My family tree (bush, thicket) is the ongoing effort of my uncle, started roughly 30 years ago. There are nearly 130,000 individuals in it.

We are migrating his data from The Master Genealogist (TMG) to Geneweb. That is quite a long story 8)

You might like to look into Webtrees.

In Australia, it’s the other way around and the clock will try to eat you or at least sting you to death.

So where do you put the rest of your helices on a cylinder or cone, in 2D? In Flatland a screw or bolt becomes a circle with a short hair. The whole point of “leftie loosy” is to try to help with reality as we perceive it.

Try it the next time you are underneath a car wielding a socket spanner with a taped on extension thingie that you jury rigged whilst trying to shift a hex nut at 45 degrees to reality that you cannot see, with oil dripping in your eye. Obviously the oil is a mix of the 30 year old native stuff loosened up with the WD40 that might break the rust lock.

I suggest you do think abut things in 3D and don’t forget the other dimension (time). That WD40 needs time to break the rust lock.

“Leftie loosy” isn’t for keyboard worriers - its for engineers and technicians, plumbers, and the rest and obviously for DiYers.

When you are knackered and pissed off and you need to shift a fucking nut or bolt or whatever, you need incantations to get you back on track.

Apple: User - you are holding it wrong!

The spanner is always at 12 o’clock. Either turn yourself or the spanner or your point of view to make it so and then the rule holds. The last option require imagination.

Take the piss after you have tried to thread a nut on a bolt that you cannot see and tightening it is towards you, at an angle. The nut has to cross a hack sawed thread and will try to cross thread 75% of the time unless the moon is in Venus.

Have a chat with some plumbers, builders, chippies, sparkys or engineers - assuming you are not one already. I think “leftie loosey …” is well known in the UK.

“warm up the sauna”

I get slapped when I try that sort of thing on with Sauna.

They are not a circle unless you have some really odd bolts or screws! I suppose a bolt looks like a circle in “Flatland” but we live in 3D space with time as a fourth dimension that we can directly perceive.

A screw or bolt and the rest are, roughly speaking, a cylinder with a helical thread on it. They also have a “head” or similar which acts a stopper. You can model all of them as a bolt. We use a spanner, wrench, fingers, screw drivers, drill drivers, scissors, whatever to do the tightening or loosening. You can model all those tools as a spanner (wrench). We need some final mental contortions to make this slightly rigorous: The spanner (wrench) is always considered as being at 12:00 on an imaginary clock and we have to assume that our bolt moves away from us for “tighten” and towards us for “loosen” and I suppose we should also require that we are looking at the “face” of the notional clock and not its obverse!

Now it should be obvious how the rule works. Turn the spanner to the right and you tighten the bolt, turn it to the left and you loosen it.

OK that lot is not very helpful when you are under a sink or in a roofing void performing strange contortions. Try holding up one of your hands and pretend you are holding a bolt or the head of a screw. Clockwise turns will tighten and anti clockwise will loosen. You might use “leftie loosey …” to bootstrap: “clockwise tighten”. It becomes even more interesting when you are trying to work out which way to turn a bolt or whatever when you can only feel it and when tightening actually moves it towards you.

Think about a bolt running through a wheel with the head towards us, say on a very simplified bicycle. Move the bike to the right, and hence the wheels turn clockwise. Friction should cause the bolt to tighten. If you change the design and put the bolt in on the other side and now forwards for the bike is to the left then you will loosen the bolt and that will be dangerous. Now change the design to a bolt with a nut and washers etc and it rapidly gets complicated!

Also, please note that some bolts have reverse threads to the norm. On a garden strimmer the tightening knob that holds the spool on is often a reverse threaded bolt. That’s for similar reasons to the bicycle wheel thing I mentioned earlier.

I’ve just spent ages and a lot of words to try and persuade you that this has bugger all to do with autism. I think that your error was really to do with not thinking too deeply about the real issue and focusing on the wrong thing. We all do that, extremely often, regardless of where we are on the spectrum.

I hope that you see that considerations with regarding helical threads on a cylinder or a tapering cone (but not circles) can be quite complicated and that’s why sometimes we all need some silly rules to get us through the every day ordeal of dealing with them.

Now, would you like a chat about circles … 8)

La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera

I just knew that would be Spanish, without being able to speak more than a few words. It works far better than our effort and is both a sardonic and satirical political comment.

Well played Spanish if that really is the equivalent in common usage. Our effort sounds like it was invented by a young child whilst responding to a BBC quiz.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.

Start the linuxa or alinux project and off you trot. Find a better name than I did here and you’ll be fine.

What on earth went wrong?

Arch is just as safe as any other distro, sometimes more so. Being a rolling jobbie, smaller bits tend to break at a time. If you want to live life on the edge then Gentoo is your man but even Gentoo is becoming pretty safe. You might lose your windowing system for a while but you still have links2 to get to a search engine.

“Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats”

There are three similes in that quote. When your considerations are that disorganized, you have not finished thinking everything through. Fiefdoms, dogs and cats … oh my! That’s on top of wild west and other trite, well worn and rather silly similes.

Make your argument without recourse to inflammatory terminology and similes and you slighten the risk of pissing people off.

Clarity is in the eye of the beholder or as someone once said: “You do you”.

I like to use my enterprise number and a UUID (all in lower case, for legibility). Here’s an example:

.1.3.6.1.4.1.33230.0d456e46-67e6-11ef-9c92-7b175b3ab1f1

Now you might say that the UUID is already globally unique or at least pretty unlikely to turn up anywhere else, so why bother prefixing it with more stuff? To that I say: “I need to be absolutely or at least reasonably sure … OK nearly sure”.

Anyway, you maintain a database of these things and then attach documentation and meaning to them. An editor could abstract and hide that away.

