who only by moving can balance

(No this is not a proper bug report. No I have not characterised behaviour well enough yet to make one. No that is not a priority this week.)

So. Got a new-to-me laptop on Monday. I decided, for reasons, that I wasn't going to set it up yet, and then somehow ended up with Adam bootstrapping the thing three times over. Some observations: 1. I am. going to have to work to unlearn the Thing I Have Learned on How To Type A Damn Colon (where it's not working reliably on what appears to be a software level, in that ; is always recognised and shift is mostly recognised but the combination is never recognised until I have spent at least fifteen seconds mashing it interspersed with semicolons. this is not the titular bug.) 2. it has a numpad. because Adam was Extremely Pro the concept, which means I can palm it off on him if I decide I hate it, and much as I am firmly at Never Dell Again... good GRIEF I am missing having PgUp and PgDn either side of the up arrow. Did not anticipate that. 3. still extremely getting used to the keyboard layout. 4. I had totally failed to clock that Restoring From Backup would transfer all [mumble]-hundred browser tabs over, and I am feeling extremely ambivalent about this fact.

But. The bug. Okay. So. Bootstrap #2 was because, on round #1, I observed that the hotkeys for screen brightness adjustment worked (in the sense that the Screen Brightness Adjustment Indicator came up, and responded appropriately to input), and also very much did not work (in that the screen brightness did not adjust but was instead set to PERMANENT MAXIMUM YELL). (Observation #5 is that I also really miss the function keys for brightness adjustment being right there.) So I did the obvious thing i.e. installed the nvidia drivers... whereupon! screen brightness toggling worked! and COMPUTER DECIDED TO PERMANENTLY ZOOM EVERYTHING EXTREMELY UNHELPFULLY. Which was the precipitating event for bootstrap #2, because Life Is Too Short to fuck about with replacing nvidia drivers with nouveau when you could just &c.

Today was the first time I actually made use of the damn thing suspending.

You will NEVER GUESS what MAGICALLY AND INEXPLICABLY WORKS once the thing has woken up from suspend.

So that's way more usable than I expected it to be! And maybe I will try to work out what the fuck is going on... next week. sometime. I think I have space in my schedule next week.

(In case you want to play along at home, again with insufficient information to do this properly, and also for my own future reference because the model number is only present on the sticker on the bottom of the damn thing: Lenovo Legion 5 15IMH05, Debian bookworm.)

I was grumbling about LibreOffice Calc the other day! Specifically, about a 22 that had shown up in the middle of the graph in ways that confused and dismayed me!

WELL. Today -- among other things -- I found out how to make it go away and also how I'd got it there in the first place.

To wit: I had apparently single-clicked on the graph (to select it as a whole entire object) and then absent-mindedly started typing 2, which I wanted to enter into the cell I was looking at, but focus still doesn't follow eyeballs and nor do I want it to do so in any way that is not hugely context-dependent.

However. If you single-click on the graph and then just press backspace, the entire graph -- quite reasonably -- gets deleted!

... in order to delete the mysterious and unnecessary palindromic numbers I first had to do some more typing, to get it to enter the fucked-up text-entry mode in the first place, and THEN I could backspace and delete shit.

I... am almost fascinated enough by wtf to go digging around in the LibreOffice code!

kaberett: ... chris
kaberett: chris I have broken everything enough
kaberett: that alt+ctrl+f2
kaberett: doesn't give me a terminal
kaberett: please tell me you're impressed
Chris: ...
Chris: *how.*
Chris: this is the machine you just reinstalled, right?
kaberett: no this is the desktop
Chris: oh ok
kaberett: chris
Chris: so I mean it's possible that xorg.conf contains DontVTSwitch I guess?
kaberett: how did I do this
kaberett: it didn't ought to
kaberett: how do I fix the thing
kaberett: sorry the clarifying point
kaberett: is that it's failing to load the graphical desktop either
kaberett: which is why I'm even trying
kaberett: :-p
Chris: ah
Chris: ..
kaberett: I AM GLAD YOU'RE IMPRESSED
Chris: but I mean, is it showing you some empty/faulty graphical screen which you then can't switch away from, or..?
kaberett: black featureless screen of d00m
Chris: (or something text based I mean)
kaberett: it briefly shows me a text-based login prompt
kaberett: which gets REPLACED
kaberett: by the BLACK FEATURELESS SCREEN
kaberett: never to be seen again
Chris: ...
kaberett: ... there's the additional special
kaberett: (yes there's more)
Chris: those sure are some impressive sharks you've got there.
kaberett: (do you actually want to hear it)
Chris: yes
kaberett: okay so
kaberett: I was fucking around with installing some more xserver-xorg packages
kaberett: on the grounds that the internet suggested that was a reasonable fix for the issue I'm having -- ... was having? -- with saving xorg.conf
kaberett: and nothing obviously broke
kaberett: ... until I went away to the kitchen
kaberett: ... and came back after the screens had gone to sleep
kaberett: ... whereupon um
kaberett: ... they wouldn't wake up again?
kaberett: I got a brief flash of background+mousecursor every time I hit space or moved the mouse enough to trigger
kaberett: ... you're proud
Chris: wtf.
Chris: *applause*

I have managed to come across another "how what no" tech-related thing, and would really appreciate help.

My primary browser is Firefox 22 under WinXP. I also have access to IE8 & the latest version of Chrome.

When I try to load www.tfl.gov.uk (but only www.tfl.gov.uk), Firefox gets as far as loading the page title for the title bar, then sits there saying "transferring data from www.tfl.gov.uk..." forever. Viewing page source reveals... actually sensible page source, it just doesn't appear to be rendering. Other subdomains (e.g. journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk) are apparently unaffected, with nice speedy loading.

Under IE, tfl's home page will eventually load given about twenty minutes. I actually just downloaded Chrome to check, and it is still thinking very hard about the problem after five minutes.

This problem is persistent on this machine across two different Internet connections & providers. In Firefox, I have tried clearing my cache and my cookies and testing in Safe Mode. Using Firefox's Web Console suggests that things start hanging at GET http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-global/scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.14/themes/tfl/jquery.ui.datepicker.css.

I don't understaaaaaaaand.