I think the original poster specifically wanted a laser printer (I'm
with him on that, and with Greg: inkjets are the perfect
"razor-and-blades model" device, with a rock-bottom initial cost and
expensive consumables, and the printed documents are very
water-sensitive), and specifically a PostS
Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:
If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript
laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After
29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet
5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox
laser, and I'm
On 6/7/25 1:58 PM, Bret Busby wrote:
"Engineers once believed flying at the speed of sound would be
impossible"
I've been following this thread intermittently during my vacation. And
almost immediately, this quote from Arthur C. Clarke came to mind:
If an elderly but distinguished scientist
Thomas Dineen wrote:
This whole thread is INSANE!!!
Old computers of this generation are so slow that they would be
USELESS!
On 5/8/25 11:16 AM, Charles Curley wrote:
Well, yes. But the original question was whether one could install
Debian on it, not whether it would be useful to do so.
On 5/8/25 7:05 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
While that's obviously good, that doesn't necessarily justify buying
a new machine from an ecological perspective: AFAIK the embedded energy
in a laptop (i.e. the energy that was necessary to produce the laptop)
is typically higher than all the electricity
On 4/17/25 5:37 AM, Roger Price wrote:
I have been told by the elderly president of a club I belong to that when I
write on the club's mailing list, it must be in blue.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you are being hazed?
--
JHHL
On 4/17/25 9:52 AM, Roger Price wrote:
The mailing list is run by framalistes.org . They accept
almost anything and forcibly HTMLize it. Roger
That's ass-backwards. Then again, looking at their site, so is
everything else they do, including their TOU.
I wonder if that's a symptom of excess
On 4/17/25 9:42 AM, Roger Price wrote:
On Thu, 17 Apr 2025, James H. H. Lampert wrote:
Have you ever considered the possibility that you are being hazed?
I wondered, but his manner and the way he spoke about his visual difficulty
suggested that he wanted me to be the first to write in blue
On 4/7/25 9:23 AM, Serkan Kurt wrote:
. . .
Can the USB3 port be used with the USB2 protocol in terms of software?
I've never heard of USB breaking compatibility with prior versions.
--
JHHL
. . . And it looks like all the dire predictions of Firefox breaking if
not updated right away, before the root cert expires, have been greatly
exaggerated.
--
JHHL
On 3/13/25 12:15 PM, David Wright wrote:
OTOH most people will have come across endoscopes, usually in the
context of colonoscopies and suchlike, hence your "scary".
Why would anybody find a colonoscopy scary?
Just geek out and enjoy the guided tour!
--
JHHL
I *could* share my strategies for coming up with passwords. But then I'd
be legally obligated to irrecoverably crash the list server, kill every
member of the List, and kill everybody who might have seen my message in
the List archives, or might have talked to anybody who'd read it, and
irrecov
I make regular use of an OS that is completely passwordless.
It's called PC-DOS 2000.
(I might also add that I wish that my Meerkat desktop Linux box didn't
make it so easy to sign off by mistake when I'd intended to power down.)
--
James H. H. Lampert
x27;t even aware that DEC had ever used magnetic
core memory. That one is only powered up for demonstrations twice a month.
--
James H. H. Lampert
On 9/10/24 7:42 AM, Larry Martell wrote:
One would be better to see an ophthalmologist as opposed to an
optician.
Correct. An optician can only fill a prescription written by an
ophthalmologist or an optometrist. And depending on where you go for eye
care, and your own particular needs, you m
On 6/18/24 10:01 AM, John Hasler wrote:
JHHL writes:
Some of us still prefer physical media
Do you mean read-only media? All media are physical.
No, I mean physical media as opposed to downloads.
Application software, I've resigned myself to downloads, although as I
said, I am not happy w
On 6/17/24 7:44 PM, Thomas Dineen wrote:
No! Some of us want to keep using DVD and not be pushed away
What he said.
Might I humbly suggest that this whole thread title is provocative,
alarming, and maybe even a little inflamatory?