I started this post as a joke. Not sure anymore. Why get your knickers in a twist with naming conventions for variables and constants. Programming is already a whopping layer of abstraction from what the logic gates are up to, another one wont hurt!

Please do a little research before trying random stuff. After checking to see if you are actually using the iwlwifi module, why not find out a bit about whether the mentioned param. is available to you and what it does:

Am I using the module. If the output from this is blank, then no:

$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi               622592  1 iwlmvm
cfg80211             1331200  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211

Also verify with lspci -k as above:

$ lspci -k | grep iwlwifi -A2 -B2
        DeviceName: WLAN
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller

# modinfo iwlwifi
   ...
parm:           swcrypto:using crypto in software (default 0 [hardware]) (int)
parm:           11n_disable:disable 11n functionality, bitmap: 1: full, 2: disable agg TX, 4: disable agg RX, 8 enable agg TX (uint)
parm:           amsdu_size:amsdu size 0: 12K for multi Rx queue devices, 2K for AX210 devices, 4K for other devices 1:4K 2:8K 3:12K (16K buffers) 4: 2K (default 0) (int)
parm:           fw_restart:restart firmware in case of error (default true) (bool)
parm:           nvm_file:NVM file name (charp)
parm:           uapsd_disable:disable U-APSD functionality bitmap 1: BSS 2: P2P Client (default: 3) (uint)
parm:           enable_ini:0:disable, 1-15:FW_DBG_PRESET Values, 16:enabled without preset value defined,Debug INI TLV FW debug infrastructure (default: 16) (uint)
parm:           bt_coex_active:enable wifi/bt co-exist (default: enable) (bool)
parm:           led_mode:0=system default, 1=On(RF On)/Off(RF Off), 2=blinking, 3=Off (default: 0) (int)
parm:           power_save:enable WiFi power management (default: disable) (bool)
parm:           power_level:default power save level (range from 1 - 5, default: 1) (int)
parm:           disable_11ac:Disable VHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)
parm:           remove_when_gone:Remove dev from PCIe bus if it is deemed inaccessible (default: false) (bool)
parm:           disable_11ax:Disable HE capabilities (default: false) (bool)
parm:           disable_11be:Disable EHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)

sysfs is a pseudo filesystem with lots of info in it. cat the files here:

$ ls -l /sys/module/iwlwifi/parameters/

… to see what your current values are set at. You can install sysfstools and run this for a neat report:

$ systool -vm iwlwifi
Module = "iwlwifi"

  Attributes:
     ...
  Parameters:
    11n_disable         = "0"
    amsdu_size          = "0"
    bt_coex_active      = "Y"
    disable_11ac        = "N"
    disable_11ax        = "N"
    disable_11be        = "N"
    enable_ini          = "16"
    fw_restart          = "Y"
    led_mode            = "0"
    nvm_file            = "(null)"
    power_level         = "0"
    power_save          = "N"
    remove_when_gone    = "N"
    swcrypto            = "0"
    uapsd_disable       = "3"

It’s always DNS (unless it’s NTP).

So now should we add dd to DNS and NTP? No. dd an image over something you shouldn’t is simply a daft thing to do and I’m sure many here use dd instead of a GUI or something more friendly that stops you from doing the daft thing. However, forgetting to consider DNS and NTP is when you cease to be a technician. DNS and NTP failure cause way more problems than they should at a casual glance.

When I was a lad people used to riff on # rm -r ./ * destroying systems (lol). Bear in mind that . means current directory and … means parent directory and that all directories apart from / have both . and … entries. So rm -r should walk both upwards and then downwards. Even better, because Unix type systems can do this sort of thing, deleting the rm binary itself won’t stop the destruction. I’m not sure when the box would eventually panic, if at all. I think I’ll clone a VM and find out.

rm these days won’t do that. It even has a --no-preserve-root option …

Rustdesk is pretty decent and being developed quite fast. Why not look at MeshCentral too. Choice is good and MC has been around for a fair old while.

My company replaced Teamviewer with MC and we have thousands of client machines across the UK.

Files are files and filesystems are filesystems. You keep your files on filesystems.

NTFS and ext4 are non convertible - you cannot turn one into the other directly, in place. However you can take files from one and put them on another.

Yes, moving TBs does take time, sorry it is unbearable.

I feel like I’m the only person who can’t make heads or tails of

It doesn’t matter if you get the result you want. The important thing is you have choice and that what you have chosen … works!

They don’t need a new distro, unless they hire a lot of highly skilled packagers. I’d take say Ubuntu or OpenSuSE … but it would be RedHat with Oracle for the NHS - they just can’t help losing money.

For my tiny company, I’m going Kubuntu … bear with … Ubuntu means:

• Multiple “enterprise AV” are available (ESET and others)
• Secure Boot
• Full disc encryption is available

Those boxes ticked gets you on the way in the rather naff enterprise security word of tick boxes. Without those - give up now.

The K(DE) bit gets you a lot of configurability and its reasonably easy to get an environment out of the box that Windows users can get to grips with. Besides, I like KDE/Plasma.

I then tack on this rather fine project: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for AD, SYSVOL, “Drive letter” etc integration. Evolution with EWS does email.

My test machine is my desktop (it used to run Arch (actually), my laptop still does) - I started off with Kubuntu 22.04 and wired up all the above and then whilst in a Teams meeting kicked off the upgrade to 23.04 for a laugh. Sound stopped after a while because the kernel modules switched out. Anyway, all good after a reboot.

Seeing as I am competing with something that has GPO, I’ll allow myself to use Ansible.

PS - I should point out that an Arch box can run one of the ESET for Linux products OK (I have). You can get it to do secure boot and it can do FDE. So can Gentoo but I spent 15 years constantly fixing my Gentoo pets too.

I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.

For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.

I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.