Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

"Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/

Huh. Following the boot splash instructions in the #FreeBSD Handbook https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-splash.html burned me because, for whatever reason, my PC starts up at 1920x1080, not vesa, before the boot menu. I think it kernel-panicked because it kept rebooting.

To boot successfully again, I had to get a loader prompt (option 3) & type:
disable-module vesa
boot

Why does it take me so long to muster the courage to do something as simple as saying hi to someone?

pictured: my computer den
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6yZq6liDeM

ALL skirts and pants should have usable and useful pockets.

Last night, I stayed up entirely too late writing a howto for something pretty neat: How to add site search to a static website.
https://thornton2.com/net/search-howto.html

I tried to cover a few ways and link to good pages on two I think are neat but can't use.

This therapeutic video is 13 years old now. It's still pretty good at calming me down about modern Mac stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWxC8ezE4Dk

#Unix & #Linux: Can kill just about any kind of process & shuts down when you tell it to.

#Windows: Tasks can stop themselves from being ended, especially tasks not responding. But ending them to shut down? No problem, mate! Shutting dow--UPDATE TIEM!

#MacOS: "Hold my beer." (Gives you a spinning beachball.)

I had a customer in today with Apple Mail problems, & when he went to shut down his Macbook (a newer one, Touchbar & all), Mail stopped it & flat-out refused to quit. My customer spent 5 MINUTES just getting the damn thing to turn off.

There's nothing like debugging why a shellscript launched from cron is running multiple copies, driving the load average ever higher, and causing cron to mail me output adding up to 200 *MEGA*bytes per job run.

And that tripped me up in some subtle ways. I actually needed `ENV=/home/arielmt/.shrc` instead, and to source it on cronjob lines. Now all my jobs are working properly & my crontab looks nice and neat. I updated the page I posted earlier because it was wrong. Double oops.

It turns out I needed `SHELL=/bin/sh` and `ENV=$HOME/.shrc` in my crontab and `PATH=` statements in my .shrc file. Oops.

I just had to figure out why a shellscript working perfectly was refusing to do anything, even quit, as a cronjob. I knew the cron environment was a bit different, but I didn't realize how much, or how to troubleshoot it effectively. Fixed: https://thornton2.com/unix/freebsd/simulate-cron-env.html

It's not exactly what's expected of a ✨ sparkly shellscript princess ✨ , but last night I wrote about patching my window manager, wmx, within the FreeBSD ports tree: https://thornton2.com/unix/freebsd/patch-wmx.html

I hadn't found any decent port patching instructions for non-porter sysadmins, so I wrote my own. The wmx author uses an "edit source & recompile" paradigm for configuration, & I only want to edit once, so off to Port Patchville I go! (This also lets me take the patch to another PC without new editing.)