7 ms·

A nobel prize winner in physics, who I had an office across the hall from, once asked me ~10 years ago if I knew how to write ħ in Microsoft word. Unfortunatel

by prpl 5y ago

A nobel prize winner in physics, who I had an office across the hall from, once asked me ~10 years ago if I knew how to write ħ in Microsoft word. Unfortunately, I did not, and I was unable to help him. I was glad he asked me though. I probably should have tried what I just did though, google it, and copy+paste.

codetrotter 5y ago
On my desktop computer that runs Linux, and where I mostly type code and write in English, I use US English as the input and a Dvorak-based layout in hardware that I made for my programmable keyboard. Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. So the few times when I have to type æ, ø or å on that computer, I just Google aelig, oslash or aring respectively and I go to the Wikipedia article about the letter or some other page from the results that has the letter on it and copy it from there. Works well enough given how rarely I type any of those letters on that computer.
- Seredo 5y ago
  You could use US Intl. keyboard layout and use RAlt+z/l/w for æ/ø/å. If you have a QMK Firmware keyboard you could even reprogram it to use Alt + '/;/[ to send these keys and you'll have æ/ø/å in the usual position.
- djokkataja 5y ago
  > and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch Is there a story behind that?
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    One of the reasons is that the computer in question has a problem where suddenly everything completely freezes, and I have to forcibly reboot the computer with the hardware reset button. And sometimes after rebooting I find that files on the file system have become corrupted. Sometimes the machine will run for days without freezing up. Sometimes it can freeze up after just a couple of hours. Sometimes I am browsing the web when it happens. Sometimes I am writing code and compiling stuff when it happens. I think the longest uptime I have had on it after the problem started without it freezing has been maybe 8 days. It’s been like this for a long while. A couple of years at least. And when it freezes it’s not just the UI. It even stops responding to ping. A few months back someone suggested that it may be due to a faulty PSU. But even after changing the PSU to a new one, it still happens. And it’s been happening both with different Linux distros and with FreeBSD. My hardware is: - MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard - AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU - MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics card - Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz 32GB ECC (2x16GB) CT2K16G4WFD8213 RAM I bought those components in March of 2018, according to the order history in my account on the store where I bought it. I don’t remember if I ever did run a memory test, but I will do so again anyways soon because I am suspecting that faulty RAM may be the reason. It just takes a long time to run a memory test on 32 GB of RAM and so whenever I think about needing to run it I don’t have time to do so at that moment. But as I am typing this I realize that I’ve got to go ahead and actually find time for running it soon. Another couple of ideas I’ve had is that maybe the graphics card or the nvidia drivers are to blame. Or that I may have damaged some component with static electricity at some point. Or maybe it’s a thermal issue. I most recently did a fresh install earlier today, and at the same time I switched out the SSD that was in it for another one. As far as I can remember though, I think I was having this kind of problem even before I was using the SSD that I switched out today. But I am not sure about that. So it could be that the SSD was the problem. But it may be a few days until it freezes again if it’s not the reason. Or it could happen in some hours. I’ve also tried to look for clues in /var/log/syslog but haven’t really known what to look for specifically. And since even pinging the machine stops working when it freezes I am not sure the system would even be able to write to any logs at the moment that it freezes, since it seems that at that point pretty much everything has stopped working. Currently I am running tail -F /var/log/syslog in a terminal in the hopes of either seeing something relevant frozen on screen, or in the surrounding output when I reboot the machine since I will then know which line of output I should begin looking in the vicinity of. But yeah, a memory test is the next thing I plan to do after that.
    - d_tr 5y ago
      Some ideas just in case... - Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings. - Regarding the GPU, you could try lowering your PCIe mode to a slower one, especially if you are using a riser cable. - I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit. - What about the quality of the power going into your PSU? - Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands?
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        > Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? Correct. > So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings. Most of the settings in UEFI that I can find about RAM are related to overclocking, and I am not using those features. But it may well be as you say that using ECC RAM with a non-ECC motherboard could cause problems. > I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit. My SATA cables are cheap ones I bought off of eBay. I may try and replace them. > What about the quality of the power going into your PSU? The freezing has happened in all of the different places I have lived during this time, so I don’t so. Unless the power cord could be doing something, but the power cord looks fine on the outside at least. > Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands? Going to try that in the future. Thank you.
