Over on the Fediverse, I shared a somewhat unwelcome discovery Imade after upgrading to Fedora 42 :

This is my face when I have quite a few binaries in /usr/sbin on myoffice Fedora desktop that aren't owned by any package. Presumablythey were once owned by packages, but the packages got removed withoutthe files being removed with them, which isn't supposed to happen.

(My office Fedora install has been around for almost 20 years nowwithout being reinstalled, so things have

Python virtual environments are mostly great for actually deploying software. Provided thatyou're using the same version of Python (3) everywhere (includingCPU architecture), you can make a single directory tree (a venv)and then copy and move it around freely as a self-containedartifact . It's also relatively easy to usevenvs to switch the version of packages or programs you're using , for example Django. However, venvs havetheir frictions, at least for me, and often I prefer

Once upon a time, people seem to have had a little thing for mentioningGooglebot in their HTTP User-Agent header, much like browsers threw inclaims to make them look like Firefox or whatever (the ultimate sourceof the now-ritual 'Mozilla/5.0' at the start of almost every browser'sUser-Agent). People might put in 'allow like Googlebot' or just say'Googlebot' in their User-Agent. Some people are still doing thistoday, for example:

Over on the Fediverse, I mentioned a grump I have about containers :

As a sysadmin, containers irritate me because they amount toabandoning the idea of well done, well organized, well understood,etc installation of software. Can't make your software install ina sensible way that people can control and limit? Throw it into acontainer, who cares what it sprays where across the filesystemand how much it wants to be the exclusive owner and controller ofeverything in sight.

(This is a somewhat irrational grump

One of my peculiar hobbies is that I read every commit message forthe Go (development) repository. Often this is boring, but sometimes I discover things I find amusing :

This is my amused face when Go is adding explicit, non-GC freeing ofmemory from within the runtime and compiler-generated code under somecircumstances. It's perfectly sensible, but still.

It turns out that right now, the only thing that's been added is a'GOEXPERIMENT=runtimefree' Go experiment, which you

For various reasons, I'm working to switch from wget to curl , and generally this has been going okay.However, I've now run into one situation where I don't know how tomake curl do what I want. It is, of course, a project that doesn'tbother to do easily-fetched downloads ,but in a very specific way. In fact it's Django (again).

The Django URLs for downloads look like this:

https://www.

Recently on the Fediverse, Dave Fischer mentioned a neat hack :

In the decades-long process of getting my fvwm config JUST RIGHT, myxterm right-click menu now has a "duplicate" command, which opensa new xterm with the same geometry, on the same node, IN THE SAMEDIRECTORY. (Directory info aquired via /proc.)

[...]

(See also a followup note .)

This led to @grawity sharing an xterm-native approach to this ,using xterm's

I have a GPS bike computer primarily for following pre-plannedroutes , because it became a bettersupported option than our old paper cuesheets. One of the benefits of switching to from paper cue sheetsto a GPS unit was better supported route following, but after Imade the switch, I found that it was also less distracting thanusing paper cue sheets. On the surface this might sound paradoxical,since people often say that computer screens are more distracting.It's true that a GPS bike computer has a

I have an unusual X desktop environment that hasevolved over a long period, and as part of that I have an equallyunusual and slowly evolved set of ways to handle URLs. By 'handleURLs', what I mean is going from an URL somewhere (email, text ina terminal, etc) to having the URL open in one of my several browserenvironments. Tied into this is handling non-URL things that I alsowant to open in a browser, for example searching for various sortsof things