The minor rants thread.
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@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
No setting to automatically add entire folders to the playlist when you open a file,
What media player are you using where that's a thing? I don't think I've encountered one. Granted my sample size is extremely small...
Let's try Windows Media Player...
The button is clickable! But...
Clicking it does NOTHING!
Maybe I missed the option to enable it?
Weird. Can't find it.
Let's try Groove!
Fuck, all these buttons are clickable, yet the only one that appears to do anything is Play.
No option to "automatically add entire folder to the playlist when open a file" here
Hmm. Maybe it's a Microsoft thing?
Foobar2000?
Nope! Any settings?
Swing and a miss...
Damn, Literally Every Other Media Player has this feature I guess...
Just in case someone accuses me of not using a folder with more than a single media item in it...
Edit: That said, I do wish it would auto-expand added folders instead of having to manually click on them one at a time...
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@TwelveBaud said in The minor rants thread.:
@anonymous234 #1 sounds like you want Irfanview. #2... skipping to the previous frame is hard.MPC-HC did it by keeping all frames back to the last keyframe in memory at all times, which caused it to crash on certain videos I have which have no keyframes beyond the first.
A better approach for this case would be to create a virtual keyframe every, say, 5 seconds.
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@anonymous234 VLC has a playlist. If I click next, I expect it to play the next item in that list, not the “next” file (in some arbitrary order) in the same folder as the current item.
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@anonymous234 If you make a VLC playlist file to point to a folder instead of a file, it will expand the folder when you open the playlist.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:
What media player are you using where that's a thing?
The Windows 10 "Movies & TV" app does it that way.
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@ChaosTheEternal said in The minor rants thread.:
@anonymous234 If you make a VLC playlist file to point to a folder instead of a file, it will expand the folder when you open the playlist.
Alternatively....
Just context-menu-ing the folder and doing this.
Granted it doesn't start with an arbitrary file you chose, but meh. Same effect.
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@ChaosTheEternal said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:
What media player are you using where that's a thing?
The Windows 10 "Movies & TV" app does it that way.
I literally can't get "Movies & TV" to open any local media file. What version are you using?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:
What version are you using?
Windows 10 Pro and Home Version 1903
Movies & TV Version 10.20022.11011.0
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@ChaosTheEternal said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:
What version are you using?
Windows 10 Pro and Home Version 1903
Movies & TV Version 10.20022.11011.0Does it look like this?
I tried: Dragging a file into the window, Open With, .... There weren't any other options in the app besides "Add your whole folder to the library to be scanned", which defeats the point.
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@Tsaukpaetra If I launch it directly, yes.
But when I get it to work as mentioned, I double-click a video file in Explorer (I still have Movies & TV set as the default opener on both of my devices) or use "Open With" from the Explorer context menu (on my tablet, I don't have VLC on my desktop).
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@ChaosTheEternal said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra If I launch it directly, yes.
But when I get it to work as mentioned, I double-click a video file in Explorer (I still have Movies & TV set as the default opener on both of my devices) or use "Open With" from the Explorer context menu (on my tablet, I don't have VLC on my desktop).
Oh. Apparently it only works for video files.
And even then, it doesn't have a list, you just have to assume the file order is as expected and hope for the best.
One point plus, four points minus.
Still a far cry from
@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
a feature that literally every other media player has
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@Tsaukpaetra What on earth are you doing? The feature I was referring to is "playing an item, then clicking next, plays the next item in the folder". The playlist thing is just the workaround I'd need to get VLC to do it.
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@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra What on earth are you doing? The feature I was referring to is "playing an item, then clicking next, plays the next item in the folder". The playlist thing is just the workaround I'd need to get VLC to do it.
Exactly as you describe. Double-click (or drag) a file into target media player. Click Skip Next (or Next Track, or whatever).
Result is as shown.
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@topspin said in The minor rants thread.:
VLC has a playlist. If I click next, I expect it to play the next item in that list, not the “next” file (in some arbitrary order) in the same folder as the current item
Well I have a folder with numbered items and if I play one and click next I expect it to play the one with the next number. So that's one against one.