        codetrotter 5y ago
        > > Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? > Correct. I should also add to this for the record, that my mistake here was that when I bought the system, I checked to see that Ryzen 7 1700 supports ECC RAM, but that I was unaware that the motherboard also needed to support it in order for ECC to work. Someone in a sibling comment pointed me to some links and gave me some info about some UEFI settings to try along with some kernel boot arguments and I've applied these. Hopefully it will be enough to take care of the issue, or at least to improve the stability a bit. But if the system continues to be unstable then I will probably try and save up a bit of money to replace the RAM that I have with non-ECC RAM instead, or alternatively that I save up money for a new motherboard which supports both ECC RAM and my current CPU as well as being able to host a newer generation of Ryzen CPU that I can then buy further into the future. Also, I went to an electronics store today after reading your comment and bought a new SATA cable that I now use instead of the one that I had.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  It's also worth giving your platform's character map a try if you haven't already. All the major desktop environments have one -- KDE, Gnome, Windows, macOS. Sometimes searching online is still faster, sometimes the character map app is faster.
- fao_ 5y ago
  With the Compose Key, which is a feature of all linux distributions: compose + a + e = æ compose + o + / = ø compose + a + o = å https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key Something I find absolutely criminal is that this hasn't taken off in a broader sense, and that most users memorize the unicode terms for characters like ©, rather than just typing a simple, eminently memorable sequence like (compose + o + c)
  - mkl 5y ago
    A feature of only some keyboard layouts though? Ordinary US layout doesn't seem to have a compose key mapped by default.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      I was thinking they meant "in Emacs" or "on a Macintosh" or something.
    - fao_ 5y ago
      It takes two seconds to map using Gnome Tweaks or something else (Usually XModMap). I map it to right alt which is usually AltGr and not used anyway, and it performs superior to AltGr
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Works for Anglophones. For the rest of us, who have some keys on the right (near the Enter key) occupied by Å, Ä, Ö or similar, we need Alt-Gr to get curly and square brackets, backslash, etc.
  - Moru 5y ago
    Yes, I was so sad when I "upgraded" from Atari to Windows and I could no longer do this. That it's still not standard is a mystery. It wasn't standard on Atari either but that it even was a thing 30 odd years ago shows yet again that we're not always as innovative as we think.
- htns 5y ago
  I'm almost in the same boat, though I use emacs' language-specific input methods for longer texts. The postfix input methods especially work great with Dvorak.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. A backup of your home fir, (or at least all dotfiles in it), etcd running on /etc (or $HOME too), and a list of packages that were installed might go a long way towards making setup after reinstall fairly trivial, and you might no longer feel like some customizations aren't worth it.
- hxtk 5y ago
  Another useful feature is some part of my environment (I've used it in Gnome 3 on both Fedora and Arch, but it doesn't work in RHEL; I'm honestly not sure what part of my stack is providing the feature) lets me pres Ctrl+Shift+U and enter arbitrary unicode. I've memorized the hexadecimal representation for a few common symbols and can enter them into basically any text field.
  - MrDOS 5y ago
    > I'm honestly not sure what part of my stack is providing the feature It's Gtk. Gtk applications on Windows and macOS also use the same keybind to enter characters by Unicode code point. (It's kind of a pain if you use a lot of cross-platform applications, because you end up having to think a bit about what GUI toolkit the application is using before you can type a special character. “Does this one do the native thing or something else?”)
zitterbewegung 5y ago
A Turing award winner needed help during a computational complexity Confrence (technically it was Karps birthday a day before the Confrence started). It was Donald Knuth and I figured out that changing pdf viewers fixed the problem of auto forwarding (instead of acrobat I used preview.app). He also wrote TeX. Video here https://youtu.be/pP2D4DEQBTU?t=146 https://youtu.be/pP2D4DEQBTU?t=146
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
You always have the trusty character map application available on Windows! Great to find characters you don‘t even know the name of.
layer8 5y ago
You typed U+0127, but he probably meant U+210F. Anyway, the answer is to either go the Insert > Symbol route or to type 210F in Word and then press Alt+X, which works since Office XP (released in 2001). Maybe this wasn’t as googlable 10 years ago. An arguably better way nowadays is to install WinCompose.
- prpl 5y ago
  You are totally right. We both knew it was \hbar in latex but could not figure out how to get there on Windows. He was collaborating with somebody on a paper and was not used to having to do so with windows/word (he had a RHEL 5 desktop). He was also 83.

