• 12 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

    Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.

    But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.



  • I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

    Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

    GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).




  • The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

    That’s actually not entirely true. Although the CPS does engage “free” barristers via chambers for some cases, most CPS prosecutions are handled “in house” by salaried barristers working directly for the CPS.

    CPS’s in-house barristers are (as a rough rule) extremely experienced at prosecuting common-or-garden cases, but lack the specialist experience of barristers available to hire via chambers, who they will usually bring in for the more complex prosecutions (or ones involving a specialist area of expertise).

    All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them, though, and one of the real strengths of the CPS barristers is experience in working with the police- both in terms of knowing how to get the best evidence out of them, and knowing a police wild goose chase when they see one. This is the part that really breaks down in cases like the Post Office, where it’s private corporate investigators throwing complex technical evidence over the fence at random barristers who have mostly not worked with them before.


  • Once you’ve got your eye in, scotch and bourbon are quite different. Many (although not all) scotch whiskies have peat in their flavour profile (a kind of smoky, salty, earthy flavour which is very distinctive), while bourbons never do. Bourbon is almost always quite a lot sweeter than scotch.

    They’re also made quite differently. Bourbon is mostly corn, and often has lots of rye and wheat in the mix, whereas scotch is mostly made of barley. Bourbon is always aged in new oak barrels, whereas scotch is mostly aged in second-fill barrels (which might previously have been used for bourbon, wine, sherry, port, cider etc.).




  • Scotch is whisky from Scotland (shockingly).

    That’s not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It’s just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don’t really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.

    The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using “bourbon” more than Americans because of the need to specify.

    Personally I’m not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it’s a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they’re indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.