Yes, the order is "arbitrary" to some extent (although in 99% of cases natural sort would work fine) but since the "add folder to playlist" feature already exists, that's a problem that already has to be solved somewhere else.
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@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
So that's one against one.
Noooo, it sounds like (at least) two against one.
The only media player demonstrated thus far that even works close to what you describe only works for a single type of file (movies) and is worse in literally every other way.
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@Tsaukpaetra That "only media player" is the default video player for Windows, so that adds some weight to it. And MPC-HC also works that way.
WMP certainly works the stupid way, which is probably one of the reasons why nobody liked it even when it wasn't deprecated.
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@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra That "only media player" is the default video player for Windows, so that adds some weight to it. And MPC-HC also works that way.
WMP certainly works the stupid way, which is probably one of the reasons why nobody liked it even when it wasn't deprecated.
I think you'll find the number of "works that way" to "doesn't work that way" apps is staggeringly against your statement that
@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
literally every other media player has
.
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@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
That "only media player" is the default video player for Windows, so that adds some weight to it.
@anonymous234 said in The minor rants thread.:
WMP certainly works the stupid way
I see being the default only matters when you like it. Or was your preferred workflow different before 2012, or something? Will it change again as soon as Windows changes default player again?
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@TwelveBaud said in The minor rants thread.:
Irfanview
I hear so many good things about that, but I can't like it for one basic fact- it opens .lnk files in the context of the folder of the targeted file, not the .lnk's folder (or at least it did when I last tried it a couple years ago). That's backwards of Windows Photo Viewer, my reference program for How Basic Picture Viewers Should Be.
Still wish I could find a replacement for Windows Photo Viewer that doesn't do something wrong enough to put me off.
EDIT: Got the .lnk behavior backwards.
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@topspin said in The minor rants thread.:
@anonymous234 VLC has a playlist. If I click next, I expect it to play the next item in that list, not the “next” file (in some arbitrary order) in the same folder as the current item.
That makes sense, if you're starting out in a playlist context. If you start out with opening a single file, there is no established playlist. And apparently it already creates a playlist in this case, containing only that file.
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@ChaosTheEternal said in The minor rants thread.:
I don't have VLC on my desktop)
I always install it. Because, invariably, I have files encoded in such a way that all the other players fail.
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@PleegWat said in The minor rants thread.:
@topspin said in The minor rants thread.:
@anonymous234 VLC has a playlist. If I click next, I expect it to play the next item in that list, not the “next” file (in some arbitrary order) in the same folder as the current item.
That makes sense, if you're starting out in a playlist context. If you start out with opening a single file, there is no established playlist. And apparently it already creates a playlist in this case, containing only that file.
I wonder if it's possible to extend functionality with a module that a checks if you're at the last item in the playlist and automatically adds items to the end when the next one is requested.
Shouldn't be too difficult I'd assume.
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edit: Actually, better starting point
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:
What media player are you using where [adding an entire folder to the playlist automatically]'s a thing? I don't think I've encountered one. Granted my sample size is extremely small...
MPC-HC doesn't do this, but it does have a convenient "next" button that will take you to the next video, sorted alphanumerically.
e: I probably should've expected to be
ed multiple timese: And posts still don't refresh after editing
e: Except after the second edit...
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@TwelveBaud said in The minor rants thread.:
Given the reaction of the devs to the feature request..... are you sure about that?
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@Vixen Fair. PRs
acceptedavailable to be filed.
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VirtualBox Virtual Media Mangler can DIAF. That is all.
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Bah! My grocery store rewrote their web page and they don't use jQuery any more so I had to rewrite my bookmarklet.
-javascript:$('#coupon').click(); +javascript:document.querySelectorAll('.button--blue-dashed-border').forEach( b => b.dispatchEvent(new Event('click')))
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
VirtualBox Virtual Media Mangler can DIAF. That is all.
This. What the fuck is the point?
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Windows XP recovery can read the borked partition and access every single file in the image VBox helpfully fucked up.
gparted barks "Cannot have partition outside of disk", as if I give a fuck what it cannot have.
