Tag: computers are evil

Mistakes were made

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Well fuck.

I’m one fell swoop, I managed to delete 1.7TB of data from my media streaming PC. I was trying to do something that would save me a few MB, if that, and fix a minor source of irritation. It ended up biting me quite stupendously in the ass.

Note to future self. When using Linux 1-liners,please be wary of positional arguments and always RTFM!

find /multimedia -name *.txt -delete

: removes all text files found under path /multimedia

find -delete /multimedia -name *.txt

: removes 1.7 TB of data

From the find(1) man:

Warnings: Don’t forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

And then you cry.

But what about your backup, you ask? Well, I do have one, but it’s 6-month out of date, which is not a major thing, and it’s also currently in a location that is difficult to access. Alternative measures are being taken to restore the data.

It’s not a critical loss. I’ll get most, if not all, the data back. Its just incredibly frustrating and involved a serious sphincter-clench, followed by an Oh-shit-I’m-stupid moment I could have done without.

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Must be my accent

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Every time – every single time – that I spell my email to someone over the phone in french, they add an ‘A’ at the start of it. Conversation invariably goes like this:

me: mon addresse email est R-G-L-C….
other person: ok, A-R-G-L-C….
me: non, non, il n’y a pas de A

So I got fed up and registered the email address with the typo in it, and now it will automatically forward the wrong email to my correct one, and send an auto-response message:

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Sphincter-clenching moment

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I’ve been on a course for the last week. Hours are brutal, 8:30am to 7pm. Been taking lots of notes on disk, in jupiter notebook files. This is something that I don’t want to lose. The course has a git repo, which I’ve forked on github. This is what happened today:

– pull class repo to get latest files.
– try to push to my github repo. Sadly, this fails, as one of the data files is 102MB and is bigger than github’s file size limit.
– try and git rm the file from my source tree
– try to push to github, that’s a fail.
– look on StackOverflow for magic git incantation to remove file from git history. This is not something that you normally want to do.
– run magic incantation
– REVERT FUCKING GIT HISTORY TO A POINT WHERE THE COURSE STARTED, THUS LOSING 4 DAYS OF WORK AND NOTES!!!!!

– Quickly run through 5 stages of grief.

– Realize that Jupiter notebook is smart/stupid at the same time, and that the versions I have in memory are different than the ones on disk.
– Preciously save MULTIPLE COPIES/EXPORTS of all the important files.

– Unclench

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The biggest lie on the internet is…

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… ‘I have read and agree to the terms and conditions’.

Each and every internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies. If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. For a given EULA, 73% of people admit to not reading all the fine print. Of those who do, only 17% say they understand it.

I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions.  
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Dealing with Facebook fuckwittery

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Before going on holiday, I got this by email from WordPress :

“Starting August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This includes Publicize, the Jetpack tool that connects your site to major social media platforms (like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).  Will this affect your ability to share content on Facebook? It depends. If you’ve connected a Facebook Profile to your site, then yes: Publicize will no longer be able to share your posts to Facebook.”

So, in order for my blog posts to automagically be posted to FB, I’ve created a page: The Beaver Is A Proud And Noble Animal. This is where my posts should appear from now on.

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