Some of us still prefer physical media, whether in the form
I will say that one should probably not expect perfection from an email
reader that's named after a cheap wine.
In my experience, T-Bird is the worst email reader I've ever used . . .
except for *every other* email reader (without a single exception) I've
tried. I'm particularly irritated with
On 5/15/24 6:46 AM, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
. . .
No its not, its your refusal to use the down arrow in your reply editor
to put your reply after the question. It really is that simple. If your
choice of email agents cannot do that, its time to switch to an agent
that can. There are dozens of the
On 5/14/24 10:41 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
We have a clash of two cultures here.
More than just *nix vs. M$.
In business communications by email, the norm is to quote the *entire*
thread, every time, without paring anything down, purely for the sake of
CYA. As such, top-posting is the only re
I will note that open source software has, by definition, a lot more
eyes looking at the source. Which is probably why (as Tomas said)
"proprietary software tends to fare significantly worse."
--
JHHL
On 4/5/24 12:12 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
. . .
Most of the time the platform is dictated by the application(s) a
user wants to run. . . .
Indeed. Which is why I still have DOS boxes (running IBM PC-DOS 2000,
with DOSShell, and no WinDoze whatsoever: Xerox Ventura Publisher
(DOS/GEM Edition)
On 4/5/24 11:35 AM, John Hasler wrote:
Desktop Linux is widely used in physics and mathematics. NASA uses
Linux extensively, including on Mars and on the ISS. SpaceX uses Linux
on their rockets and spacecraft. Over 90% of the top 1 million Web
servers run Linux, including Yahoo, X, and Ebay.
On 2/4/24 9:56 AM, Michael Kjörling wrote:
If you contact them and ask, they can probably tell you whether the
key caps . . . can be flipped physically.
Unicomp can and will make custom keycaps.
--
JHHL
I also wouldn't mind one bit if somebody came up with a computer
keyboard that exactly duplicates the key arrangement and feel of a
Linotype keyboard.
Not for practical daily use, mind you (I'll stick with my Unicomps);
rather, as a practice instrument for those who occasionally run Linotype
On 2/2/24 5:25 PM, Lee wrote:
I figure there's a high percentage of keyboard jockeys here so ..
which keyboard do you like and why?
Unicomp. They acquired the rights and the tooling for the IBM buckling
spring technology.
If only they also offered mice that were as rugged as their keyboards.
I, too, have always used APC.
I've heard people swear by APC, and I've heard people swear *at* APC.
I've had reason to do both, myself (and I won't elaborate on either).
--
James H. H. Lampert
On 12/20/23 1:06 PM, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
I finally switched tactics last year and tried gaming mice. I thought
about the way they're used. It's comparable to how much I click for
emails and research related to ongoing Life.. shtuff.
The main reason why I avoid gaming mice is because they te
is not terribly difficult.
But I can definitely confirm that Logitech is NOT making mice like they
used to.
If only Unicomp made a mouse as good as their keyboards . . . .
--
James H. H. Lampert
On 11/27/23 1:59 PM, Maureen L Thomas wrote:
I would like some advice. I have been offered a dedicated IP through
NORD. Is it worth it or is it not needed? Pros and cons would be very
helpful. Thank you.
Assuming you mean a static IP address:
Useful if you need to self-host something (ass
On 10/18/23 5:09 AM, Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
. . .
I'd be interested in hearing any comments from users of Acer products.
I have a pair of their VL270U monitors hooked up to my work Mac Mini.
The biggest challenge I had was building a "portrait mode" stand for one
of them. They've been worki
Hmm. IBM Plex. Not bad-looking, and it does solve the stated problem.
I will note that like Bistream Swiss Monospaced, it's only *nominally*
sans-serif, in that it has slab-serifs (Stymie-style, rather than
Clarendon-style) on the capital I, and one small slab-serif on the
lowercase l.
--
JH
are readily
distinguishable are about as scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth,
whether you're talking digital, photo, hot metal, foundry, or wood.
