Monthly Archives: May 2026

geek stuff, linux-maintenance

okay, this is weird…

i came across a music-blog that i follow, which posted the first four albums by PiL, a band which i have been enamoured of since the late 1970s, so, of course, i downloaded it.

i already had one of the four albums, “First Issue”, because it has one of my all-time favourite songs — Religion (parts I and II) — contained on it, but these are .flac versions, and i previously only had .mp3 versions, which are not as good. the .mp3 tracks were stored in a folder labeled “public image ltd”, and, when i got the other three albums, i figured why not actually change the folder to more accurately represent the name of the band, so i changed it to “Public Image Ltd.”

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY the “public image ltd” folder DISAPPEARED… it was as though i had taken the entire folder and dumped it into the “Recycle” bin. in fact, that was the first place i looked for it — i’ve got a left-handed mouse, but the heel of my right hand (the one that i lose track of, from time to time) is RIGHT OVER the “Delete” key, and i frequently hit it by accident — but it wasn’t there…

hmmm… i wondered… what could have happened to it? so, of course, the first thing i tried was the “file lookup” button (which has always been pretty much un-findable on ANY version of mac or windoze that i have EVER used) and searched for “public”… and there were a whole bunch of folders that were IN the folder that i had just re-named, so i chose one of those, and looked at the file path, and discovered that it was in a folder called “PJCKO4~H” (or something like that). “this is odd”, i thought, so i moved to that folder and renamed it “Public Image Ltd.”, and i got this warning which said “renaming this folder will overwrite the folder you already have called “Public Image Ltd.” do you really want to do this?”

this is NOT NORMAL computer behaviour, i thought… as i clicked “NO”… so i moved one level closer to ‘/’ and learned that, indeed, the folder was named “PJCKO4~H” (or something like that), so i tried renaming it again, and got an identical warning, which i sort of half expected this time… then i remembered some early lessons in the unix file system i got back when i was still working at software.com, which was that best practice was not to use file-names that end with a period, for some as-yet-unremembered reason, and that doing so would result in weirdness with the file, later on.

so, instead, i named the folder “Public Image Ltd”, and, sure enough, that folder showed up right away. my recollection, now that i think about it, is that i discovered the same thing when i originally created the folder “public image ltd”, shortly after the cloud-drive crack of 2021… and, i promptly forgot that it was a problem shortly thereafter, because there were more pressing things to worry about. but this time, i am probably going to sniff around internet until i find an explanation for WHY you shouldn’t end a file-name with a period, because it is PROBABLY going to be both simple and stupid.

260522 UPDATE: it is, in fact, simple and stupid… which is to say that it’s a problem entirely caused by micro$not. the file system used by linux (and, by extension, mac), EXT2 (i believe), allows me to make a folder which ends with a period, without a problem… the problem comes when i try to move that folder on to a file system that windoesn’t can access, over samba. i don’t know what that file system even is, any longer, because it has been that long since i have voluntarily dealt with windoesn’t, but what it comes down to is that, under windoesn’t, you can’t end a folder name with a period because they’re not actually folders, in the way you think of a physical folder: instead, they are special files, whose file extension is suppressed by the operating system. everything in windoesn’t reverts back to a state where the file names are eight characters followed by a period and a three character file extension, so ending a folder name with a period freaks out windoesn’t and it defaults to an 8+3 format.

thus proving that quote that i’ve had in my database of email quotes for a long time, now: A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. — John Walker 😒

i am a terrorist

then there’s this…

i’ve seen more and more teslas with stickers that say things like “ANTI-ELON TESLA CLUB” or “I BOUGHT THIS CAR BEFORE I REALISED HE WAS CRAZY” and things like that…

it’s like @DamnYouWillis says, it sounds like “ANTI-JOKER JOKERMOBILE CLUB”. 😒

i really want to make a sticker that says “IF YOU CAN AFFORD TO BUY A TESLA, YOU CAN AFFORD TO DUMP A TESLA!” but the problem is, as far as i can tell, only people who CAN’T afford to buy teslas would buy them, AND surreptitiously putting a sticker ON someone else’s tesla means dealing with the 360° cameras that send images to some unknown location. 😒

budgies, diverticulitis, moe

oh yeah… this…

two of the budgies — the ones that came from ian — apparently are unsymptomatic carriers of a disease that, when disease-free birds are in their presence, bad things happen to the disease-free birds. and, apparently, more than 40% of pet birds are unsymptomatic carriers… apparently, they have only recently determined that this disease exists, which means that they don’t know very much about it, yet, and testing for it means sending samples to a testing lab… so, we gave the two birds back to ian, after losing one of our own budgies, and almost losing another one. at this point, we’ve got two “baby” birds, grover and fozzie, and one remaining bird from the disease fiasco, bert, but bert has been in isolation for a few days. ernie and bert were the ones that went back and forth from work, with moe, but, with ernie dead, that whole scene has been disrupted.

the whole dog-training facility scene is scheduled to reach its current climax the last week of may, and moe has been overwhelmed with emails, and phone calls, and meetings, and this, that, and the other thing in preparation. she’s kind of got to hit the ground running at a speed faster than she can run, because she’s got to start IMMEDIATELY making about three times as much money as the business has been bringing in, because the former owners have been paying on a mortgage that was put in place 20 years ago, and moe is paying on a mortgage that was put in place yesterday. to start out with, that means putting more classes on the schedule, but all of the infrastructure to do that, including the class instructors, is in flux, because the old owners are retiring and moe hasn’t taken possession yet. it sounds as though moe knows what she’s doing, and has everything under control, but there’s a lot of running around, shouting, and arm-waving going on, which makes me (who is only vaguely informed about all of this) kind of nervous.

i’m still thinking that i’m probably going to have another flare-up of diverticulitis, eventually, but it hasn’t happened, yet, which is also making me kind of nervous.

i wrote to proto-pipe llc about my pipe which the stem broke off of, and they said that they can fix it for me, so i’ve got it all packaged up and ready to ship out tomorrow. i have another one, but it is brand new from the manufacturer, never even been unwrapped, and i want to keep it pristine.

oh, also, my “left-handed” mouse started acting like it was possessed by demons, so i got another, right-handed mouse, went to “System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse” and chose “Left handed mode”, and, by gum, it works! fuck the more expensive, demon-possessed mouse that was “made for left-handers”! i got a perfectly good, 3-button mouse for $10 that works just fine!