https://www.euronews.com/2024/09/13/demographic-decline-greece-faces-alarming-population-collapse
Empty villages, disillusioned young workers, and government officials scrambling for solutions: this is the stark reality Euronews uncovered in Greece, where the country is bracing for a major population collapse fuelled by plummeting numbers of births, mass emigration, and low fertility rates. #EuronewsWitness
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/floods-southwest-poland-kill-one-force-evacuations-2024-09-15/
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/09/13/france-tests-space-lasers-for-secure-satellite-downlink-in-world-first/
The point-to-point nature of lasers makes them more secure than radio frequencies, and they can’t be jammed the way radio can.
https://apnews.com/article/italy-hospitals-attacks-medical-staff-army-calabria-patients-families-27e4684e40df9dd73264e02f4f39573d
Italy’s army is set to begin guarding medical staff in Calabria starting Monday. The decision follows a series of violent attacks on doctors and nurses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z7-2ipyW9k
https://www.newsweek.com/nate-silver-reveals-election-vote-donald-trump-kamala-harris-1952655
Silver made the announcement on his podcast, shortly after being publicly praised by former President Donald Trump.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/us-charges-russian-military-officers-for-unleashing-wiper-malware-on-ukraine/#p3
WhisperGate campaign targeted Ukrainian critical infrastructure and allies worldwide.
This post just got inspired by (trying) to sign another receipt where the restaurant had a clogged ballpoint that would write only intermittently.
I don't carry a pen with me. Most extended text I work with these days is typed, so don't use one enough to really do so, but I have thought about doing so.
There are a couple of pen communities on Lemmy (which I'll mention below, for folks who might be interested). Thought I'd get a broader cross-section view of the general public, though; pen enthusiasts tend to have their own, often kinda niche, positions.
A few years back, I decided that I'd hit up an online pen store, get a variety of pens, and see what I liked.
In general, I've found that:
Ballpoints are the most-common pen I see in the US. They use oil-based ink. They require a high amount of pressure to write with. They are inexpensive, don't smear, and don't bleed. And they are the only option if you need to use carbon paper, like on a check, due to that high pressure. But they are also exasperatingly prone to clogging, particularly on some receipts -- not sure if it's due to some sort of coating on the receipt paper. If you particularly like a given case, you can get non-disposable pens with semi-standardized inserts to "refill" a pen; these contain a replacement tip and ink container.
Rollerball pens or gel pens use water-based ink. I'm generally pretty enthusiastic about them; they're probably my favorite as things stand, though I grew up mostly with ballpoints. They do have some drawbacks: they are more-prone than ballpoints to smearing (for those left-handed people out there who don't write right-handed and drag their hand through fresh ink when writing, I suspect that that's especially annoying). They're more-prone than to bleeding through paper (though this depends on on the paper and ink). However, my experience has been that they do much better than ballpoints when it comes to writing consistently without clogging. They also write much more-smoothly than ballpoints; the tip's interaction with the paper is closer to "gliding" over it, is less-fatiguing than writing with a ballpoint; many people find this to be a rather-pleasant surprise if they're used to ballpoints. Larger-diameter tips are even smoother. I have no idea why I see fewer problems with clogging with these, as intuitively I'd think that "water would dry out, and oil wouldn't". But, well, I just rarely see clogging with 'em, whereas with ballpoints, it's a near-universal. As with ballpoints, you can get semi-standardized inserts to "refill" a pen if you want a non-disposable. I would encourage most people to, if they have only used ballpoints in their life, to give a rollerball a try at some point; I was significantly happier.
Felt-tip pens have a solid core through which ink moves. I used to think of these mostly as permanent Sharpies for writing on odd surfaces (thick, not something you'd write with), highlighters (again, special-purpose, not something you'd write with) or washable, large-diameter pens for kids doing coloring or something, again not what you'd write with. But I have had some narrow-diameter felt-tip pens, and they tend to work pretty well. They don't clog. They can dry out, if you leave them uncapped, but you can normally get even those going by adding a drop of water to the tip and letting the pen sit for a while. These do have some downsides -- if you let the tip sit on one place on paper, they tend to bleed through, since it keeps dispensing ink. That's not a problem with ballpoints or rollerballs. My experience is that they have more friction than rollerballs, don't have quite the "gliding" feel. You have a lot of options as to size of the tip, can get very large ones. For writing, you probably want a narrow one; these have a metal sleeve and just expose a bit of the felt at the end. Apparently it's possible, for some of these, to get refills, though I don't believe that it's common; these come in the form of liquid ink. Normally, I believe that these are disposables.
