takeheart

This was for querying package delivery status. I finally got one right after many attempts. The layout, layers, colors change after every attempt so good luck on figuring out which letters count.

I'm writing a fish script to process the output of music tagging programs (like operon). I use this for instance to list the filenames of all music tracks in a collection that are missing certain tags like a date of release or which have a CD number tag but no tracknumber tag.

Unfortunately the output I'm parsing may control control characters // escape sequences. This caused me quite a lot of headache during debugging.

Take the following string for instance: it will display as tracknumber (including the leading whitespace` in my terminal. The word itself only has 11 characters so naturally I tried to call string trim on it, but that doesn't actually alter it because on closer inspection the character sequence looks like this:

string_value= tracknumber
string_length=16
0:
:[
2:0
3:m
4:
5:t
6:r
7:a
8:c
9:k
10:n
11:u
12:m
13:b
14:e
15:r

As you can see it starts with a terminal escape sequence which is rendered as a whitespace.

Is there an easy way to strip any and all escape sequences from a variable? I used regular expression search and replace with some success, but that seems quite a brittle approach as I can't anticipate every single (edge) case and could also accidentally remove stuff I want to keep.

source: https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/colorful-river-basin-maps/

It has more detailed maps for each continent too.

I often write multiple statements on the same logical line. For instance short loops that converts one image format to another.

Is there a way to bring up tab completions or history search for subsequent statements? After beginning a new command with ; && &or | I want to be able to make use of suggestions again.

The picture shows a close up of their skin. You can see tiny water droplets curling up on the black scales, as is typical on repellant surfaces.

source

Feeling no pain is actually terrible as you won't know when you hurt yourself and you don't properly learn to avoid dangerous situation. People with this mutation have to rely on others for danger assessment as for example they won't notice easily that they have open wounds or even broken bones. Tragically this boy died at the age of 13 when jumping/falling off a building; the sources differ but it's likely that he engaged in risky behavior if he couldn't feel any pain from falling.

Edit: The original title improperly stated that the boy was from India. Corrected it to Pakistan.

So after I last updated my deck I got a generic error message. No biggie. But then suddenly on the next reboot: stuck at the boot logo. Tried lots of things, no way of getting back in. Not with the current kernel, not with the previous one. Really annoying as I use my deck as a general purpose computer too.

So I created a recovery USB. Reinstalling the OS (which attempts to preserve user data and games) failed silently. So I reluctantly copied my entire home folder to an external drive and went with the nuclear option of completely reimaging the internal drive. After steam os finished installation I restored my entire home folder from the backup and restarted the machine.

I was expecting to having to manually reinstall and reconfigure so many apps and settings. And was verily not looking forward to it. But lo and behold: pretty much everything worked just the way it did before the fumbled system update. My desktop layout and window arrangements remained the same, settings and preferences were preserved, it didn't even log me out of email account. No manual imports of settings required. I had to reinstall most apps via the Discover store first, that much is true. But that took just a couple of minutes.

So yeah, really happy with how that went. Last time I had to reinstall everything on a Windows system it was a major pain as settings are all over the place (on the system drive, in the registry, inside appdata, inside the my documents folder, etc). I guess it has to do with the Linux philosophy of "everything is a file".

In the future I'll actually move my /home/ folder to my SSD card so that if this ever happens again the process is even less painful.

PSA: when you backup your home folder make sure to include all the hidden folders and files (anything starting with a dot like the .config folder).

I'm also using the deck as a work machine and for that I connect an external monitor, keyboard, mouse. Getting the monitor to display correctly is quite the hassle though.

Suspends, reboots, turning off the dock's power overnight or switching tween gaming and desktop mode all can cause issues with the external display being detected properly. Sometimes the deck uses it's internal display instead. Or worse both screens stay black and I have to restart the deck by holding the power button. Other times the desktop environment uses the wrong resolution and I have to manually adjust it. Or the resolution is correct but the image is off center (leaving a black bar on one edge of the monitor and missing rows of pixels on the opposite side).

¿Are others experiencing these issues as well? I never have trouble with the other peripherals (keyboard, mouse, network cable).

I purchased Steam's official dock cause I wanted the additional charger. ¿Can owners of docks from alternate manufacturers report how well external displays connect? Might be worth a switch to save me all the hassle.

edit: I just learned that you won't receive updates to the dock unless you follow this procedure:

1. power everything off (shut down deck completely, don't just sleep it)
2. remove all peripherals connected to the dock (except network cable if you use that for your connection)
3. start the deck
4. if there are any updates for the the dock, they should show in the options of gaming mode

🤨 why tho, valve? why not show dock updates always? how am I supposed to know about them otherwise... 😮‍💨

I've had multiple occurrences of this lately with programs installed as flatpaks, such as Audacity (audio editor). The updates section might list 3.6.0 --> 3.5.4̀ for a program.

Whenever this happens I usually manually exclude any version downgrades and only upgrade the rest.

¿Can this happen due to security issues? ¿Or because the higher version has become incompatible with something else on my system?