--
James H. H. Lampert
(And for the record, my "go-to fonts" are all versions of Garamond.)
On 7/28/23 8:46 AM, Haines Brown wrote:
I've used an on line validation servce to which I submit code. It
terminated with the note that it has now become a web service on the
Amazon EC2 Web Service. I registered for this cloud sercice, but have
no idea how to access an instance created by someone
On 7/13/23 2:28 PM, Tom Browder wrote:
I know the binary version of the PS fonts can be converted to TrueType by
FontForge.
However, is there a way to convert from the PS ASCII version .pfa file to
the binary .pfb file?
I have a very old font editor, that I used briefly (on a neighbor's
WinDo
On 6/2/23 11:33 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
This is very hard to believe. I'm willing to believe that there have
been insulation dyes that have proved problematic, but if you've
encountered those problems in the 70s I find it *really* odd that it
would still affect cables from this century (e.g.
On 6/2/23 8:34 AM, Mario Marietto wrote:
You may argue that developing for a small number of old computers
isn't worth trying. But,first of all,I think that there are a LOT of
old PCs in the world,since poor people aren't only a niche.
Nor are they the only ones using antiquated hardware, or ex
On 1/31/23 11:38 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
. . .
Because SPI is a US registered charity, it is covered by
charitynavigator.org:
. . .
And its numbers are impressive. Although it appears to have been rather
lavishly overfunded in 2018.
--
JHHL
On 10/13/22 11:05 AM, DdB wrote:
But i am very used to running outdated software, as i am living the old
recipe to "never change a working system".
I've got you beat: I still have a DOS box. And I'm in the process of
configuring and loading a replacement for a worn-out DOSbook. And I
still run
ith ResEdit on a Mac Plus,
more than half a lifetime ago). Do I shove this down anybody else's
throat? No. But neither do I care to have somebody else's look-and-feel
elements shoved down my throat.
--
James H. H. Lampert
(I also like a garbage can icon to look like a garbage can. With a
WinDoze logo on it.)
Another place to look is your local laptop store. My current laptop,
as well as its predecessor, are refurbished ThinkPads I bought there
for about $300. They run Linux just fine.
"Local laptop store?"
Not quite sure I've heard of such a thing, at least not recently. My
Chromebook came from
On 5/6/22 1:11 PM, Charles Curley wrote:
Maybe, maybe not. I got started with a KIM-I: 6502 running at 1 MHz,
just over 1 kilobyte of RAM. Six seven segment displays and a hex
keyboard for data entry. I still have one.
I remember *reading about* the KIM-I (and the Altair, and a few others)
in
On 1/15/22 7:38 PM, Yamadaえりな wrote:
hello list
I have thought about buying a laptop from system76 with linux pre-installed.
What do you think of this manufacturer? Glad to hear from you.
I've had a Meerkat for several months, and except for an occasional OS
crash within 2 minutes of power-up
On 1/4/22 11:33 AM, David Wright wrote:
In fact, I was quite shocked when I just tried
DNS over HTTPS for a couple of minutes. The 10-day weather
profile that I screenshoot every day was plastered in popups.
Anyone know how to combine DoH with resolving 14,000 addresses
to 127.0.0.1? Also, does
On 1/4/22 10:19 AM, Michael Stone wrote:
And this is why putting stuff into /etc/hosts is basically never the
right answer. :)
Au contraire!
Among other things, the host table is the best possible place to block
access to certain unwanted domains. For example, if you add these entries:
> 0.
On 11/29/21 2:41 PM, Jeremy Ardley wrote:
P.S. I am totally unconvinced about the arguments for using sudo rather
than running as root. You can do exactly the same damage with sudo as
being root user.
P.P.S The conventional instruction is to use visudo to do the edits.
Which means using Vi, whi
>>> I also wonder how Leibniz is relevant to this scenario ...
When I think of Leibniz, I think of calculus (and rejoice in the
fact that the only calculus I still have to deal with is what the
dentist has to jackhammer off my teeth [before it turns into partial
differential equations]).
