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any robocaller blocking answering machines?
by CAREY SCHUG 30 Aug '25

30 Aug '25

When I do a web search, I find devices "preloaded with xxx thousand numbers" or room for me to add xxx thousand numbers, but IME, spam/robo calls never come from the same number twice, so that is a waste of me pressing the "block call" feature. I want an answering machine including multiple cordless phones, and maybe that will connect to bluetooth to handle mobile calls too, that will: 1. if the number is in my local directory (names I have saved as friends), act like a normal answering machine: wait 2-6 rings (selectable) while ringing all my cordless phones with the "friend" ringtone and maybe saying the name, and then answer and take a message. (This would be a short, casual, friendly message) "Hi, it's <my name>, please leave a message" 2. If the callerid is an actual name, act like a normal answering machine: wait 2-6 rings while ringing all my cordless phones with a "stranger" ringtone and saying the name. If I don't pick up, answer with a formal business-like message: "You have reached 847-333-4444, the phone of Carey Schug. He is away or busy at the moment. After the tone, please leave your name, number, and purpose for your call." 3. If the callerid is "PRIVATE", "UNKNOWN", "TOLL FREE CALL", "CELLULAR CALL", "WIRELESS CALLER", or "ILLINOIS CALL" (which can be programmed for different local service providers' defaults), answer immediately with "hello" and wait a second. A real person, admittedly including some spammers, will respond immediately. A robocaller will have a 2-second delay until they connect their end to a person, so my device will hang up. If there is an immediate voice response, record it, then when they pause, respond "please wait while I locate <my name>" and continue ringing my phone(s), with an "anonymous" ringtone. 4. If I pick up, play the message it recorded and give me the options --connect live --play a message to "remove me from your phone list and do not call back" and hang up --respond as if I did not pick up (below 5. After a while, if I do not pick up, return to the caller and say "<my name> is not available. if are you happy with the message you left, just hang up, or press 1 to leave no message, or press 2 to record a new message." 6. bonus #1 (maybe). Long ago, I saw (or had?) a phone which had a button, press it and it would emit the tones the phone company uses to indicate a non-working number, purportedly would cause the spammers to remove the number from their list. Maybe that doesn't work anymore, as I have not seen it as a listed feature. I think I have recently gotten a special tone when I called a non-working number. 7. bonus #2: let me record a special message for a specific number, e.g. Sam is coming over today, so for Sam ONLY, a message plays "I may be 15 minutes late getting home, please wait for me." 8. bonus #3: like bonus #2, but for names in my directory in a group, e.g. family members or members of a club, the message could be "our next gathering is Sunday at 4 PM". 9. the special messages above should be selectable to be for 24 hours or until I delete them. Or maybe till the person calls. Carey

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Do you recognized valid email addresses? NO, you do not.
by Ron 29 Aug '25

29 Aug '25

For everyone complaining that $tech is too complicated or makes no sense (I'm guilty sometimes), here's a fun quiz to test your knowledge about something simple - email address formats. A tip when going into this, "Valid" can mean "Was Once Valid per RFC". https://e-mail.wtf/ > I scored 12/21 on https://e-mail.wtf and all I got was this lousy text > to share on social media. What's your score? 100% == liar Bonus: https://jsdate.wtf/ > How well do you know JavaScript's Date class? Worth looking at even if not interested in JS. I forget my score on that one, but it wasn't great.

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(Sort of off topic) High School courses
by William Park 28 Aug '25

28 Aug '25

Does anyone know how High School courses are selected? I don't think Ministry of Education staffs write the textbooks, exercises, and curriculum. They probably review it and stamp approval. Because I have an idea for a course at K-12 market.

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lighttpd problem with systemd configuration file
by Michael Galea 28 Aug '25

28 Aug '25

Hi All, Around late spring the cgi-bin components of web pages I wrote started failing under lighttpd with what looked like permission problems. After much debugging I tracked the problem down to a configuration file lighttpd installs for systemd, namely /lib/systemd/system/lighttpd.service which is symlinked by /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/lighttpd.service. The lighttpd developers added a configuration parameter (ProtectHome=read-only) that completely disables cgi-bin access. My problem is that the file is not treated by lighttpd as a configuration file, the next install of lighttpd ( I use Debian) rewrites the file. This behavior seems puzzling to me as lighttpd went to a lot of trouble to support cgi-bin and the debian package is disabling it every update. Does anyone know of a work-around? -- Michael Galea

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let's be a bit more polite
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 27 Aug '25

27 Aug '25

Recently several messages struck me as too heated and too directed at people. It's great to disagree but be respectful when doing so, Don't attack people. We do have a code of conduct <https://www.gtalug.org/?page_id=14>

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Linux distros for specific goals?
by Karen Lewellen 26 Aug '25

26 Aug '25

Speaking of interesting ideas..perhaps, I have a question. Given how many many Linux distributions exist, I am wondering if it is say a basic aspect of the os to be scripted for specific goals? For example a distribution that combines tools important to accounting, or home security or music making or so forth? Karen

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narrow/condensed monospace font?
by CAREY SCHUG 26 Aug '25