by prpl 5y ago

codetrotter 5y ago

On my desktop computer that runs Linux, and where I mostly type code and write in English, I use US English as the input and a Dvorak-based layout in hardware that I made for my programmable keyboard. Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. So the few times when I have to type æ, ø or å on that computer, I just Google aelig, oslash or aring respectively and I go to the Wikipedia article about the letter or some other page from the results that has the letter on it and copy it from there. Works well enough given how rarely I type any of those letters on that computer.

Seredo 5y ago
You could use US Intl. keyboard layout and use RAlt+z/l/w for æ/ø/å. If you have a QMK Firmware keyboard you could even reprogram it to use Alt + '/;/[ to send these keys and you'll have æ/ø/å in the usual position.
djokkataja 5y ago
> and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch Is there a story behind that?
- codetrotter 5y ago
  One of the reasons is that the computer in question has a problem where suddenly everything completely freezes, and I have to forcibly reboot the computer with the hardware reset button. And sometimes after rebooting I find that files on the file system have become corrupted. Sometimes the machine will run for days without freezing up. Sometimes it can freeze up after just a couple of hours. Sometimes I am browsing the web when it happens. Sometimes I am writing code and compiling stuff when it happens. I think the longest uptime I have had on it after the problem started without it freezing has been maybe 8 days. It’s been like this for a long while. A couple of years at least. And when it freezes it’s not just the UI. It even stops responding to ping. A few months back someone suggested that it may be due to a faulty PSU. But even after changing the PSU to a new one, it still happens. And it’s been happening both with different Linux distros and with FreeBSD. My hardware is: - MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard - AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU - MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics card - Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz 32GB ECC (2x16GB) CT2K16G4WFD8213 RAM I bought those components in March of 2018, according to the order history in my account on the store where I bought it. I don’t remember if I ever did run a memory test, but I will do so again anyways soon because I am suspecting that faulty RAM may be the reason. It just takes a long time to run a memory test on 32 GB of RAM and so whenever I think about needing to run it I don’t have time to do so at that moment. But as I am typing this I realize that I’ve got to go ahead and actually find time for running it soon. Another couple of ideas I’ve had is that maybe the graphics card or the nvidia drivers are to blame. Or that I may have damaged some component with static electricity at some point. Or maybe it’s a thermal issue. I most recently did a fresh install earlier today, and at the same time I switched out the SSD that was in it for another one. As far as I can remember though, I think I was having this kind of problem even before I was using the SSD that I switched out today. But I am not sure about that. So it could be that the SSD was the problem. But it may be a few days until it freezes again if it’s not the reason. Or it could happen in some hours. I’ve also tried to look for clues in /var/log/syslog but haven’t really known what to look for specifically. And since even pinging the machine stops working when it freezes I am not sure the system would even be able to write to any logs at the moment that it freezes, since it seems that at that point pretty much everything has stopped working. Currently I am running tail -F /var/log/syslog in a terminal in the hopes of either seeing something relevant frozen on screen, or in the surrounding output when I reboot the machine since I will then know which line of output I should begin looking in the vicinity of. But yeah, a memory test is the next thing I plan to do after that.
  - d_tr 5y ago
    Some ideas just in case... - Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings. - Regarding the GPU, you could try lowering your PCIe mode to a slower one, especially if you are using a riser cable. - I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit. - What about the quality of the power going into your PSU? - Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands?
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      > Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? Correct. > So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings. Most of the settings in UEFI that I can find about RAM are related to overclocking, and I am not using those features. But it may well be as you say that using ECC RAM with a non-ECC motherboard could cause problems. > I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit. My SATA cables are cheap ones I bought off of eBay. I may try and replace them. > What about the quality of the power going into your PSU? The freezing has happened in all of the different places I have lived during this time, so I don’t so. Unless the power cord could be doing something, but the power cord looks fine on the outside at least. > Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands? Going to try that in the future. Thank you.