Wh
On 9/21/21 10:21 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
. . .
WORM is Write *Once* , not Write *Only*
"Write only" storage is easy and fast - just throw things at /dev/null
and they can never be altered (or read back).
Quite.
Or to paraphrase something I said, that actually got published in some
magaz
On 9/18/21 2:19 AM, Jeremy Ardley wrote:
My experience is that toner does degrade over a period of years. To get
full life you need to use your advertised pages within a year or so.
Agreed. I've seen toner cartridges go bad. Of course, they had been
sitting on a shelf for *many* years.
--
JH
On 9/18/21 2:00 AM, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
The direction of travel for printing is entirely driverless, so this is
less important than it used to be.
Really? If true, that is exceptionally good news. The last time I looked
at new printers, the "direction of travel" was entirely
driver-depend
PostScript data stream, fed through a Centronics port,
is a non-negotiable requirement for me: it's either that, or I have to
dump the data stream to a file, distill it into a PDF, and print that.
--
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante
On 7/25/21 6:38 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
. . .
Nowadays, I'm still planning to use that same Thinkpad X30 to display
PDFs in the classroom (when I get to meet students physically again),
and more than half of my machine are older than 10 years old.
Better yet, they don't seem significantly slowe
it ran on the Amiga.
Aggressively multitasking within itself, on a platform where there was
no memory protection, and nothing but "good intentions" to keep one task
from stomping all over another task's memory. It nearly killed me.
--
James H. H. Lampert
I know people who associate the time-honored metasyntactic "foobar" with
the military slang acronym FUBAR.
--
JHHL
On 6/17/21 1:25 AM, Grzesiek wrote:
test
I got your test message. As it happens, we just went live with DMARC,
and have reason to do some testing ourselves.
--
JHHL
anything else to handle
DMARC-enabled senders.
--
James H. H. Lampert
Touchtone Corporation
The price is our souls, and we all agree that's too high.
Hmm. Isn't that also the price of anything sold at Wal-Mart?
* * *
At least the OP was polite enough to *ask* about posting ads, rather
than just *doing* it.
--
JHHL
On 5/17/21 9:39 AM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
I have a number of VHS tapes which I'd like to digitize, and I'm
trying to figure out where to start, hardware- and software-wise.
Do you have a DVD-R video recorder? Simplest way I know is to dub the
VHS to DVD, at which point accessing the video from
Suffice it to say that the only Social Media outfit I trust less than I
trust Facebook or Twitter (neither of which I trust any further than I
can throw the U.S.S. Hornet) is LinkedIn. Which I have loathed since
*before* they became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsloth.
--
JHHL
(I'd use a s
ng and checking my email. And I like it that way.
But I tried DDG last week, and it appeared incapable of helping Boy
Scout find a candy store.
--
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante
On 3/12/21 8:09 AM, Larry Martell wrote:
I did the same thing - I resisted being on FB for a very long time,
but eventually I had to get on because it was how my family was
communicating and I was being left out of the loop. I joined as my dog
only my family knew how to find me. Even to this day
On 2/23/21 8:13 AM, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:
You can always add more filesystem space later. It's easier if you're using
LVM but that isn't required. You just build another filesystem on the new
drive after it's installed and mount it into your filesystems, at the
appropriate mount point.
Indee
FWIW, "proportional" or "typographic" would be more conventional terms
than "variable pitch."
--
JHHL
(Feel free to visit me some Saturday at the International Printing
Museum. After COVID-19 is no longer an existential threat, but merely a
minor nuisance.)
Hmm. When I put a new flash device into service, at the very least, I
wipe all bundled content from it, and may completely reformat it,
depending on my needs, just as a matter of course.
--
JHHL
(I vaguely recall that at one time, if you bought a new wallet, the
card-and-picture section would
David Wright wrote:
Why do I keep mine? 1) Sentimentality, as it was the one on my work desk
when I retired. 2) Being a tower, it has room for up to 4 PATA drives.