Fountain pens. I really thought that these were entirely-obsolete, though they certainly have some ardent fans. I've read a lot from enthusiasts about how one should clean nibs, only store them in particular orientations, etc. However, on a whim, I picked up a package of cheap disposables. I then stored them in a hot car for years, didn't clean them at all, ignored storage orientation, did pretty much everything that I was told shouldn't be done with fountain pens. They wrote without a hitch. So I decided to give 'em more of a chance. These have something of a "gliding" feel, kind of like rollerballs. The tips are a bit more-fragile than rollerballs or ballpoints, can damage them by stabbing things. The big drawback: these guys are prone to bleeding through paper; having a sheet of blotting paper or maybe a clipboard beneath when writing to soak up any extra ink is a good idea, unless you've got more control than I do. I did pick up some thicker, more-expensive paper, and that helps a considerable bit, but obviously, if you intend to use only one type of special paper for writing, that's a pretty substantial constraint on pen use. They also tend to be more prone to smearing. Like felt-tips, as long as you keep the nib down, they'll keep dispensing ink, so you gotta train yourself to lift the nib if you're stopping movement. The big selling point with these, as best I can tell, is that you have an extremely wide variety of inks, and using non-disposable fountain pens that permit for refills is very common. Some people mix their own. The inks have various properties -- here's a page talking about sheen, shimmer, and shading -- that can let them create really visually-impressive effects. They can dispense all sorts of exotic inks that wouldn't work well in ballpoint, rollerball, or felt tip pens. I've never taken advantage of this, don't write enough for it, but I do think that it's neat; I have occasionally thought about picking up a fountain pen plotter, but don't think that I'd likely plot enough for it to be worthwhile. Looking at the state of plotters and printer manufacturers, which frequently use a razor and blades model for ink, I think that it'd be nice to just be able to get whatever consumables from whomever.
There are a few other kinds of exotic pens, like fudepens (or "brush pens") that are really more-interesting when doing stuff like East Asian lettering or some kinds of art, but aren't really what you'd want for writing in normal-sized Latin script. Or paint markers; also not really something you'd expect to normally write with.
In general, I found that I preferred larger tips. As long as I don't have to write in a too-confined space, ink flow with ballpoints and rollerballs was more-consistent and with them or felt tips, the writing was smoother.
As a kid, I used to use wood or mechanical pencils, but unless one needs erasability, I don't really feel that they stand up to pens. With wood pencils, one needs to lug around a sharpener. With either, the graphite tends to smear over time; fold up a paper with pencil writing and put it in a pocket, and it'll slowly blur to unrecognizability. And the graphite gets on things (and I'd just as soon not be having electrically-conductive dust being dumped everywhere).
For me, the big issue with going crazy on pens in 2024 is that I just don't use one all that much. Even a lone disposable pen will last me a very long time. But it is nice to still be able to write consistently when one does want to write, and I felt that I'd never really sat down and looked into the various options out there.
Since I think that it's worthwhile to mention relevant communities to help people find them, if they haven't yet:
!fountain_pens@lemmy.world. Doesn't seem to be getting much traction.
!fountainpens@infosec.pub. No traffic.
!pens@lemmy.world. Only a little traffic.
!pens@feddit.uk. No traffic.
There are also some .ml-based communities; I tend to use non-ml-based communities in preference to .ml-based communities myself, but for those who feel otherwise, there are !fountainpens@lemmy.ml, !pens@lemmy.ml, !pen@lemmy.ml, and !pensandpaper@lemmy.ml, none of which are seeing much activity.
A common task people want to perform is running a set of given programs during every Wayland session.
GNOME and KDE have their own approaches and graphical utilities for down this. For those of us who don't use a desktop environment, how about in Sway?
A bit of experimentation appears to show that this syntax is a pretty reasonable way to do this:
# Power notification support
exec_always flock -n $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY-poweralertd poweralertd -s
# Make clipboard persist after application termination
exec_always flock -n $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY-wl-paste wl-paste --watch clipman store
Thought I'd share for anyone else running into this.
For some Sway users, that may be enough. But if anyone wants to read more history, here goes!
Background and rationale:
Once upon a time, it was conventional to have a shell script, ~/.xinitrc
, that was invoked whenever someone started up an X server with startx
after logging in on an (initially) text terminal. Any per-session commands could be invoked here.
Later, when display managers showed up, it became common for a Linux machine to go straight to a graphical display at boot and show a login prompt from there. xdm
showed up; if it was started, it'd run another shell script, ~/.xsession
. A lot of people, including myself, just symlinked ~/.xsession
to ~/.xinitrc
.
Still later, some desktop environments, like GNOME or KDE or some less-popular ones, introduced their own schemes for storing a list of programs to start when the graphical environment came up.
