Violently coloured, crudely racist and sniggeringly sexist, tales represent with considerable energy the worst impulses of fiction at its worst, while being at points compulsive reading. So says the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and who am I to argue with John Clute? The best thing about this book is the look. I confess I really like the look of these old paperbacks.

NsCDE is a copy of (not a continuation of) the Common Desktop Environment. It can be thought of (roughly) as a very heavy 'skin' on top of FVWM. It is not available pre-packaged to my knowledge, but can be installed from source relatively readily. Relatively. The issue i had (on Debian) was tat some packages were only available (limiting myself to default repos, I hasten to add) in Debian 12 and some only in Debian 13, so I could not readily get a system that was exactly right.

So I ran sudo apt update sudo apt list --upgradable And I see all these files like libreoffice-l10n-ta that I never asked for. I don't need the help or the interface in Russian, Swedish or any other language other than boring English. I am limited to one language. I dare say there are better ways to do what I am trying to do here.

Well, this is a very well known book. It won a lot of awards, and I can see why. The central idea works as a powerful metaphor, a key plot driver and a fascinating invention. The story is involving -- being a police procedural murder investigation -- and the writing, sentence by sentence, is of a high standard. Tyador Borl\'u is an engaging protagonist, and much of the rest of the cast is well drawn.

Venture SF #8. A story of time travel, with the requisite loops and meeting ones-self, and so on. First published 1976, which makes it a later Meredith; having said that, I do not think it as good as We All Died at breakaway Station. Well, the underlying time-travel story has some nice elements. There's a twist in the tail, of the kind where you know something is coming, but you're not sure what.

I want to wake and log into a Ubuntu/Debian box from a Windows computer. In the MS store, searched for wake on LAN and pick one. I tried 'Simple Wake-on-LAN'. It's a couple of MB. No satisfaction; then tried 'Easy WOL' and it worked. In Linux box, need to check that WOL is enabled. Opened a terminal window and: ip -a…

Using Windows RDP to get into a Ubuntu box, and I just wanted it to log me in to MATE instead of the default, which is unusable for my old brain that likes a desktop with a menu and icons. Should have known this: sudo update-alternatives --config x-session-manager password for darren: There are 2 choices for the alternative x-session-manager (providing /usr/bin/x-session-manager).  

Nice little (mono) portable machine. Single miniwatt valve for the amplification, speeds of 16, 33, 45 and 78 RPM. Very 1960s, sized perfect for playing singles and 10 inch LPs. Cartridge was buggered, but they have not changed much. I had a broken plasticky turntable in the shed and the connections fitted, but the bracket would not hold it, so I just taped it into place.

Cannot run even the simplest macro because of security issues in Word, even though they are enabled in trust centre. Close Word completely. Rename the normal template to force Word to reinitialise it. Open this folder in Explorer. C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates Rename normal.dotm to something like normal.dotm.23June25 (or whatever the date is.) Restart Word, When I opened the file in question, I got a notification about enabling content in the file.

Summary: Install pipewire and some other software, remove PulseAudio and reboot. Has worked on several computers. Great to be free of PulseAudio. Well, this is how audio is with Linux using PulseAudio -- every so often it just stops working. No change in hardware, nothing even unplugged or plugged in, but now it does not see my sound hardware and only gives me the dummy output.

What you're installing is an interface to the thing, not the thing itself. Click: + Create new secret key Name it Apply it to the default project Click: Create Save it somewhere safe. Unzip the binary to somewhere, say: ~/installs/gpt then cd ~/installs/gpt ./chatgpt-cli -k HEREISTHEKEY chat Where HEREISTHEKEY is the key you created in the website and copied down locally. It is just  a string of ASCII characters.

This is a diary kept by an 'unknown aviator' about their experiences in WWI flying over France. The author is generally known to be John McGavock Grider, a US pilot who joined the RFC, went through training in England and flew in France. Young men died frequently during training, especially if flying Sopwith Camels, and in great numbers at the front.

Download the source: Extract the archive and: cd installs/ tar xvjf ~/Downloads/edlin-2.24.tar.bz2 cd edlin-2.24/ ./configure make sudo make install wget manpath sudo mv edlin.1.gz /usr/local/man/man1 man edlin I got  the new improved man page from here and copied it so some folder in my man path (I used the system man path, because the binary was installed systemwide). Here is the man file, printed to the screen using zcat.