The loaned Optiplex only holds one—after that, I'm down to an old PATA
caddy. 3) There's no WEEE here, so I'm not sure exactly how on
hard drive exhibit.
--
James H. H. Lampert
On 6/26/20 1:20 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
But this stretch machine can't find it amongst all the other usb stuff.
It doesn't have cheese, and vlc doesn't recognize it.
. . .
Anybody have an idea of what driver this camera needs?
Would transferring images on memory cards be a workable solution?
Personally, if I were a moderator on this List, I would order this
thread terminated with extreme prejudice.
--
JHHL
Personally, I have a clamshell.
It's my second clamshell, an LG VN220. It replaced my previous
clamshell, after my first vacation to Canada: the previous clamshell was
a paperweight from the moment my bus from Seattle to Vancouver crossed
the Canadian border, up to the moment my flight from To
On 2/26/20 8:52 AM, Dan Purgert wrote:
Are you ssh'ing in as root? If not, is your user's $HOME on the
machine's failing disk, or another (remote?) drive?
and I replied (off-List, and *not* intentionally so):
Yes. As root.
Oh, and one other thing, the thing that brought this to my attention
One of our Linux boxes is behaving oddly. If I ssh into it, I can
connect easily, and I get:
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Lin
The OP wanted this treated as a survey, and so . . .
Many dialects and derivatives of BASIC, including (but not limited to)
IBM VS-BASIC (ran on 370 and compatible mainframes), TRS-80 Level 1,
Level 2, and Mod I Disk BASIC, GWBASIC, and the various QBASICs
(QuickBASIC and QBX). (I took one loo
g Windmill: you run those
backwards more than 1 or 2 degrees, and they shred themselves.
--
James H. H. Lampert
On 5/24/19, 11:00 AM, ghe wrote:
I forgot about LISP too. LISP was the first high level language I
learned. Thought I was going to die...
(CLUTTER CLUTTER (CDR CLUTTER)) is probably the only s-expression I
still remember from over half a lifetime ago. (It's a line of code from
the "Blocks Wor
Just out of morbid curiosity: what about a full ANSI PL/I?
--
JHHL
(And the mere fact that I'm asking ages me.)
On 2/21/19, 8:27 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
Never received bounce spam aka backscatter spam? Remember that time
(perhaps 1-2 years ago) where this very list was plagued by an
especially evil form of backscatter involving the useful idiot at
the other end of some smartphone?
No question, I've
On 2/21/19, 12:38 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
You shouldn't /bounce/ spam anyway: where are you going to bounce it
to? To a most probably spoofed address, i.e. to a totally innocent
victim? Thus generating reflected spam, aka Joe Jobs?
That depends. Some spammers don't see themselves as spammer
On 2/3/19, 2:22 AM, Alexander V. Makartsev wrote:
The only problem with external disk drive enclosures from well known
brands like WD or Seagate is they don't offer a way to open them e.g. to
switch the disk drive inside.
That and the fact that, judging by the price tags (and this also seems
t
On 1/28/19, 3:16 PM, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> To this end, I’d like to disable the left ctrl key only, and force my
> brain to use the right one. Better yet, I’d like the screen to flash
> or something then I inadvertently hit left-ctrl.
Just two thoughts occur to me:
1) On a 5250 data stream term
Fellow List members:
Would anybody care to voice an opinion on USB external hard drives in
the 2 terabyte size range, for automated backup purposes?
We've been looking at the Seagate "Expansion" and the WD "Elements";
I've noticed that on Amazon, both have a fair number of negative reviews
c
ies to mount the USB
drive. I also can't seem to get that drive to mount on anything else,
which suggests that it has been corrupted.
Can somebody suggest where to start looking for the problem?
--
James H. H. Lampert
installed
Depends: openjdk-8-jdk-headless (= 8u171-b11-1~bpo8+1) but it
is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
which is what I was getting before.
--
James H. H. Lampert
mick crane wrote:
"Windows is a service..."
Actually, I'd call WinDoze a DISservice.
