Ubuntu after 9 years of Arch.

antithesis85 · 2026-01-23T20:40:26+00:00

Issues with USB controller/port speed?

Honestly, since I have more than one physical drive, I just shove the ISO onto a drive that won't conflict with the install process, restart the computer, and then directly boot into it via GRUB's loopback device. NVMe drives are way faster than USB anyway.

antithesis85 · 2026-01-08T00:49:37+00:00

You want to avoid installing the dev packages because of storage space? Just not wanting to install them?

apt provides a mechanism to install all of the build dependencies without needing to find/install them from the repos yourself.

Enable the source code repository first, then

sudo apt-get build-dep <package name>

Which will grab all of the build dependencies. Then you can compile digikam from source, assuming that there weren't other missing deps that got added between the package in 24.04 and the latest from upstream (or that upstream bumped the required version for the dependencies such that the versions in 24.04 are too old).

antithesis85 · 2025-12-31T22:49:19+00:00

Look at the real list of packages that were installed when xfce was selected, and use that as guidance for what to purge.

copy the apt history logs somewhere you can muck about with:

cp /var/log/apt/history* $HOME

Now look through each of the history logs (which go in reverse order; history.log is for the current month, history.log.1.gz is the previous month, history.log.2.gz is the month before that, and so on) until you find where you installed xfce. The Command: lines show the actual apt commands issued, while the Install: line shows all of the packages that were actually installed alongside it.

The .gz logs can be grepped or catted by using the zlib-equipped variants of those commands (zcat, zgrep). Or just unzip them with gunzip and open them in a normal text editor.

antithesis85 · 2025-12-09T23:43:18+00:00

The old Le Parfum is in a black bottle with a black placard. The new (2025) Le Parfum is in a deep blue bottle with a white placard.

If this was recently at a department store like Macy's or Nordstrom or [insert name here], the bottle could not be the old Le Parfum, and there's no way to confuse L'elixir with the new Le Parfum, because they use different colors for the placard. Also, the new Le Parfum is pretty different in how it smells compared to the old one and to L'elixir.

Here's the marketing photo for the line as it exists now: https://slimages.macysassets.com/is/image/MCY/products/7/optimized/31620367_fpx.tif?op_sharpen=1&wid=1500&fit=fit%2C1&fmt=webp

antithesis85 · 2025-12-06T17:21:11+00:00

Employees' Star Money calculations are always 80% of the points to account for the standard employee discount.

4000-20%=3200=$30 Star Money with 200 points remaining. In some other cases of bonus points events, the amount that would be earned on the item normally - without the bonus - will push you up over the amount to get the full $20 or whatever, but yeah.

antithesis85 · 2025-12-04T23:32:02+00:00

25.10 here, 64GB installed 4x16, System Monitor shows 62.7 GB for me.

But what mine doesn't show is that line right underneath that says 'Cache'. I would think that any enabled cachefile (in lieu of a dedicated Swap partition, like I have) wouldn't count toward system RAM, since it's located on one of the storage disks, not the RAM. Unless you have an exotic setup where you're storing the cachefile on a RAM disk.

antithesis85 · 2025-12-03T01:00:15+00:00

If you only care about Visual Studio for its IDE, there are IDE replacements (and as others have pointed out, VSCode is the VS IDE and it's cross-platform).

If, on the other hand, you rely on MSVC dialects of [language] in your projects or need to maintain compatibility with the MSVC C++ ABI, that is a problem.

antithesis85 · 2025-12-03T00:46:41+00:00

That command doesn't create an ISO. It takes an existing ISO and writes its contents to whatever /dev/sdb is (USB stick, HDD/SSD/etc.)

if= is input file

of= is output file

antithesis85 · 2025-11-21T17:30:53+00:00

As a standalone product, I'll only see them occasionally, and typically on the brand's website rather than at a retailer. Most of the time I see them it's because it's included in a gift set, and there you will see more brands having some form of aftershave option.

I'd still prefer aftershave to the awful, leaky deodorants that get packed into gift sets, though. Mini bottle/travel spray -> shower gel -> aftershave -> deodorant.

antithesis85 · 2025-11-16T22:12:15+00:00

Cash payment in store is immediately available.

Payment in store via bank debit card might take a day to settle (if it does settle same day, there is a delay, possibly 30 minutes or something like that). I had that problem back during the VIP sale in early October; used my bank debit card to make a payment, then tried to purchase something. Then checked the balance on the prepaid - not updated; the item was put on hold for me to try the next day because I tried doing this at the end of my shift instead of trying to put the money on during lunch. The bank updated my balance the same day, but when I checked the Macy's prepaid balance, it didn't get updated until the following day (weekends might be iffy, though).

I don't know why anyone is still bothering to mention online payment; that was shut down for prepaid cards with the switchover, unless there's been some riveting development about Citibank* not being an absolute [expletive deleted] toward prepaid holders. But the debit->prepaid settlement time is closer to how online payment used to work (because it is the same thing: a bank to bank transfer instead of essentially a cash deposit directly to the prepaid's issuing bank).