26 Aug '25

1. Recommendations for a more-characters-per-inch monospace font, preferably sans serif? 2. Is there an editing program that I could take a font I like and with just a few clicks make a narrower version of all the characters? Back in Windows days, many fonts just came in multiple versions including "narrow" or "condensed". I have a table where I want to get the maximum information in an area (spreadsheet cell), but I want to have columns line up, and there are too many columns to have each in it's own cell (plus I need to move or edit one line at a time, including adding/removing lines Carey

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getting back space from snap
by CAREY SCHUG 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

my root partition has been skirting full for months. I found a 1.4 gb snap for kde support. kf6-core24 supposedly deleteing a snap warns me if there are dependencies. actually I deleted a couple of programs i installed that did not like and never use first, but it took the delete command without complaint. going to the snapd directory shows the file is not there. i emptied trash (did not see any large files in trash). that graphical display of used space shows it gone from \var\lib\snapd\snaps no change for a while, but now my root partition is 98% full per df -k this was 20 minutes ago, i think it takes a while to reclaim space from deleted files, but this long? from system monitor, there is no task doing disk writes except intermittantly, but maybe cleanup isn't included (that would be a MAJOR deficiency if so). I'm guessing somebody will tell me I have to reboot, but why did none of the instructions on the internet say that? and since I was allowed to delete all the snaps that should imply none were in use, so why would a reboot be needed? Carey

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fish vs bash: a progress bar from YSAP and some timing measurements
by Ron 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

Thanks, Evan, for bringing fish shell to my attention. I'm really liking it - it's just what I needed and didn't even know it. So, I'd mentioned it feeling faster, which William commented on. Thanks William, you got me thinking. "Feels faster" ≠ "is faster" and I thought I'd measure something. And along comes Dave from YSAP with a great video on how to make a progress bar in bash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL3xdQyMs5o I love his videos, he's highly knowledgeable and quite engaging. He make bash scripting look fun. I decided to implement his idea without too much peeking at the solution, then re-implement it in fish. Despite me saying earlier that I'd probably continue scripting in bash. The fish syntax is *so much better*. When I went to add a feature to the bash script, once again I got caught up in punctuation hell, where fish mostly eschews that inscrutable mess for things like: $ math "10 * 5 / 100" 0.5 Note the floating point math... When done, I ran them both with the `time` command, and bash version was consistently faster (results at bottom of message). However, if one takes into account dev time, fish is faster despite it being new to me. So it depends on how you rank run time vs dev time which is "faster", but I'm giving the win to fish in this case. Adding to that the luxurious interactive features and it's a no-brainer: fish is the (my) future. The tab-completion is light years ahead of bash (but so is the tab completion in node.js, bash is kind of lagging behind here these days). $ time ./progress-bar.bash START: files count: 500 Batch size: 3 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] 500/500 (100)% ________________________________________________________ Executed in 1.04 secs fish external usr time 115.62 millis 545.00 micros 115.08 millis sys time 58.08 millis 214.00 micros 57.87 millis $ time ./progress-bar.fish START: files count: 500 Batch size: 3 [ ] 500/500 (100)% ________________________________________________________ Executed in 1.50 secs fish external usr time 490.80 millis 0.00 micros 490.80 millis sys time 148.81 millis 760.00 micros 148.05 millis

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Re: [kwlug-disc] fish vs bash: a progress bar from YSAP and some timing measurements
by Ron 23 Aug '25

23 Aug '25

Ron wrote on 2025-08-23 00:28: > The fish syntax is *so much better*. I'm reminded of how nginx came along and really took a lot of install base from Apache. Is it because it's faster? Maybe; debatable on equivalent work loads (from my understanding). Is it because the configuration syntax is much cleaner, clearer, legible, and sane? I think so. One quirk I've encountered is in passing an array to a function and accessing it as a variable. This may be due to a failure to understand something on my part, but I don't think so. Functions are defined something like this (formatting for personal preference only): ``` #!/usr/bin/env fish function myfunc \ --description "This appears in tab-completion hints" \ -a my_arr echo -e "Inside myfunc \$my_arr has $(count $my_arr) item:\n $my_arr" echo -e "Inside myfunc \$argv has $(count $argv) items:" set -l i 1 for arg in $argv echo " $i/$(count $argv): \$argv[$i]: $argv[$i] (or \$arg: $arg)" set i (math $i + 1) end ## printf "myfunc argv passed: %s\n" $argv end ## In bash, ** requires `shopt -s globstar` ## and `shopt -s nullglob` lest one gets either the string "./**/*.cache" ## if no matches or something else unwanted (I forget) set files (ls ./**/*.cache) echo "Found $(count $files) files in a test array" ## Indexing starts at 1 (yay!): myfunc $files[1..5] $ ./test2.fish Found 500 files in a test array Inside myfunc $my_arr has 1 item: ./baz/delme-100.cache Inside myfunc $argv has 5 items: 1/5: $argv[1]: ./baz/delme-100.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-100.cache) 2/5: $argv[2]: ./baz/delme-101.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-101.cache) 3/5: $argv[3]: ./baz/delme-102.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-102.cache) 4/5: $argv[4]: ./baz/delme-103.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-103.cache) 5/5: $argv[5]: ./baz/delme-104.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-104.cache) ❰uid1❙~/utils/ysap-bash/progress-bar❱ ✔ ≻ ``` So, passing in an array and capturing the entire array in a local variable does not (seem to) work. However, that array is accessible as $argv, so ... that's okay. I do like that indexing starts at 1 - that's great!

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