Windows 7 based recovery tells me the disk is not writeable, so yeah, it found some problems, hth hand!
Windows Ten-nic based recovery disks just hang with black screen before even getting to any recovery.
1909 Ten-nic boots after 5 minutes of doing fuck all, looks at the disk intently for five more minutes, then says the old funny "parameter is incorrect" and also hangs.Innit modern tecknology noice?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
Windows XP recovery can read the borked partition and access every single file in the image VBox helpfully fucked up.
That's actually impressive.
gparted barks "Cannot have partition outside of disk", as if I give a fuck what it cannot have.
May I interest you in our lord and savior TestDisk in case such a screw-up happens again?
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@aitap said in The minor rants thread.:
May I interest you in our lord and savior TestDisk in case such a screw-up happens again?
Thank you. Currently copying stuff to another disk, but I may need it yet. There's another image I haven't the foggiest how its MBR got corrupted.
And another one I lost the DEK for, by simply removing it from the machine. Poof, gone! It can warn me about missing images, duplicate UUIDs, everything but whether I would like to reconsider losing the data after all. Anybody got the NSA helpline number handy?
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@djls45 said in The minor rants thread.:
I have a reminder in Outlook (Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus) for a calendar item every Friday morning.
The reminder will pop up every week on Thursday evening as almost appropriate, except that it always says "6 days ago" for the scheduled time. And when I dismiss it, the reminder pops back up within a few seconds. It will not allow the reminder to disappear unless I manually engage the delay to "remind me again in " <x> amount of time or I dismiss it after the time scheduled for that event this week.
I've tried every method I could find to reset the calendar's events, cache, etc. short of deleting and recreating the event, but nothing has worked so far. I can't remove the event because it was created by management, and even if I were to tell them and they recreated it, I'm not sure that the problem wouldn't persist.
It probably isn't an issue with the appointment itself; it's probably a bug in how Outlook or the mail server are calculating the next reminder time. Mail servers generally don't create separate entries for each occurrence of a recurring appointment - at least they don't communicate as if there is a separate record for each occurrence. Rather, there is a single record for the entire series with a recurrence rule that is used to calculate everything after the first occurrence. This means that there is only one alarm defined for the entire series which gets updated when you snooze or dismiss a reminder for an occurrence.
Of course, if this is on a shared or domain calendar, then things get hairy.
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@Applied-Mediocrity How about Easeus? That's been my go-to recovery program for Windows.
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@djls45 Hard to say. I will add it to the list of tools to consider. Its boot disk is still WinPE based, probably Win Ten-nic these days, too, so I wouldn't place any bets. I tried several WinPE disks (wouldn't recall the exact names anymore). And I didn't consider any Linux-based installations to handle NTFS any better given that the latest gparted couldn't.
I wonder, however, what exactly went wrong with it? Given that I recovered all files, the filesystem itself must have been fine. IBM PC DOS MBR is relatively simple. Well, there's likely more than enough stupid proprietary legacy edge cases, but, I mean, even the partition type byte was correct. Assuming gparted was right, either the number of sectors or the last sector was too large, falling outside the physical disk boundaries. That Windows built-in recovery declared the disk non-writeable might have been the result of it trying to access past the end maybe.
Hindsight is 2020, but I would have expected folks to foresee that the partition geometry may go screwy (for example, during an attempted resize) and handle it so that if there's just one partition record or it's the last one (t.i., others end before its first sector), adjust it so the partition ends where the disk ends, and if there's more partitions, it ends where the next one starts. I don't see any immediately obvious harm in that. Bark loudly, maybe refuse to boot, if it's active, but don't frickin' hang. XP probably worked just because it doesn't have any sanity checks at all.
I wonder if GPT may have been better. It's got a backup table at the end of the disk. The disk I copied stuff is still MBR. Living dangerously, living
.
Or there was a bug in VBox VMDK handling. Blaming Oracle can not be overlooked.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
the partition geometry may go screwy (
I remember some project that creates a disk image that holds several technically overlapping filesystems on it, and a hybrid ISO is literally this.