On 10 November 2025, CSFG launched its latest anthology of short stories, Never say die, at Smith's Alternative in the Melbourne Building, Canberra. The theme is death. The call for stories said (at time of writing it's still online, here, but I expect that won't last): For as long as people have told stories, there has been a hunger to understand the meaning of life, death, and all which exists beyond.

Venture SF #7. The second High novel in the Venture SF series, and perhaps an improvement over the dire Come, Hunt an Earthman. Perhaps. A comet (or something; can't recall) was going to wipe out Earth. The elites went off in spaceships, and the rest were left to die on the surface, except for a relative few (still millions) who were put in deep sleep in underground caverns and vaults.

Installed Debian to a card and booted the RPi. Set it up to be a print server, set up some printers, then accessed them from the LAN. Installed Debian -- just did what it said and it worked perfectly. Well... took ages to get it to work, but not Debian's fault. Turned out there was a tiny fragment of plastic in the SD card holder on the Pi, and it was preventing electrical contact.

Well, this is what worked for me. This is just a note to self. Settings > Apps > Installed apps > Copilot > three dot menu (...) > Advanced options > turn off Runs at log-in. But that was not enough; because using it for work, must also check for 'Microsoft 365 Copilot' Do the same -- so only trick is, 2 version, turn off both! Yes, that seems to have worked.

This is an example of LOLCODE. You need this language. HAI 1.2 CAN HAS STDIO? IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTH SAEM VAR AN 5 VISIBLE "TWO TIMES VAR = " SUM OF VAR AN VAR IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE cd cd installs git clone cd lci cmake . CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:1 (cmake_minimum_required): CMake 3.31 or higher is required.

So. Here we have the 3rd autobiography by Isaac Asimov, the remarkably productive author who began his career in the science fiction magazines of the 1930s and ended it in the early 90s. Asimov was a huge figure in science fiction. When a new fiction magazine was launched in the 1970s, only one name would do -- for despite producing relatively few novels in the preceding 20 years, of the authors whose names came closest to dominating the field, only Asimov had truly remained part of the SF community, in the sense of remaining a strong presence in the magazines and the discussions centred in them.

Got this error message. Package: _/Unknown package  gtk3.sh exit code 127 Now, Cygwin all works fine, but it's annoying. The file is in: /etc/postinstall which is where the Cygwin installer looks for postinstallation scripts to run. This is gtk3.sh: rm -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache /usr/bin/gtk-query-immodules-3.0 --update-cache Can do some checks. ls  /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache So that folder is there. If the executrable that it calls?

The Cygwin XWIN Server sets up a menu in the corner of the screen, in the system tray. When you install applications, they write .desktop files into the folder:        /usr/share/applications, so if you want an application to show up in the menu, and it doesn’t, it’s probably because there’s no desktop file in that folder. So one answer is to copy one in.

I wanted a nice, light, fast, postscript and encapsulated postscript viewer for Windows. Evince. Now to make it the default app. After installing it, the default installer, at least in my case, put the binary here: C:\Users\darren\AppData\Local\Apps\Evince-2.32.0.145\bin therefore, when  I right-clicked on an EPS file and chose ‘Open with’,  I had to navigate to there and choose evince.exe. When you get the explorer/navigation window after choosing ‘Choose an app on your PC’.

Installed MT6.9 on old machine with Win 10 and Office 2010. (Found that MT6.9 did not play well with Windows 11). To convert all the equations to EPS for a graphic designer: Opened the Word file. MathType tool bar > Convert equations > Select all 'from' options > Select MT6 OLE objects as 'to' option. Same tool bar > Export > EPS with TIFF preview.

This is a Panther paperback from 1976. I mention this because the production is woeful. Oh, Linotype Plantin is a perfectly good font, and the page design is fine. But the book is very poorly proofread -- it frequently mixes up if/is/it, and at one point says 'difference' when it means 'distance' (at least, 'distance' made a lot more sense), and there were a couple of sentences where I really was not sure what was meant, and Asimov is really not known for intentional ambiguity in his writing.

Install Zoom on Debian. Does not really need a blog post, but I did it, so why not? Really all you need is: But anyway. In terminal (as always before installing software): sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade -y sudo autoremove -y There's a list of dependencies on the website; I just copied it to a text file (