huh ... re-subscribed with 3RRR earlier in the month and only just got around to opening the envelope to put the new card in my wallet ... 3RRR are celebrating 50 years this year, I didn't realise my membership has been active for more than half that time since joining in mid-2000 #3RRR
in bash, is there any way to do parameter expansion/replacement such that the output is (eg) "A" when a variable is defined and "B" when it isn't?
there's the "alternate" form: ${foo:+A} which returns "A" when $foo is defined ...
then there's the "defaulting" form: ${foo:-B} which returns "B" when $foo is not defined ... but crucially _does_ return the value of $foo when it is defined
... I can't see any way to combine these so that the value of $foo is not returned in either case, just "A" or "B" without using some explicit test
saw this on BlueSky and instantly thought @futzle would be interested ... some fascinating Oddnesses in here, mostly that kilo and milli are both a 1000 measure, but we don't use them that way now ...
I somehow completely missed that the Joybubbles documentary is being shown this year at MIFF - for anyone a fan or even curious to understand how phone freaking used to work[1] on the old analogue network then I'd recommend watching this film. I came at the phreaking scene from reading Phil Lapsley's excellent Exploding The Phone which does an even greater dive into it
https://miff.com.au/program/film/joybubbles#top
[1] US-centric, but most techniques were universal or required minimal modification
I wonder if this was a christening or confirmation ... now hearing Nick Cave's Into My Arms ...
ok ... now we've veered into Mark Knopfler's theme from A Princess Bride - Once Upon a Time ...
ok, we appear to be at the Tom Jones Delilah section of the neighbour party ... previously it was kids tunes (with kid voices) so I'm guessing these would be the grandparents ...
... still going, now doing the transverse passes ...
... clearly someone is doing some mapping over Melbourne this morning ... #melbourne #mapping
@futzle ... in my defence - the example image looks plausible if you don't stare at it too hard and I installed the watch face on my device during a new moon and only figured out what was going on this morning ...
How do other English speakers treat the words begin, end, start and stop?
For some reason I think of these as effectively different bracket pairs - "begin" and "end" vs "start" and "stop"
To make things more specific, in my head "begin"+"end" denote the global termination of an event - can't be anything before "begin", nor can anything be after "end" ...
"start"+"stop" on the other hand denote a span of time within an event - "stop" in this sense is more considered "pause" in that it might resume later, but denotes the closure of this span ...
All of that to say, EOFY paired with SOFY is making me twitchy ...
watched Hot Fuzz last night and was lucky enough to catch a gag that I'd read about but not seen in person - Bill Bailey plays a pair of characters, identical twins, both desk sergeants whose identity is never quite clear to the main character as they swap shifts throughout the film.
At two points Bailey is seen to be reading a book while on duty - the first time (as Angel drags half the village into the cells) he is reading Complicity by Iain Banks, the next time (as Angel and Butterman are carting all the farm weaponry into the evidence room) he is seen reading State of the Art by Iain M Banks ...
Victorian vehicle registration plates are (currently) of the form
[0-9][A-Z][A-Z]-[0-9][A-Z][A-Z]
... sometimes my brain will want to play stupid format conversion games on plates such as 2mi-3km or 1ft-3dm, for example ...
nothing exemplifies living with pets than vigourously towelling dry an already-dry dog because they got jealous that the other dog was being towelled after a wash because they stank ...
what term would you use to refer to the action of doing a wide search through multiple sources to find a particularly obscure item?
morning quandry - seeing a post from an author I appreciate that contains a grammatical error due to word choice, and I would give them a subtle correction to apply and everyone moves on with a sense of community bolstered ...
however: when I research the word they chose and discover that it apparently does now have the meaning ascribed to it in the post ... yet I am _sure_ the only reason it was chosen was because it is a homophone for the word they actually want and that the apparent wider usage is in fact weight of everyone else getting it wrong over time ... but that's how language works ... and yet ... Wrongness!
somebody on here[1] recommended an online store to replace the buttons on my aging Logitech Harmony 650 remote and today this arrived ... cheers
[1] I did pull my Mastodon archive to try and correctly attribute this however I think my response was in a reply and I don't think my archive included that
ooh, a Perl-based client could be interesting to pore through https://metacpan.org/pod/Net::Goofey
reflecting that many of the folk on the Fediverse that I've reconnected with are alumni of the Goofey messaging system, used almost exclusively at Monash University during my time there as an undergrad in the mid-late 1990s ... would be interested to see what remains online about this - so far a brief search only pulled up the following from Wikibin which apparently is a site where deleted Wikipedia articles end up ... https://wikibin.org/articles/goofey.html