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@Tsaukpaetra Is one of those how the Mechwarrior 2 CD was both a computer CD that contained the game installer and files and also an audio CD that could play in a regular CD player?
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@djls45 said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra Is one of those how the Mechwarrior 2 CD was both a computer CD that contained the game installer and files and also an audio CD that could play in a regular CD player?
Not technically. Those simply contain the audio tracks and data track, and some metadata that the computer reads to know which is what.
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@djls45 This is more like "The disc has both an ISO 9660 partition and a UDF partition, which both store the same files in the same places on disc, but when the UDF partition header is written out, it's done in such a way that ISO9660 considers it a super-hidden file."
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status: how hard can it possibly be to execute a trivial reproduction case?
I may not be being overly explicit, but the steps are simple: create any VM in the interface, start it, click the "serial connection" button. See error.
Could you not spend 26.8 seconds trying it out before telling me to prove it? What the fuck?!?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Was writing my angry tirade in the minor rants thread
Alright. So... free trials can go die in a fire. And not [only] because it's a braindead kind of trick companies do hoping I'll forget to cancel.
So, there's ITV Hub+, for example. One can create an account from anywhere in the world. It just asks for a valid UK postcode for whatever stupid reason. Regulatory, I guess. Well, one more from *googles Buckingham Palace* SW1A 1AA. But just an account is pretty useless, because geolocation.
Now, geolocation clamps can be partly loosened by Hub+ subscription, which is said to cover Europe (whatever that means exactly). For that you have to provide a valid UK card number. Yada-yada, ITV somehow does not have international broadcasting loicense for its own shows, fuh-fuh-fuh. A proper UK bank account is bloody difficult to get (legal residence is required), so that seems like a safe bet.
Except there's virtual card providers such as Revolut, which can issue a card that appears to be UK, but doesn't really exist. Apparently Netflix, ITV and the lot of them up until not very long ago were none the wiser. That is, I'm told, until those virtual cards were issued for free in great numbers and crafty fuckers got to scamming infinite free trials. So now these virtual cards are blacklisted.
Well, that's some wasted time today. I wasted more writing this tirade, of course, but that's not the point, right?
The thing is, I don't even fucking want any fucking free fucking trial. Why don't you fuckers charge the money right away? I'd be perfectly alright paying for at least one month to see if it works alright. I don't even see the option. It's the free crap or lolgf.
Fuck this new age internet business of free handouts
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@Applied-Mediocrity Sounds like a lot of effort to view ITV shows. What's even good on ITV these days?
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@loopback0
Promised mums to look into finding The Durrells in something better than eye-test-for-bats readily available to world + dog on the high seas. I've read two of Gerald's Corfu books a couple times over when I was a kid, and about travels around Argentina, too, so I kind of wanted to see how they fucked it up. I stopped after the first two (and a half) episodes myself, though. It's far more family-sentimentally-lovey-mushy focused 
. Well, I guess it had to be, otherwise anyone who might possibly watch ITV wouldn't bother indeed.
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@loopback0 said in The minor rants thread.:
Sounds like a lot of effort to view ITV shows.
Any effort to do that would seem to be too much in my book, so yes.
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Yesterday I updated my Linux machine (plugged into my TV). The year of Linux on the desktop is definitely here!
It updated the kernel, but it turns out that the Nvidia (legacy) driver that I need no longer works (compiles) with the newest kernel (because the kernel decided to mark some symbols GPL-only and of course some of those are used by the module). Said kernel is very new (moved out of Debian/experimental less than 10 days ago, I think?), so I'm willing to be generous and assume it'll be fixed in a couple of days.
Except that the latest version of the Nvidia module has in its Debian changelog a mention of that issue ("The [...] module will fail to build for Linux 5.8 due to licence incompatibility unless [a change] gets reverted in Linux 5.8 or NVIDIA switches the [...] module license", yeah, good luck with that...). So it's a known issue, but the update process still tries to install it. I mean, it's not like Debian has a whole extremely complicated version managing system that could allow one package to block another package, so when it's known that one package (kernel 5.8) is going to break another, the normal solution is to go ahead and update it and let the user deal with it.
