Yeah. Right.

The busies always make it worse.

He’s bang on. LLMs have no understanding of anything: they are literally just statistical models.

Don’t have any experience with this particular model, but I have found that with most printers on Mint you don’t have to “do” anything at all - if it’s on the network or plugged into the USB, the system will find it and install a driver automatically. I’ve used MANY printers with Linux over the years, and some were a right PITA to set up, but so far all the printers I’ve tried with mint have “just worked”. The only problem I’ve had recently was that when I updated to the Debian Trixie based LMDE 7, a bug in CUPS misconfigures EPSON ET2860 when automatically discovered, but it still works on stock Mint 22.3 without manual intervention. The fix is to manually add it, rather than accepting the auto discovered one, so it’s a problem with the discovery function, not drivers, and I suspect it’s due to some kind of quirk with this printer’s firmware that defines how it interacts to discovery queries on the local LAN.

Yeah it was wild, but I suspect few orgs do things that way any more.

Salmon reversing aid.

You mean in the context of high availability?

tl;dr: It’s to test if the cluster fail-over configuration is working properly.

So this was before things like Kubernetes or Terraform were a thing, so had to be done by the operating system itself. The simplest HA cluster is made of two nodes, one in “active node”, the other “passive”. The active node does all the work, and the passive node just keeps its data synchronised with the active node. I used to use DRBD for this, which is a system for copying writes to the active node over a network link to the passive node. That only gives you a “second, up-to-date copy” which is not that useful on its own - you also need a way to automatically switch over to using the passive node if the active one “dies”, and for that I used to use “heartbeat”, which simply passes packets back and forth between the two cluster members - ping-pong style - and if the passive node notices that the active node hasn’t sent its scheduled packet for, say, 10 seconds, it cuts it off the current active node (kills it), and promotes itself to the active role, thus preserving the service. Killing the “other node” is necessary to stop data corruption or user requests going to a node that can’t actually service them, and is called STONITH - Shoot The Other Node In The Head. STONITH can involve an electronically controlled switch, which literally cuts off power to the “other” node, or can isolate it on the network, by shutting down its network ports on the switch, or in a VM setup, sending a notification to the hypervisor to kill the VM.

The reason you need to be able to kill the kernel on the active node, is that when you manually shut down the active node, it automatically informs the passive node that it’s going down, known as an “orderly fail-over”, and you’re not actually testing if the heartbeat fail-over works, you’re just testing an orderly fail-over. Killing the active node’s kernel tests that the passive node is properly configured to take over during a catastrophic failure of the active node. You can watch the heartbeat status go from “up” to “down”, and then see the passive node decide to take over, promote itself and bring up its services, and begin processing requests.

To make sure it’s all working, you need to test orderly fail-overs first, from both nodes, then test disorderly fail-overs both ways, by using the kernel gun on the active node.

Things moved on from Heartbeat-based HA clusters to multimode clusters managed by Corosync and other software, enabling other strategies to be employed. This was eventually supplanted by “orchestration” systems like Kubernetes, and proprietary Virtual Cloud systems that move this functionality to the platform rather than the operating system.

Nah man. “kill” doesn’t shut the system down quickly. This is the “instant death” way - the kernel reset gun - no shutdown scripts, no disk sync, just reset to BIOS boot sequence, instantly:

As root:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

If you change out the “b” in the second command for “o” it will just halt the kernel instead of rebooting. Still switched on, but the system is doing absolutely nothing.

I used to use this trick all the time to test high availability server clusters.

Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?

Yeah “but not as annoying” lol. No idea what you mean about jeeps: I’m in the UK, and not a car enthusiast either.

Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.

HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.

The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.

You’re quite right, Ozone is actually O₃, I got that wrong. I should have looked it up, but I didn’t, hence the error. I’m so sorry I mislead you - can you forgive me? Ozone is actually very interesting - did you know there is a layer of the upper atmosphere known as The Ozone Layer, and that it has a hole in it? Also, Ozone is sometimes produced by chemical reactions and electrical arcs - it has a distinctive, Ozoney smell. As you also made mistakes, I think we are now even - have you ever considered taking up a career as a Large Language Model?

What about Microsoft Bob? Doesn’t that count as their first attempt?

I usually do that too, but this time round I’ve really not had the spoons. Had the “Red Letter” yesterday - “we’re sending in the heavies”. I still CBA - send 'em. We don’t have a telly and we don’t watch any telly via the web - we HATE TV. I don’t even watch any U-tubers regularly. Been this way for >20 years.

