, and two shelves filled with DVDs?

So, just how geriatric am I? How much do I have a weird preference for doing everything the difficult way?

[bradrn]

So, just how geriatric am I? How much do I have a weird preference for doing everything the difficult way?

I presume I’m much younger than you, and I have very similar preferences: dislike of smart devices, preference for local and offline work, only the most necessary apps on my phone, and so on. I’m quite unusual in this, though — most people I know are the opposite.

[Raphael]

Why did I spend the last two years without hearing of this? It's fucking brilliant, though in a sad way:

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com

[Travis B.]

Why did I spend the last two years without hearing of this? It's fucking brilliant, though in a sad way:

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com

We can thank the EU for the damn cookie warnings...

[Raphael]

I don't remember the exact date, but I first got the computer on which I'm writing this post at some time during the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2013. Of course back then, the idea of using the same computer for ten years would have sounded pretty weird to many people, myself included. I did upgrade the RAM and the hard drive a few years ago, but everything else is still the same as it was at the start. So perhaps I can hope against hope against hope that things will work out for another ten years.

Looks like I might have jinxed it. Last night, there was a brief panic when I thought my computer might have died. Thankfully, turning it off, disconnecting it from everything, opening it, using a lot of breadth to blow away a lot of dust, taking out the RAMs, blowing at them, putting them in again, closing the whole thing again, connecting it to everything again, and making sure all the connectors were tightly connected, did the trick. Basically an unusually extreme and far-reaching version of turning it off and turning it on again.

[Man in Space]

I upgraded to the latest MacOS…and somehow I more than doubled my free disk space? I had less than 20 GB free, and now I have 42?! Wha?