I thought this might be a good occasion to try (once more... I do that about once every year or two) to switch to nouveau and be done with proprietary stuff and headaches like the above. The switch went on seamlessly (
) but somehow nouveau was unable to do more than 1024x768 through HDMI on my TV. I know my 
is growing and I might need glasses one day, but that's still a bit too much for me...So I ended up removing the current kernel package so I'm now stuck on a slightly older version, which is compatible with the Nvidia driver. And since I will forget about this it's almost guaranteed that it'll come back to bite me in a few months when that version will become obsolete and I won't understand why it has stopped updating it.
All of the above is just a simplified final summary, of course, not the whole story as it unfolded, because trying to find information when all you've got is a text terminal that shows 5 lines at a time (slight exaggeration) or a GUI in 1024x768 isn't smooth sailing (have you tried googling a lengthy error message when you have to type it by hand in your phone?).
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@djls45 said in The minor rants thread.:
@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
Gah! Lately I am nearly incapable of typing words with
tionin them correctly the first time. I keep typingiton.We have one of those that got into our codebase:
getAnonymousDefiniton().
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@remi said in The minor rants thread.:
So I ended up removing the current kernel package so I'm now stuck on a slightly older version, which is compatible with the Nvidia driver. And since I will forget about this it's almost guaranteed that it'll come back to bite me in a few months when that version will become obsolete and I won't understand why it has stopped updating it.
You didn't say which distro you're on, but I've ranted about this previousy regarding Kubuntu 18.04. I have a similar situation. The key for me was to (re-)install
xserver-xorg-legacy-hwe-18.04. There was an update where that got removed somehow. I'm always a bit apprehensive when the kernel updates now, but they seem to have figured out that they shouldn't be uninstalling that.
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@boomzilla I'm on Debian, none of that Debian-for-children stuff for me!
As far as I understand it, I have one meta-package for the kernel itself (I don't remember if it's
kernel-image-amd64orlinux-kernel-amd64orlinux-image-amd64or... whatever, you get it), which gets updated whenever a new kernel is released (by Debian), and the new version of that package installs the actual kernel itself (so recentlykernel-image-amd64got updated to version5.8.scoobydooand that automatically installed the actual 5.8 kernel through packagekernel-image-amd64-5.8or something similar).For the Nvidia module, I have one package
nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver(I think?) that also automatically pulls in a bazillion of other packages. But at the core, it's the source code of the module and installing that packages automatically recompiles the actual binary module using something fancy called "dkms" (whatever that is, I don't care).So my solution was to remove
kernel-image-amd64-5.8which is the faulty kernel (Debian keeps the last 3 installed kernels by default, so I also have 5.5 and 5.4 installed). The worry for me is that doing so also removedkernel-image-amd64(the meta-package), meaning that when new kernels are released I won't get the new version of that package and thus the kernel that comes with it. Which is want I want right now, so I should be happy, but of course who knows how I'll feel about it 6 months from now?Of course the "easy" solution would be for someone (Nvidia, Debian, I don't care) to release a new version of
nvidia-legacy-390xx-driverthat fixes the issue. If that ever happens I just need to reinstallkernel-image-amd64which will pull whatever the current kernel is at that time and all worries will be forgotten, like butterflies on the wind (???). There are apparently some patches floating around so that's probably technically feasible, but I have no idea how it stands GPL-ishly, since that's the core of the issue (probably badly, knowing the GPL).Tl;dr: thanks, but actually that probably doesn't help me.
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@remi ah, yes, the HWE stuff seems like a 'buntu invention. :-P
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@BernieTheBernie said in The minor rants thread.:
@djls45 said in The minor rants thread.:
@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
Gah! Lately I am nearly incapable of typing words with
tionin them correctly the first time. I keep typingiton.We have one of those that got into our codebase:
getAnonymousDefiniton().
Is this refering to anything in particular?