(I don't allow WinDoze in my house.)
--
JHHL
(Currently using PCDOS-2000, OS/400, MacOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and
occasionally, at work, CentOS and WinDoze XP.)
On 9/3/18, 5:22 PM, David Niklas wrote:
Quick, where can I find the "eponymous fox chewing on a Microsloth
Imploder logo"?
You ought to know Murphy's Law of the Internet by now: nothing posted to
the Internet ever goes away . . . . unless you're looking for it.
--
JHHL
Hmm. I'm all for customizing UIs (my preferred Open Office icon is a
manual typewriter, my preferred Firefox icon is one I found with the
eponymous fox chewing on a Microsloth Imploder logo, and my preferred
Thunderbird icon has the eponymous bird carrying a bottle of T-Bird),
but what have you
On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 05:39:36PM +, tech wrote:
Should'nt be time to move away from an old mail-listing to
something more modern like a bugzilla or else ???
On 8/9/18, 10:47 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
No.
What? A list server isn't good enough for you? It's good enough for the
Tomcat
Exposing children to C and/or C++ should be considered abuse. :)
No need for an emoticon there! C in the hands of an inexperienced
programmer is a recipe for disaster!
Lego or smalltalk, pharo smalltalk has its own IDE so everything is in 1
place
Unless there's now a "Lego" programming la
It's the RAID controller card.
Naturally.
--
JHHL
econd beep alternating with a one-second silence).
Any insights?
--
James H. H. Lampert
Speaking strictly as a user, I really liked SquirrelMail, when I was on
my old ISP (or on the rare occasions when I check my former ISP email),
but I utterly despise everything about the "SmarterMail" product that my
present ISP uses. (It seems like they chose to emulate almost everything
that'
I wrote:
The student timeshare systems my high school used (running the
McGill University MUSIC operating system) while I was a student
there (an IBM 370/135 at the District Office) and shortly after I
graduated (an on-site IBM 4341) used Merlin drives.
to which Tomas replied:
Those times, hig
On 12/11/17, 7:04 AM, Joe wrote:
The rigid platters of IBM cartridges and packs (the things you see in
computer rooms in films) did have brown oxide coatings. The surface of
each 12 inch platter side stored a magnificent 2.5MB, or at least the
version I used did. It was used in a system with an e
On 12/6/17, 2:53 PM, Michael Lange wrote:
uh, I guess you ought to have used your time to check your machine and
read some docs instead of figuring out how to best insult the debian
developers ;)
(scnr)
Now, now, you walk up to the physical console on an AS/400, you're not
going to be able to
On 11/8/17, 10:55 AM, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
The output of 'ps aux', 'iostat', and 'free -m' would help identify the
problem. Also, 'cat /proc/mdstat' if you have a RAID setup.
. . .
After a mostly-off-List discussion with Mr. Sanchez, I gave up and did a
"shutdown -r" on the system.
Af
I've got a small problem. On our local Jessie box, the Tomcat and Apache
web servers both seem responsive enough, and I likewise have no trouble
getting and using an SSH session remotely (except that the "find"
command is extremely slow).
But the Gnome desktop has become almost totally unrespo
About a week and a half before I went on my fall vacation, acting on
recommendations from a couple of List members, I moved the mount point
for the "Auxiliary" mirrored pair I added from "Media" to the file
system root, and it works quite nicely.
Just before my vacation, I asked a question about
About a week and a half ago, acting on recommendations from a couple of
List members, I moved the mount point for the "Auxiliary" mirrored pair
I added from "Media" to the file system root, and it works quite nicely.
But a question: I'd like that mount point to show up in Gnome as
something ot
I really can't believe I didn't think about the possibility that my
browsers were both still caching the default root context from Tomcat 7
when I did the port swap.
I definitely need to always remember to consider the possibility that
I'm doing something stupid.
--
JHHL
practice.
So it's something specific to the root context.
--
James H. H. Lampert
o look for something like that?
--
James H. H. Lampert
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