Jim @sullybiker@sully.site

I got that drive from the Maplin store - long gone - in Southampton to install Windows XP on my main desktop. A different time and country.

It's really, really loud. Always has been.

I put together a parts bin PC for my youngest son because he wants to play Supertuxkart with his brother (and me). The drive in it is some Maxtor thing from I think 2004. It's still going, I'm honestly amazed. I'll run it until it dies or when Linux inevitably doesn't support IDE anymore (soon, iirc).

I should say it introduced a sleep target, it wasn't a dependency.

Had a weird experience of someone wanting an app on the server that actually had some GUI deps, one of which was a sleep target. Ever had a server mysteriously go down because it frigging went to sleep? That was a new one for me. DC tech mailed me and said "I think it's sleeping, want me to wake it up?" I didn't even know rack tin could do that.

The Apple ones tend to be the best, until that brittle insulation that Apple have insisted on using for years inevitable splits.

It's surprising to learn that quite a few USB-C cables are really quite terrible. The spec must be quite demanding because I've had loads of shit ones.

I've got my bikes for that, but they don't cut the grass.

Faced with needing to mow the lawn at the new house (an activity I oddly enjoy) I did some research and decided I didn't want a petrol mower, as the cordless options now have enough battery density to get the whole thing done. I got a Ryobi 40v 6AH mower from the store, and I fucking love it. It's about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, and easily has enough on a full charge for the front and back lawns.

I love the smell of petrol and cut grass as much as the next person but I do not miss having to fuck about with fuel and oils and carburetors after winter.

It was an easy enough fix; just cleaned up the formatting for the insert. It looks like the previous version of MariaDB was chomping the invalid characters for me.

SAR allows you to spit the report out in a 'db friendly format' but it still has the odd irregular line in it. I thought I'd caught most of them but apparently not.

Previously the same script broke because SAR inserts the string 'reboot' into a single line if the server is, er, rebooted, so when the script parses that line it just WTF'd out of there.

Always fun when a software update causes your code to break because your code was wrong in the first place.I have a little python script that feeds SAR reports into a MySQL instance and suddenly it was rejecting my datetime entries. It was obviously tolerant of the format before...

I do love the fedi community. Most of the time.

For example on my son's PC I could not get the Wifi up for love nor money. Just wasn't happening. Strong signal, but it kept dropping. Got my old Slackware 14.2 installer (I cannot tell you how many times I go back to Slackware, but..a lot) and although I was back in TTY land everything worked with no problem.

This is where the more 'basic' or 'do the work' distros seem to win, they don't have the layers until you add them.

Ubuntu is great when all the stars align and your hardware is in the middle of the bell curve, but generally it's never changed in that it just does too much bloody *stuff* with GDM and Gnome in the mix complicating things. As a result, occasionally things simply don't work and it's unusually hard using the usual methods to figure out why.

The entire experience is awful. Look what they make you do just to use your own computer. How did it get so bad?

How about just give me the driver and store my prefs in a file like normal people you complete dicks

ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME YOU UTTER COCKWOMBLES