Notices by Linus Torvalds (torvalds@social.kernel.org)

Some of you know today as π-day.

But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

Staycation: day seven.

We had power back twice yesterday for a couple of hours each time. The weather and PGE were just teasing us, and I will not consider that a real break in the cold darkness and despair that is being without electricity.

But I still have battery power, and while it froze some more overnight and outside is now very slippery, it’s once more above freezing. So frozen pipes remain a thing of the past.

End result: I have a handful of pull requests left (most of which came in in the last few hours), and no reason to believe that I won’t close the merge window normally on Sunday.

.. and ten minutes after posting that, power and internet are back up.

RE: https://social.kernel.org/objects/ff709e97-12f1-49d3-9d3c-c57e914f3e52

Staycation: day six.

To nobody’s surprise, power didn’t come back yesterday, but neighbors report that the tree across the power lines has been cut up. So hopefully the electrical crew can come in and fix the power line.

Of course, there may be other issues lurking. We lost power at 5am Saturday morning, and apparently the tree fell a few hours after that. So now there are conflicting theories about where our power is actually fed from.

Presumably somebody at PGE knows, but they aren’t telling.

Once again - there is a pattern emerging - PGE reports that our otage will surely be fixed by 10pm today. And there are now sufficiently few outstanding outages reported that our little area with only 174 customers affected might actually merit some attention.

In the meantime, while temperatures might dip just below freezing again, it won’t be bad enough to freeze any pipes again, so while the kitchen is at a balmy 8°C, I don’t feel worried about the house freezing.

So I’ll continue the merge window on battery power.

Staycation: day five.

Power still off, but outside is warming up. So now it’s a big ice rink outside with people playing bumper cars with the real things.

Not interested in partaking in that particular contact sport, and as a result I’m still not leaving the house even if the worry about frozen pipes is fading.

Instead trying to see how far I can get on the remaining merge window pulls on just battery power. Not very far I bet, but at least something.

PGE claims power back tonight. Of course, they did that yesterday too…

@powellnathanj lovely. They fixed it at some point since I originally subscribed. Except today I couldn’t actually even get to my account since I couldn’t prove to them I was human.

Maybe they’ve fixed whatever went wrong by now, maybe it was just the smoke in the newsroom, but it’s all moot by now. The phone worked fine.

@brianstorms Shh! Keep this private between just the two of us, but I actually have and use an ad-blocker. But I see those ads on my tablet, and I find them unreasonably annoying.

Don’t charge me, and then also show page-wide stupid and annoying ads. The news I can get elsewhere with less annoyance, and I’ll probably miss wordle and the new math game in beta the most.

@juancnuno it’s not hard to cancel. It’s just really annoying. I at one time tried to use a pre-paid credit card just because I despised that practice so much, but that didn’t work.

If you rely on that kind of behavior to keep your customers, what does that really say about you?

The fact that they have some technical problems right now, and you can’t actually read the articles without going into soem endless captcha hell - who does that idiocy any more anyway - was just the last drop for me.

I didn’t mind subscribing per se.

Bye bye, nytimes.

When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”.

But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

@morgthorak I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

@kainoa real

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again.

Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking.

I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.

@Reiddragon @imikotoba honestly, I was hoping for something nice and clean, not some eldritch horror from the last century that has just seen more maintenance than uemacs.

Less LISP and “GUI wrapper to make it look modern”, and more “actually configurable natively GUI editor”.

Dear lazy-web - question time.

I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent.

The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.

Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.

Anyway.

I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).

Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”.

And I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?

And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me.

And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.

I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.

@kernellogger side note: one of my old rants against case-insensitivity was on good old Google+. Now you can’t see it any more, because G+ went away.

But the gist of it then was (and still is) “Don’t do it. Please”.

@ariadne Volvo XC40 Recharge.

In my defense: not only is this the first car I’ve ever had with lug nut keys, it’s my first car with a frunk, and I was searching for the lug nut key in the trunk - where both the jack and the lug wrench were.

Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are…

We have a brand new family car (replacing one that was twenty years old - just to clarify that this is not something very common in our family). The wife is taking it up the mountain for some late spring skiing, so even though the season is pretty much over, it wants proper traction tires.

No problem. I’ve done this before, even if it’s been a few years. Order tires from Costco (they aren’t in stock, since what idiot would install traction tires in March?), and have them install them.

They call back half an hour after I’ve dropped the car off, because the new car has locking lug nuts. I’ve never heard of such a thing, didn’t know my car had them, and have absolutely no idea what a lug nut key is, much less where it would be.

So I go back to the tire center, google what said “key” is even supposed to look like, and try to find it, eventually just give up and say “let’s reschedule”.

In their defense, the tire techs keep a straight face, and don’t laugh in my face for never even having realized that my car has such things.

As I drive away, I light goes on. I have a manual. It tells me exactly where said lug nut key is (It’s under the carpet in the frunk, in case anybody wonders).

I drive back, feeling really stupid. But at least the car is ready for skiing now.

Moral of the day: RTFM.

@larsmb I may be biased by where I am, but it does seem like the problem has never primarily been the resources or public policy or access, but individuals who “did their own research”.

I think it was harder finding ivermectin than vaccines at times.

So I’d worry more about plain old stupidity than the #WHO guidelines.

@larsmb To be fair, isn’t that the job of something like #WHO?

A health organization really shouldn’t look at an individual, but at a societal, level. You as an individual then have to make your own choices, but from a policy standpoint there has to be some kind of cost effectiveness bias and taking averages into account.

No policy can ever be perfect, and striving for perfection is pointless and actively detrimental. So you should always look for “this is the best we can reasonably do in the big picture”, and ask yourself whether that shouldn’t take cost and effort into account?