This diagram is wrong on so many levels. Ozone is “charged Oxygen” (O1 rather than the usual O2) so it’s saying you get Ozone out of the Hydrogen side. The bubbles are forming in a place where they can’t get to the output vents, so the accumulating gases would slowly force the water level in the inner chamber down, and thus up through the vents. It’s pretty shit. Is it AI slop?

NPM is not a Linux thing - it’s to do with web applications, so it works on Windoze and Mac too.

That’s fair. I’m thankful for your perspective - food for thought. You’re right I’ve not seen that section of society from that angle, though I have a sibling who went through addiction. They were a “functional addict” and were working throughout, so I’m aware of that angle, at least. That was all decades ago now, though their partner had a relapse after an operation when they were given opiate painkillers. I think you’re being hard on yourself though - and I don’t know your circumstances, so I don’t know how you got into that mess, but although it’s easy for outsiders to frame addiction as a personal failure, I think the circumstances that led to that path are often ignored. I see such problems as a systemic failure, rather than a personal one. I’m glad you got clean of the class A’s, it’s no small achievement, and I hope you’re making progress with the rest - though I understand that Nicotine is perhaps the hardest of all to kick. I do think you have a bit of survivor bias there, though. One thing I’ve learnt recently, is that not everyone has the same abilities to get through - I know you’ve seen chancers, and you managed to get through, but I don’t think it’s true that everybody could have taken your path.

For myself, I’m getting help from the CAB, so we’ll see where that goes. I start 1-to-1 support next week with the local “Autism Hub” which is an entirely new thing to me - I’ve never “been in the system” before, so it’s an “interesting” learning curve. I have ups and downs - the past few days I have been far better, but I keep relapsing due to factors outside of my control - mainly caused by said system. I just need the time and space to recover properly, but I don’t know if I’m going to get it. Purely “mental health” things are something this system seems hell bent on denying, so I’m expecting a continuing struggle. I have no choice but to push on.

I can assure you it’s far from easy to get PIP, as I’m going through the process at the moment. It’s degrading and stressful (which is the thing I’ve been told to avoid) and seems entirely arbitrary. The application process is opaque and assessment is not performed by medical professionals. If someone IS getting PIP, they have jumped through MASSIVE hoops to do so. If you think they’re “cheating” then I challenge you to try to get it yourself. You really seem to have no idea.

I hate your reductive “if they’d just” rhetoric, whether directed at drug use or other “simple to solve” difficulties that are, in practice, far from simple to solve. You see an outward symptom as the root cause, and you also fallaciously assume that even if that IS the root cause, that it’s easy to solve. And before you assume that I’m one of those people “doing drugs all the time”, I’m not.

I started working in 1985, and I’ve worked right up to July last year, when I got ill. Prior to that, I seldom had time off sick - I had less than two weeks off in the past decade.

I guess I’m the heretic here - I’m currently using Cinnamon DE, after recently switching from MATE, which I’ve used almost exclusively for about 13 years. I always preferred Gnome (even v1) to KDE, but used both in the early 2000’s, but eventually settled on Gnome2 by about 2005, because it was what Ubuntu used, and that was the distro I was using back then. Later, when all the main Linux distros switched to Gnome3, about 2013, it wrecked my workflow - it simply wasn’t possible to do the things I needed to do - though I tried for a couple of months. Mainly things like lack of usable support for multiple monitors, full-screen-first app behaviour, rearranged key-bindings, etc. just made it impossible to work efficiently. I tried most of the commonly supported DEs - LXDE, XFCE, LXQT, plain X-Window(!) and even an early version of Cinnamon, but eventually settled on MATE when it became supported by Debian. I felt at home with it, and stuck with it for the longest of any of them - mainly because it fits my workflow, even through its evolution through different work roles and personal projects. I wasn’t really looking for a new DE, but last year, I refurbished a load of old laptops to give away on Freecycle/Freegle, initially putting Debian + MATE on the early ones. I saw a discussion about Linux Mint, and how it had matured into a really beginner-friendly system, and decided to try it out. I’m by no means scared of doing the technical work to get things running (I was doing tarball installs back in the mid 1990s) but I do appreciate convenience, and Mint was amazingly smooth.

I’d installed Ubuntu for my kids and friends over the years, and still hated the way Gnome3 works, even though it has evolved and some of my original gripes were now alleviated, so as Mint is based on Ubuntu, I was not expecting much. I was totally shocked - it was basically easier than Windoze 10 (which I was adminning for my day job) - printers and scanners, something that have long been annoying to support - worked instantly, and the Cinnamon DE was a revelation - smooth and friendly, and works well with how I like to use a DE. It runs well on old hardware - though 4GB seems to be the hard, workable minimum, and people seem to really like it.

That’s fucking disgusting.