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        > > Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? > Correct. I should also add to this for the record, that my mistake here was that when I bought the system, I checked to see that Ryzen 7 1700 supports ECC RAM, but that I was unaware that the motherboard also needed to support it in order for ECC to work. Someone in a sibling comment pointed me to some links and gave me some info about some UEFI settings to try along with some kernel boot arguments and I've applied these. Hopefully it will be enough to take care of the issue, or at least to improve the stability a bit. But if the system continues to be unstable then I will probably try and save up a bit of money to replace the RAM that I have with non-ECC RAM instead, or alternatively that I save up money for a new motherboard which supports both ECC RAM and my current CPU as well as being able to host a newer generation of Ryzen CPU that I can then buy further into the future. Also, I went to an electronics store today after reading your comment and bought a new SATA cable that I now use instead of the one that I had.
nitrogen 5y ago
It's also worth giving your platform's character map a try if you haven't already. All the major desktop environments have one -- KDE, Gnome, Windows, macOS. Sometimes searching online is still faster, sometimes the character map app is faster.
fao_ 5y ago
With the Compose Key, which is a feature of all linux distributions: compose + a + e = æ compose + o + / = ø compose + a + o = å https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key Something I find absolutely criminal is that this hasn't taken off in a broader sense, and that most users memorize the unicode terms for characters like ©, rather than just typing a simple, eminently memorable sequence like (compose + o + c)
- mkl 5y ago
  A feature of only some keyboard layouts though? Ordinary US layout doesn't seem to have a compose key mapped by default.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    I was thinking they meant "in Emacs" or "on a Macintosh" or something.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    It takes two seconds to map using Gnome Tweaks or something else (Usually XModMap). I map it to right alt which is usually AltGr and not used anyway, and it performs superior to AltGr
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Works for Anglophones. For the rest of us, who have some keys on the right (near the Enter key) occupied by Å, Ä, Ö or similar, we need Alt-Gr to get curly and square brackets, backslash, etc.
- Moru 5y ago
  Yes, I was so sad when I "upgraded" from Atari to Windows and I could no longer do this. That it's still not standard is a mystery. It wasn't standard on Atari either but that it even was a thing 30 odd years ago shows yet again that we're not always as innovative as we think.
htns 5y ago
I'm almost in the same boat, though I use emacs' language-specific input methods for longer texts. The postfix input methods especially work great with Dvorak.
kbenson 5y ago
> Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer. A backup of your home fir, (or at least all dotfiles in it), etcd running on /etc (or $HOME too), and a list of packages that were installed might go a long way towards making setup after reinstall fairly trivial, and you might no longer feel like some customizations aren't worth it.
hxtk 5y ago
Another useful feature is some part of my environment (I've used it in Gnome 3 on both Fedora and Arch, but it doesn't work in RHEL; I'm honestly not sure what part of my stack is providing the feature) lets me pres Ctrl+Shift+U and enter arbitrary unicode. I've memorized the hexadecimal representation for a few common symbols and can enter them into basically any text field.
- MrDOS 5y ago
  > I'm honestly not sure what part of my stack is providing the feature It's Gtk. Gtk applications on Windows and macOS also use the same keybind to enter characters by Unicode code point. (It's kind of a pain if you use a lot of cross-platform applications, because you end up having to think a bit about what GUI toolkit the application is using before you can type a special character. “Does this one do the native thing or something else?”)

zitterbewegung 5y ago

A Turing award winner needed help during a computational complexity Confrence (technically it was Karps birthday a day before the Confrence started). It was Donald Knuth and I figured out that changing pdf viewers fixed the problem of auto forwarding (instead of acrobat I used preview.app). He also wrote TeX. Video here https://youtu.be/pP2D4DEQBTU?t=146 https://youtu.be/pP2D4DEQBTU?t=146

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

You always have the trusty character map application available on Windows! Great to find characters you don‘t even know the name of.

layer8 5y ago

You typed U+0127, but he probably meant U+210F. Anyway, the answer is to either go the Insert > Symbol route or to type 210F in Word and then press Alt+X, which works since Office XP (released in 2001). Maybe this wasn’t as googlable 10 years ago. An arguably better way nowadays is to install WinCompose.

prpl 5y ago
You are totally right. We both knew it was \hbar in latex but could not figure out how to get there on Windows. He was collaborating with somebody on a paper and was not used to having to do so with windows/word (he had a RHEL 5 desktop). He was also 83.