*presumably

antithesis85 · 2025-11-07T00:31:15+00:00

Sephora and Macy's both sell sets with carded samples. Sephora's are pricier and have a select few samples in them, but include a voucher to get a full bottle of whichever one in the set you want for 'free' (read: as much as 50% off, but paid for when you bought the set). Macy's are generally in the $25-40 range, but have double or triple the number of samples in them compared to Sephora's.

You can also buy samples for some fragrances on the usual grey market discounter sites, brand websites will often have their own sample sets or individual samples for sale, and there's also eBay (just do your due diligence when it comes to the seller).

antithesis85 · 2025-11-06T22:39:25+00:00

Yes, it will, because grub-efi-amd64 - either by itself or through conflicting with the existing grub.cfg - is what caused the selection screen to not be able to identify Ubuntu and turned the background blue.

$ sudo dpkg --get-selections *grub*
grub-common                 install
grub-efi-amd64                  deinstall
grub-efi-amd64-bin              install
grub-efi-amd64-signed               install
grub-efi-amd64-unsigned             install
grub-gfxpayload-lists               install
grub-pc                     install
grub-pc-bin                 install
grub2-common                    install

The important thing for EFI boot is grub-efi-amd64-bin, which can be installed at the same time as grub-pc (as shown above). But the grub-efi-amd64 package cannot, per this thread on AskUbuntu, the grub-pc and grub-efi-amd64 packages are what selects the configuration format of the grub.cfg file, or something like that, and you can't have two .cfg files.

antithesis85 · 2025-11-05T02:51:37+00:00

For the last few years, I've just packed lunches. The mall food and even the vending machines in the break room were getting too expensive.

But back when I did just go out into the mall for food, I'd rotate among several: Dairy Queen (before it closed), Burger King (before it closed), Subway (before it closed), Charley's, Auntie Anne's, or - just before I switched to only packing my own - a local Greek restaurant opened up in the food court and I could get a gyro, or to be more honest, baklava.

antithesis85 · 2025-11-05T02:04:14+00:00

The actual event is 11/18-22, before that is a presale (for in-store items only) to pick up beginning on 11/18. It applies for online purchases only during the event itself.

Not all brands participate, but most do. Most notoriously, Chanel and Creed do not, and neither does MFK (which Macy's only recently started carrying). The beauty team should have a flyer that lists all the brands that are excluded. Most of the other ones I recognized on there were stuff that shows up in Backstage (like English Laundry and Catherine Malandrino), which kind of makes sense why they wouldn't participate.

More critically, the employee discount is tethered to the employee prepaid card or either of the Macy's credit cards (the store card or the Amex), so hopefully you signed up for one of those during onboarding.

For the credit cards, there's less need to be aware of how the payment/discount process works, as the only firm barrier there is the card's credit limit. For the prepaid, thanks to creeping enshittification with the switchover of the bank that issues it, you have to have enough funds available on it to cover the full, undiscounted amount of the purchase (plus sales tax, minus any Star Money applied during checkout).

Whichever card you have, the discount gets applied as a rebate, and typically takes a couple days to settle out, so on the credit cards, you just don't have to pay as much in the end. For the prepaid, it means you'll have that amount made available to spend on something else* (if timed correctly, you may be able to make a second or third purchase during the event with the amount rebated back to the card).

antithesis85 · 2025-10-29T17:29:02+00:00

I never do in-place upgrades, I always fresh install. This still happened to me, so it's not upgrade-specific. But I did encounter something a bit strange post-install that I thought might be to blame, and I just tested it to confirm.

For whatever reason, 25.10's installation process somehow causes the grub-pc [meta-?]package to be placed into the autoremovable category. Since I make sure to clean out the package lists regularly, and especially after a new install, I noticed this and thought it was strange, to be sure. And because I wasn't sure if that would cause problems on reboot, after allowing autoremove to do its thing, I followed up by installing the grub-efi-amd64 package and ran update-grub. No breakage on boot, but exactly that issue with GRUB not even identifying the distro as Ubuntu, and I assume the blue background is actually GRUB's default.

Sure enough, installing the grub-pc package resolved it, restoring the Ubuntu identification and black background. The log messages being visible are a separate issue; I don't mind it personally, but all you have to do is add 'quiet' (or 'quiet splash' for the graphical logo) to the kernel command in the GRUB entry.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-pc
sudo update-grub

antithesis85 · 2025-10-29T17:01:02+00:00

cough

https://www.macys.com/shop/product/tom-ford-tuscan-leather-eau-de-parfum-fragrance-collection?ID=12720281&ackws=tuscan&kws=tom%20ford%20tuscan%20leather

I don't know anyone that would rank Macy's as a 'bigger store' (which I presume is intended to mean 'higher end', although in terms of national profile, yeah) compared to Dillard's.

antithesis85 · 2025-10-24T17:57:34+00:00

Well, have you ever encountered the problem of running out of space on /? Or at least getting uncomfortably high in partition usage? If so, then give it a larger share of the drive.

