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Hi. I was @mikemccracken.

I do Linux and container stuff at Cisco for work. In a past life I did HPC & architecture research

Northern Californian

Stale bloghttp://michael-mccracken.net
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/mikemccracken
Githubhttps://github.com/mikemccracken

The other day I was wishing for an option in a grep-like tool that would show me nothing and exit immediately if there were no hits, but show me the full file in a pager with the hits highlighted if there were hits...

That's how I discovered `less -p <pattern>` which is *good enough* and I wish I'd known about it many years ago

Here's the first published video of my FOSDEM talks, about native OCI support in systemd:

https://video.fosdem.org/2026/ua2118/ZKKQWC-native_oci_container_support_in_systemd.av1.webm

two more to come, stay tuned.

#systemd #fosdem #fosdem2026

@b0rk thanks for working on this, it's great to see work on improving docs for such a well used tool.

I saw your email thread viewer used jwzthreading, and just in case it comes in handy - long ago I also wrote something using that, and there is a bug in that library that loops forever with some threads that end up having cycles. The original repo never got the fix, but I see there's a version at https://github.com/FreeDiscovery/jwzthreading that handles the case I found correctly.

GitHub - FreeDiscovery/jwzthreading: Implementation of the JWZ threading algorithm for e-mail or newsgroup messages.

Implementation of the JWZ threading algorithm for e-mail or newsgroup messages. - FreeDiscovery/jwzthreading

GitHub
@ccgus Yep
This is the worst job market for junior programmers *ever*. History teaches that people whose hopes have failed look for someone to blame, so if we don't explain how the world works *in ways that angry young men will actually listen to*, many of them will embrace Musk/Thiel/alt-right ideology. https://third-bit.com/talks/sdgc/ is my thoughts on what we might teach and how; feedback as email to [email protected] is welcome. (Please don't thread here.) Thanks in advance.
Cocaine and Conway's Law

Here's a good trick if you ever need to paste an image into a PDF with OS X preview - it doesn't work the obvious way, but there's a hack:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/378888/add-images-to-existing-pdf-with-preview

Add images to existing PDF with Preview

Preview allows to add text and shapes to PDFs. But is it possible to add existing images (PNG / JPEG) to a PDF file as well? I do know that Preview already has some of image embedding by allowing ...

Ask Different

I'm having to clear out my home office for a big move, and I had to just chuck a bunch of textbooks and manuals that I'd been keeping out of nostalgia, basically.

If I still worked in an office, I'd have just left the Unix-Hater's Handbook in the break room for some laughs, but sadly no one around here wants it.

I kept the UNIX barf bag it came with though.

@b0rk this is really good. I didn't know about `which -a` - there's always something still to learn.

I don't know if it's worth adding zsh-specific things, but when I was using zsh I really liked the interactive editing of variables like path via e.g. `vared path`, or append to it with just `path+=newdir`

Being able to just edit the variable and not have to remember to include its previous value, etc. was nice.

today I learned about emacs dired's "dired-omit-mode" in the most frustrating way possible, trying to figure out why files that end in .bin were not being generated. Took me so long to just try looking for them in a shell...

Say Hello to Acorn 8: https://shapeof.com/archives/2024/12/say_hello_to_acorn_8.html

Mask Subject, Remove Background, LUTs, Data Merge, Quick Processor, Canvas Ruler, new shape tools, Export Presets, SVG improvements, QOL things, in/cm support in all the UI, Shortcuts rewritten to use App Intents, JPEG-XL support, Live Text. And more.

It's on sale for a limited time, so grab it at a discount while you can: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Acorn is one of the few remaining independent full featured image editors left, built just for macOS.

Say Hello to Acorn 8