Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

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.)

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

Basically, two of the default mouse button assignments are painful to me, & the author uses an "edit source & recompile" paradigm for customization. I only want to edit once, so off to Port Patchville I go!

Free PC tip I just had to give a customer: If the text in your browser window is too big or too small, hold down the <Ctrl> key and roll the mouse wheel to change the zoom. <Ctrl>+<+> & <Ctrl>+<-> do the same, & <Ctrl>+<0> resets the zoom to 100%.

Is the deep bass rhythmic throbbing I'm hearing in this restaurant a new ambient music station or just a loud roof AC?

(video) Pinball Wizard, Folsom Prison Version:
https://youtu.be/6bfPwtUTP4k

I ran FreeBSD's `pkg autoremove` command yesterday, & it removed a bunch of stuff I didn't notice, including hal. Also, something must've changed in a recent kernel because I had to install a new package, xf86-video-intel (on an ancient Dell Inspiron 518 w/on-board graphics), before X11 found a screen again. #DayWithoutX

Welp. Today is the #DayWithoutX. My workstation broke somehow and won't start X11, which means no GUI. Since the fallback in Unix is the CLI, & I grew up on the CLI, I'm not completely lost or unable to work. It's still a surprising nuisance, though.

Wait. Did he clean the motherboard by spraying it with brake parts cleaner? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx63Fv4l_5c