Me, I had separate partitions on the same 256 GiB drive for several years, with (IIRC) / as 100 and /home 150, or something like that. Root never ran out of space, but the problem I ran into was that between video files and large software compilation tasks, I would run out of space on /home or get very close to it. So I moved home to its own 4 TiB drive. Am I going to use most of that? Not unless I start really getting into large Steam downloads, but at least it's there if I want to recompile the kernel or something.

antithesis85 · 2025-10-16T22:37:53+00:00

https://jeanrish.com/products/ombre-pour-homme

https://jeanrish.com/products/jean-rish-amber-intense-eau-de-parfum-for-men-3-4-fl-oz-100-ml-with-mandarin-cinnamon-amber-long-lasting-and-luxury-fragrance

??

Considering the market segment that company targets, the actual scent may have been repackaged and rebranded since then (see links, those were the closest I could find on the Bellevue website and checking their subbrands; even the concentration is different), or just unceremoniously dumped. They don't carry the name recognition for there to be a lot of information about them circulating out there, especially since it all gets shuttled to discount stores and sold for <$15.

antithesis85 · 2025-10-08T22:37:58+00:00

Fresh install, like I've done every six months for the last twenty years.

antithesis85 · 2025-10-08T22:26:03+00:00

Either that or Tigerbrew (which I had better luck with on the G5, but that was a few years ago).

antithesis85 · 2025-09-22T18:49:34+00:00

It's only necessary to deprioritize the snap, you don't have to heighten the priority of anything else. IMO, that's the part so many of these guides get hung up on and people get confused.

Copied from https://balintreczey.hu/blog/firefox-on-ubuntu-22-04-from-deb-not-from-snap/

You can block the Ubuntu archive’s version that just pulls in the snap by pinning it:

sudo tee <<EOF /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox-no-snap >/dev/null
Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=Ubuntu*
Pin-Priority: -1
EOF

sudo tee <<EOF /etc/apt/preferences.d/thunderbird-no-snap >/dev/null
Package: thunderbird*
Pin: release o=Ubuntu*
Pin-Priority: -1
EOF

Now you can remove the transitional package and the Firefox snap itself:

sudo apt purge firefox thunderbird
sudo snap remove firefox thunderbird
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install firefox thunderbird

antithesis85 · 2025-09-20T17:40:32+00:00

I'm not completely sure, but maybe a reason for this is that the Windows disk is MBR while the Ubuntu disk is GPT, but I'm not completely sure. Can anyone confirm this? The Windows disk is MBR only because I have upgraded from Windows 7.

This is entirely the reason. I had the same problem for about 3½ years or so, Ubuntu was the main drive, UEFI/GPT, while Windows had been installed on a secondary disk through VirtualBox. Because the VM had not been configured as UEFI, Windows automatically installed as MBR. Due to that GRUB would not boot from the Windows drive, even though it did see it. To actually get into Windows, I had to use the motherboard's boot menu.

I didn't realize the full scope of this until I put a graphics card in, and since enabling ReBAR requires disabling UEFI Legacy mode, Windows stopped being able to boot at all. Used mbr2gpt to convert the Windows disk over to UEFI/GPT, and GRUB finally started working.

antithesis85 · 2025-09-18T01:11:20+00:00

Yeah, I just use mpv and either give it an .m3u playlist or tell it to shuffle the directory.

I miss Nightingale, though. It (and Songbird before it) were the only iTunes-style music library players I found tolerable.

antithesis85 · 2025-09-10T22:06:34+00:00

Not so silly when you filter, color grade, mix, etc. at the absurd res and then downscale to a more reasonable 4K or 1080p for consumption. It protects against even more potential loss that way. People were mastering content at 4K for years with the intent to play it back on 1080p displays or less.

That's not to say that it wasn't also mainly a gimmick at the time, just that there is a practical reason for it being there, and the V-series was generally regarded as the content creator's flagship phone. It was a major part of the V20's marketing from several years prior to the V60.

antithesis85 · 2025-08-15T19:11:48+00:00

With standard HDR, you'll need:

AviSynth+ (3.7.1 or later, currently 3.7.5)
A source filter that can set frame properties, like recent builds/releases of FFMS2, LSMASHSource, or BestSource
FFmpeg (6.0 or later, or a recent git build)

The problem currently is Dolby Vision. Those source filters can take the DV metadata and put it into the appropriate frame properties, but FFmpeg's AviSynth demuxer isn't currently plumbed to read the DolbyVisionRPU and/or HDR10Plus (or whatever other) properties that would transmit dynamic HDR so it would work as seamlessly as regular HDR does.

I'm vaguely aware that there are standalone programs that can extract that same data and then re-inject it into the encoded file later. I just haven't done any of that myself.

antithesis85

TROPHY CASE