Posts by ModicumSuch

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

> A compose key should combine a letter with any valid combination of accents simply by typing them out.

Perhaps you should try it before telling me what it doesn’t do, since this is exactly the function I described.

> For advanced keyboard customization, Karabiner-Elements is very capable, but despite considerable experimentation we've yet to induce it to provide the classic Compose key functionality. If anyone has, do let us know in the comments.

That may be because it’s already baked into MacOS through the ABC Extended keyboard. https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/mac-help/mh27474/mac (the section titled “Use key combinations”)

Option+e = accent grave

Option+~ = accent aigu

Option+u = umlaut

Option+c = cedilla

Etc.

Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up

"It's perfectly grammatical"

You're one of the only people who believes that.

NetBSD 10 proves old tech can still kick apps and take names three decades later

"Why choose NetBSD instead of FreeBSD?"

Because NetBSD is less addicting, I’d imagine.

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Re: Tab = four  

> It has been a while since I used it, but doesn't even MS Word have proper tabstops you can set anywhere?

As I recall, you can click and drag anywhere on the ruler to set stops. It’s a charming holdover from typewriters, until you start getting complaints from users who don’t know why their indents aren’t uniform across paragraphs.

Re: Tab = four  

> Given the equivalence has existed since the first typewriter

Not at all. Mechanical typewriter tabs were always arbitrary (but usually divisible by 5). On the earliest ones, these were physical tab stops you inserted. Later manuals let you set and clear tabs with dedicated keys. Tab, after all, is short for tabulator, and tabs were first and foremost intended to produce consistent columns for tables. It just happens that tabs are convenient for setting indentation.

In fact, classic typewriting manuals advised beginning lines with 5 spaces, not 4.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: I have done the air-con shuffle in the past!

> the only sociopath who has suggested that 0.0207070129276 inches would be a useful measurement is yourself.

Also known as 0.526mm.

Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former coworker

Was Room 101 overbooked?

Woods was held in county jail for 428 days in total, and after a California judge deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial and Woods pleaded "no contest" to the two felony charges against him, he was sent to a mental hospital for a total of 147 days and medicated with psychotropic drugs. From then on, the judge also ordered Woods to only use his "true name," Matthew Keirans, going forward.

“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved being named Matthew Keirans.”

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

It reminds me of the old joke where a husband goes into town to sell livestock and telegrams back to his wife to say that he made it there safely, sold the livestock, is returning, and loves her. Over successive revisions, he reasons out the need to include any of those things (he pays by word, naturally), since they’re all either self-evident or implied by sending the telegram.

In the end, he just telegraphs back “Martha, Robert.”*

*whichever names are used for the couple in the joke.