The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There’s an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.

Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren’t super standardized in their format I guess, so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. I like to use Python’s argparse when rolling out scripts myself, and its --help format is pretty rigid given that it’s algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into the argparse.ArgumentParser class itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn’t expose public APIs for that. Oh well…

This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.

The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word commando (presumably a portmanteau of “command” and “window”) and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok’d the window, it would generate the command line for you.

I’m rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what’s possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.

But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.

I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.

Oh yeah, that’s another way to make a subshell. But don’t forget to stick the find in there also:

sudo sh -c 'cd ./testar && find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f' | ...

The commands within the parentheses run in a temporarily created subshell with its own environment. So you can change the working directory within it and it won’t effect your main shell’s working directory.

Let’s say you’re in the home directory that’s called /home/joe. You could go something like:

> (cd bin && pwd) && pwd
/home/joe/bin
/home/joe

If find had something equivalent to tar -C, you wouldn’t need to do this, but I don’t think it does?

Ok, I actually tried something like this at a terminal. You do still need the -C ./testar if you use the subshell since tar won’t know where to look otherwise.

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -C ./testar -T -

This will still give you a listing with ./text.tz and so on because find prints ./whatever when you search .. I think this is harmless? But I suppose you could remove them if it bothers you.

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | cut -c3- | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -C ./testar -T -

I think that since you’re piping in the file list from find, the -C ./testar in the tar command is basically irrelevant? You probably need to cd ./testar before the find. Maybe you could do that in a subshell so that the cd doesn’t affect your tar archive path? So something like:

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -T -

I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren’t great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

And most recently, I’ve been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It’s a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I’m playing around.

I often go chmod -R go+rX . if I want to give read-only access to whatever I’m working on to everyone else. The capital X only sets the executable bit on directories.

There is a lot NA could learn from Germany and, well, Europe in general. I’m in Canada and read an article recently about how some Scandinavian communities keep their bike trails serviceable all winter long. I wish! They pack down the snow kind of like a cross-country ski trail here but over a broader width.

The worst part is that he tried to blame me for the accident.

Good God. Now there’s some drama you could’ve done without. Sounds like you had a competent lawyer though. Glad that part worked out!

I looked up what the model the local dealer was selling. They’re made by a company called trivel which I see now seems to specialize in orthopedic designs. Specifically, they were selling the e-azteca model. What I remember from watching others ride around the parking lot was the seating position looked a bit more recumbent than a regular bike and there was some back support? Wish I had tried one myself! Would have more to say about it then.

Since you were cool I’ll share a few pics of the accident I plan to put in the video I’m making. I warn you it’s a bit graphic but it’s not blood and gore levels of graphic.

Thanks for sharing those. I think the importance of such photos is that they give you a baseline to compare where you are today. I had some major surgery to remove a growth from my neck and looked like hell afterwards. I also had some facial numbness and the doctor wasn’t sure that would ever heal? It did after several years but in a weird way. Like I can touch my neck and feel it on my earlobe. Weird stuff like that. lol

That is one hell of a story! It just burns me that one second of dumbfuckery by a dude with no idea of the responsibility that comes with driving a large vehicle created this life-altering saga for you.

Also this is a bit weird, but my ankle is super problematic.

Keep bitching about this to the doctors or get a second opinion. Maybe they’ll send you for an x-ray or some physio? You have to be your own advocate with this sort of thing. And as they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

If I can ride a bicycle one day, even just for a short ride.

Last time I was at the ebike dealer, they had a bunch of these 3-wheeler cargo models and I saw several people take off on them. I asked the owner about them. He said he rides one himself in the winter since they are much more stable over snow and ice, and the extra storage in the back between the 2 wheels is handy. He also said the last 2 he sold were to people with mobility issues. One was a husband with some sort of condition that kept him house-bound a lot of the time until his wife figured out he could do this and now they ride everywhere. The other was a 91-year-old cyclist who was saying his balance was not what it once was. I kid you not! Anyway, something to consider.

I’m working on a YouTube video that will recount the story.

Please drop a link here if you do this. I would love to see this.

I am long since past my teen years, but as an avid traditional cyclist who is now an ebike enthusiast, here are a few points off the top of my head:

• ebikes are consistently faster. It is easier to plan your day around ebike trips, since they take about the same amount of time every day. With a regular bike, your trip could be twice as long today because yesterday’s tail wind has been replaced by a stiff head wind.
• Issues involving extreme heat and poor air quality (in my experience, these often go hand-in-hand) have less impact on ebiking.
• Terrain not being an impediment gives you more options. There may be some path you’d never have contemplated before since it is hilly or goes down into a deep ravine you will eventually have to slog your way out of, and so you’d wind up taking busy city streets instead with the danger that entails.
• ebikes do give you exercise. You can usually control the amount of pedal assist or even turn it off for a real workout. When off, you will get more exercise than with a traditional bike since ebikes are heavier. But you can do this exercise wherever it is safest to do so and go electric when you need to move with traffic.
• If your city has a main corridor for cycling in terms of say an off-road paved trail to downtown, but you’d have to go out of your way to an extent to reach it, you will be more likely to do so on an ebike. It is just not as much of bother to seek out the better and safer routes.

Oh shit! Are you ok man?

I think the pros outweigh the cons? Anything that steers us away from car culture is desperately needed at this point, and this is one of the only practical alternatives in suburbia.

I would be for bike safety being taught at schools, though I feel licensing for minors would be a quagmire? Let’s not go there. I would be for speed limiters that are harder to bypass. For example, I can disable mine by phone app. If I had any trouble I could ask, well, a teenager? lol

But perhaps most importantly, cycling infrastructure, at least in North America, is a joke and there is so much that can be done on the safety front it’s not funny. I wish the decision makers were all bike commuters. Then they would understand the level of impracticality in their well-meaning but futile attempts to improve the situation.

If you follow the history of the Mac, it went through a number of major architecture transitions from 680x0 -> PowerPC -> Intel -> ARM. Each time, Apple supplied a decent emulator to support applications during the transition.

From a developer perspective, these were huge upheavals that came with a lot of drama but also offered some opportunities. The latter came from the fact that the bar was in some way set higher on the new platform and you could count on any code you compiled for it supporting certain base features. Every PowerPC, for example, had hardware floating-point. Before that, some CPUs did, some didn’t. The Intel transition happened at the time when dual core had become standard and SIMD had become serviceable (with SSE2). The ARM transition has set the bar at 64-bit architecture for every CPU (since Apple had earlier dumped 32-bit on the iPhone side).

Windows/Intel has developed in a more evolutionary than revolutionary manner, which is easy to see if you look, for example, at all the legacy cruft in the Intel ISA. It’s a sad sight. Supporting all that makes instruction decoding a nightmare. In theory, Intel/AMD could reinvent a new sleeker ISA if they could get Microsoft to commit to supplying a performant emulator for the old one? But I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t remember it costing much more and the kids seemed relieved to not incur my wrath on a monthly basis. And not long after, my ISP increased the speeds on all accounts, so it more or less got us back to where we had been anyway.

Incidentally, if you’ve been with a particular ISP for years, it’s worth talking to a person when you change your account. They may have some discretionary power to give you say an introductory rate on a better plan to reward your loyalty?