It looks like the setting is max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf. Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

Oh… oh dear!

Linux on ARM is getting better all the time!

I sometimes tell my kids about things I was taught, and survival habits I picked up in the “dad qualification program”. I based the idea of the program on a brief description of air force officer survival training in the book The Hatchet, and a generous dose of imagination. The kids have never questioned it.

Good point! We should only use date formats that are allowed by both standards! https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

Don’t say “acronym” when you mean “abbreviation”!

“Acronym” specifically refers to an initialism that forms a new word. For example,

• scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus)
• NASA (pronounced like a word - you don’t say “ehn eh ess eh”).

It’s acro- (height) -nym (word) - a word that exists on top of / above other words.

In contrast “NIH” is not an acronym because it isn’t pronounced or read as a word. It’s appropriate to say, “‘NIH’ is an abbreviation” or “‘NIH’ is an initialism”. But saying “‘NIH’ is an acronym” is wrong!

Yes, I meant miles, but I forgot about the abbreviation collision

I raised my kids using metric temperature for weather. Now that they’re older they hold me to it!

1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

The mile-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

The kg-to-pound conversion is two-and-a-bit.

A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I’ve corrected it.

Edit: Of course by “m” I meant “mile”

This advice is also golden!

I’m not sure if I’ve used more in the last 25 years. And when I did I think it was in MS-DOS.

Here’s a thread with basically the same question that has references to some specific laws: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/1cbyw91/can_my_employer_mandate_where_i_shop_as_a/

That thread is in reference to Ohio. Replies call out Ohio labor provisions, and laws regarding rebate.

Here’s someone on Bluesky who does regular “three wins today” posts. But those are mixed with less positive news. https://bsky.app/profile/ariellaelm.bsky.social

I’m not a lawyer either. But going off the company store insight, maybe we can look to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It prohibits paying wages in scrip, or “similar devices”. Scrip can take a couple of forms; one is an internal company currency that can only be spent at the company store. That provision in the FLSA was specifically intended to shut down company store scams.

It seems that an implied condition of your work is spending some portion of your wages at certain stores. Since scrip is money that can only be spent in certain places, it might be argued that if you are required to spend a portion of your wages in certain places, that has the same effect as paying a portion of your wages in scrip.

Unfortunately after a bit of searching I haven’t seen this specific argument made. But again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know how to research case law. It sounds like they’re trying to claim this program in optional, so it might be challenging to prove that participation is de facto mandatory. I’m guessing if you could get someone to tell you a number for how much they expect you to spend in this program that would help with such an argument. On second thought, I don’t actually know how helpful a number would be, and I don’t want to get you in trouble.

The article doesn’t suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.

I was also thinking Nestlé before I clicked through. They want to corner the market on water. WTF!

Less is not an editor, it’s a “pager” which is a read-only viewer for files, or for command output that doesn’t fit in a single screen, or whatever. Generally to control which you want programs use you set the PAGER environment variable.

The old grandaddy pager was called “more”, as in “there’s more text than fits on the screen”. The successor is called “less”. For most purposes, less is more.

I heard Superman gained the ability to fly during the first TV series because doing the special effects for flying was easier than for jumping.

It sounds like you’re including NixOS in this category so I guess I have switched.

I also tried Fedora Silverblue a bit, and it seemed to me that ostree distros are built on a cool idea supported by compromises I didn’t like:

Some stuff doesn’t work in Flatpak sandboxing - at least not yet. One example that comes to mind is Firefox integration with the desktop 1Password app. Maybe I could make this work by tinkering with Flatseal, but when install the native packages in NixOS this interaction just works.

I don’t want my CLI tools in a container running a different distro. For example if I’m using Distrobox to set up a dev environment that’s installing a distro with traditional package management to get around not being able to install packages natively in the host OS. I get that Distrobox enables isolated dev environments for different projects. But for that use case I think Nix devshells are more flexible, robust, and performant.

Nix also has its problems - in particular the usual complaint that the documentation is not comprehensive enough to match the complexity of the system.

This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.

It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.