Wayland+sway -- to my initial surprise and annoyance -- isn't really geared up for that. In theory, you can use whatever login manager you want. I use a non-standard login manager -- greetd to launch agreety
(and I'd use emptty if it were in Debian bookworm) which lets me log in on a terminal. But these don't provide functionality to run a startup script. This kind of makes sense -- on X11, once the display manager starts things up, X11 can run programs, whereas Wayland really requires a functioning compositor to be going, which means that Sway really needs to be up and running. So maybe it makes sense for the compositor, Sway, to handle launching startup programs in the graphical environment, rather than the login manager. but Wayland compositors don't have even a semi-convention for a "login script" like ~/.xinitrc
or /.xsession/.xprofile` or an equivalent, which surprised me. That might be because Wayland compositors are heavier than their X11 window manager analogs, and perhaps its less-expected for people to be switching among them.or
What Sway does is to, in its config file, ~/.config/sway/config
, have two directives, exec
and exec_always
. One can make them invoke a script. These can be handy. But they don't quite what I'd ideally like them to do.
You see, Sway -- like some X11 window managers -- has the ability to permit a "reload", where it re-reads its config files. That's handy! If an X11 window manager couldn't do that, when you changed its config file, you'd have to close all your graphical programs, log out, and log in again to confirm that it did what you wanted. You don't have that problem with Sway. You can just change its config file, ask Sway to do a reload, and it'll be "re-applied". And then exec
and exec_always
come into play -- the former will run a program only when Sway initially starts, but not when it does a "reload". The latter will run a command each time, both at Sway start and each time Sway reloads its config file.
For some programs, exec
and exec_always
are sufficient. Maybe you just want to make sure that a program has been run and then terminated at least once in your current session.
But that isn't normally what I want to do. By far my overwhelming need -- and I suspect this is true of others -- is that I want to have some kind of daemon running and persisting in the background of my session.
Some daemons try to be clever. If you try to run multiple instances at once, the new instance will just bail out. blueman-applet
is like this. And if your daemon works like this, then running exec_always
is fine. If you run a new instance and there's an already-running instance, the new one will just bail out.
But some daemons don't -- they just start up another instance. So every time you reload your Sway config, exec_always
will start another instance of that daemon. I have a couple of daemons like that. poweralertd
notifies me when my laptop battery is getting low, for example. If I just let poweralertd
do its own thing and start it via exec_always
, then when my battery gets low, if I've reloaded my Sway config 5 times, I'll have 5 instances running, and get 5 warnings when my battery gets low.
But running exec
isn't ideal either, because then you have to give up on Sway "reapplying" your config when you reload it. If I want to have a new daemon running in the background of my Wayland session, I don't want to have to log out to ensure that my config is working correctly.
Now, at this point, I suspect that a number of people think "Aha! What about systemd?"
So, not everyone is a huge fan of systemd. It is a very large software package that provides a lot of useful functionality to most present-day Linux systems. So you might not want to tie yourself to systemd.
But more-problematic -- while systemd does have the ability to manage both "system" daemons that run one instance per system, typically come up when the system does, and "user" daemons, one instance per user...that isn't quite correct for Wayland. It's reasonable for a user to have multiple concurrent Wayland sessions on a Linux machine. Maybe it might make sense to selectively share some functionality among those, like one mpd
instance to play music -- dunno about that. But you definitely don't want to have random Wayland programs run in each session running one-instance-per-user, because otherwise, any additional Wayland session will have the programs just not come up in that new session.
It looks like some people out there have recognized that this is an issue. uwsm looks to my quick glance at being a stab in the direction of "per-Wayland-session systemd-based management". But whether-or-not it could be used, it's not in Debian bookworm, and I want to use stock software for basic stuff like getting my desktop up on a new system.
Hence, we get to the above flock-based approach.
So, let's say that one wants to have a program like wl-paste
running persistently, but only one per-session. How?
We want to have only one instance running at once. Traditionally, the way to achieve that on a Unix system is to create a file, then establish a "file lock" on it via the flock(2)
function; this is guaranteed by the OS to be an atomic operation, only one can occur. There's a command, flock(1)
, which does all this at one go -- it creates a file if it doesn't exist, establishes a file lock on it, and then, while continuing to run, runs a specified command. When a process goes away, the OS releases the file lock, so when the invoked command (here, wl-paste
) exits, the flock
process exits, and the file lock goes away. By default, flock
will block if there's a lockfile with a held lock, which is what you want if you just want to make sure that two commands wait to avoid interfering with each other but with -n
, it'll just fail; this is the behavior you want if you want to make sure that you have one, but only one, daemon active.
And we want to have one instance per session, not per user. The $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
environment variable provides a temporary directory per-user...but not per session. $WAYLAND_DISPLAY
is guaranteed to be unique per session for a given user. So any path containing both $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
AND $WAYLAND_DISPLAY
is going to be unique per-session; we just need an extra bit of text ("-poweralertd") to make it unique to a given daemon per session.
Given how this wasn't an immediately-obvious approach to me, thought that I'd point it out to anyone else who might be using Sway and want per-session daemons running.
@tal
@lemmy.today