JdeBP

This is a general, but non-politics, account covering everything from computer programming to supermarket meal deals; any politics will be taken up by npub1f2204982vaaef3xxjw2ak0ewdauts8xcvr6kg8ugkj4u55rq9acsteltwj (npub1f22…ltwj).

For #senryu and #SlowLife tasks, see JdeBP (npub1q08…smj9).

For the command-line and system tools (including #nosh and #djbwares), specifically, see JdeBP (npub196j…6f5a).

WWW: http://jdebp.info/
YouTube: https://youtube.com/user/JdeBP
INSTA: [@[email protected]](https://pixelfedapp.uk/JdeBP )

Last Notes

2026-07-22 15:19:18 UTC

- reply

Idiomatic Hiberno-English, and a fairly straightforward extension of more widespread constructions that non-Irish speakers don't blink an eye at, such as "come on over!" and "come on in!" and even "cross over to", "go on around", "walk on by", and "walk out in front of".
Unusual enough to be an effective linguistic marker for 'Irishness', still. Although the word 'craic' does give it away a bit. (-:
#EnglishLanguage

2026-05-24 21:01:08 UTC

- reply

It's not microcode. It's not modules. It's likely not processor hardware.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116611581241448030
It's erroring out in the middle of loader code, before the kernel is even running, that is doing little more than calling 8086-mode firmware services (not OpenBSD's I/O system) to read a whole contiguous section of an ELF format file from an UFS partition on disc. It has already read 7 such sections without a hitch, and is failing reading the 8th.
Which is why I suggested objdump, to check that the ELF file is correctly structured.
After all, look at the file size. It has decreased between the working and non-working versions.
#OpenBSD #boot #ELF
#note1jya…tlvu

2026-05-21 08:18:40 UTC

- reply

They don't mean much to me, either. (-: But I'm not an OpenBSD developer.
At this point I suspect that diagnosing this involves running objdump -x -i or similar on the file that does not load.
Because the error indicates that there's something fundamentally wrong with either the filesystem or the executable file format of the file. Either the file has been generated corrupt, or the actual filesystem is corrupt. It's erroring out in the middle of code that should just be straightforwardly reading a sequence of bytes from that file into RAM via a standalone filesystem driver.
You might well end up (non-destructively, first off) checking the filesystem, too.
#OpenBSD #boot #ELF

2026-05-19 22:13:10 UTC

- reply

Aussie #IKEA must be very different. Here in the U.K. one collects Yet Another Allen Key with every item, and there's sometimes a shelving pin or two and usually a screw left over as well. Plus, in the customer service area there's a dispenser for even more of the things.
I have a relative who after many years has a fair sized collection of all-the-same Allen keys.

2026-04-12 08:11:39 UTC

- reply

I regularly, many years ago, reversed a car with a trailer. And I had visibility out of the rear window. I've also reversed light vans where there are only mirrors.
I can only imagine how careful one has to be to reverse one of those things without jack-knifing. Around a bend and on an incline, too.
Looks like xe mounted the verge a bit, from that soil trail, and then took the outside of the bend for best visibility.
10 minutes seems about right. (-:
#ArticulatedLorries #HGVs

2025-12-18 12:00:23 UTC

- reply

Sans context, I'd merely venture something along the lines of "Stop there immediately, sir!" as a translation into English. (-:
#EnglishLanguage

2025-07-06 18:20:40 UTC

- reply

It is a shame that neither
> Resolve-DnsName -Name where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io -Type LOC
nor
> nslookup -type=loc where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io
work.
Not even @npub1sd9…279m 's Resolve-Dns supports the LOC resource record type.
Although I suspect that might be the Windows tool that gains support the most quickly, just for the bragging rights of being able to show an ISS LOC record in Windows when no-one else can. (-:
#PowerShell #DNS #MicrosoftWindows #nslookup

2025-01-15 14:18:18 UTC

- reply

Humphry Davy called it "aluminum" in 1812, and Noah Webster stuck with that spelling in his 1828 dictionary. It was the original spelling, bar Davy's abortive attempt of "alumium"
"aluminium" came from French and German chemists, and there's an amusing 1891 account of English chemists resisting "foreign" interference and sticking with "aluminum" until 1827 when German chemist Friedrich Wöhler published the Wöhler process and the German spelling took hold in England.
#chemistry

2024-12-06 06:14:47 UTC

- reply

People focus overmuch on bank costs.
I was hit by the problem of restrictions on taking cash out of my account last year, and it was only when the manager took me aside and asked me whether someone had told me to lie about why I needed the money (which was to pay a landscaping contractor) that I realised that I looked to them like an old person victimized by a telephone scammer.
They are *also* trying to protect us from scammers and dodgy traders.
#banking

2024-10-29 18:20:02 UTC

- reply

There is *so much* that I almost don't know where to start. Even sticking solely to Names (Asimov, Baxter, Bova, Clarke, Harrison, Heinlein, Herbert, Niven, and so on) could keep you going for years. And there is so much beyond them.
This being the FediVerse, I shall however explicitly recommend James Tiptree Jr's Brightness Falls From The Air.
#SciFi

2024-10-10 00:30:23 UTC

The new deck mode in the #Mastodon WWW UI is awful.
How they've gone for collapsing various things to make them consume less real estate, and narrowing scrollbars, and yet ended up with being overall *wider* than before, is ridiculous.

2024-08-30 04:33:49 UTC

One of these days I'll read how #Mastodon works internally; but my educated guess is that a post going into the local timeline is basically a no-op, as constructing the local timeline is an exercise in querying all statuses in descending date order and filtering by mute/block/visibility/origin requirements; whereas a post going out to peer nodes and into home timelines needs a background mechanism to work out the complexities of who exactly needs to be fed what.

2024-08-24 07:45:30 UTC

- reply

The #Mastodon-branded app has a long-standing reputation for being difficult & for hiding some of the fundamental things about the #FediVerse.
Whether that it still true since last I checked over a year ago, I don't know, but you might want to check out some of the many other reading/posting apps. In some of the better ones, switching between the home, local, & federated timelines is just a simple matter of swiping sideways or picking from a drop-down.
https://hueyy.github.io/awesome-mastodon/#ios

2024-08-13 10:21:13 UTC

- reply

But can you get it to run Elite? (-:
https://universeodon.com/@markmoxon/112938627393744036
#BBCMicroComputer #retrogaming