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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I face the same specific issue. I started with the French (Canada) layout years ago but now Windows sets the default to Multilingual/CSA because it has been made the official one by the government a number of years ago.

    So now everyone that got used the “old” one has to fiddle with keyboard settings every time they use a new Windows session/computer.

    And it’s not exactly a breeze to switch, as Windows often keeps the multilingual one and switches back to it when you use a different application. Gotta make sure to delete the multilingual and leave only one layout. It’s a real annoyance.



  • Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don’t think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I’m in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I’m still working when I’m working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!

    I took eight weeks this year. So you’re saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?


  • I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I’ve never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.

    This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking “generous” sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the “no work from home even if sick” policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.

    My current employer allows me to WFH and I’ve been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.







  • Where I live temperatures can reach -30C in winter and 30C in summer, so storing anything “sensible” in a shed is a very bad idea. Everything has to be stored in a controlled environment or it will quickly get moldy and rusty.

    However, I kept my old 5.25" diskettes in a box where they were a bit squeezed together and they obviously didn’t like that. It could also just be time. Anyways, a few years ago I decided to copy everything on hard drives and some diskettes were now unreadable.

    I waited too long to backup them and now it’s too late for some of them.

    And even stored “properly”, I also have burned CDs from the early 2000 that are also unreadable. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing I can do now, except to learn and remember the lesson.

    I’m always baffled by people that find old computers stored in barns and still working. Where I am I don’t think they would last more than two winters with this kind of temperature and humidity variation.



  • Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

    For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

    I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

    Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.









  • I do tech support on the phone.

    When I can’t take remote control, the person on the other side is not following instructions, and they just keep repeating “no, not working!” while trying multiple things one after another, that I can’t see.

    Like, I can understand not being good with technology, I’ll be patient. But if I tell them to try loading the site in a private/incognito window and they’re telling me “but I tried in Firefox and it’s not working”, it’s not what I’m asking them to do. And if they’re like “wait, I’ll try again in Chrome” then repeat “nope, not working!”, it’s still not what I’m asking them to try!