For everyone who wanted to know what a fish would look like if it was a sock puppet, now you know.

Nature’s wild.

Any advantages to this over scp, samba/nfs, or even something like LocalSend?

Oh very neat, that works great! A much better solution.

I know you’re looking for a desktop solution, but here’s something that you can try in case you can’t find one – I’m betting that having a solution is better than having none!

So I just had a quick muck around:

• You can use pgrep to detect if a process with a given name is running
• You can use notify-send (part of the libnotify-bin package) to publish a configurable desktop notification
• You can drop it into a cron job to run it automatically on a schedule

As a test, the following command will look for a process called syncthing and send a desktop notification if it can’t find it:

pgrep syncthing || notify-send "Syncthing is not running"

To set up a cron job:

1. open a terminal
2. run sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y libnotify-bin to install the app that will let you send desktop notifications
3. open the editor with crontab -e (if you need to pick an editor, nano will probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)
4. in the editor, add the following line to the end of the file: 0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || notify-send "Syncthing is not running"
   • The 0 * * * * sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)
   • Everything after that is the command to run
5. save and quit

If you ever want to get rid of it, just open the cron file again (crontab -e) and remove the line.

Good luck, I hope you find what you’re looking for!

[edit] added step (2) to install libnotify-bin in case you don’t have it already.

Hello! I don’t know of a desktop watchdog application that will do this for you, but you may be able to achieve this with a simple cron job. Probably just an hourly crontab entry that looks for a running process with the right name, and uses something like notify-send to send an alert if it’s not found. I’ll jump on the computer and have a quick play, though I run gnome not plasma so I don’t know how well it will translate.

Sure, I would guess that the same goes for just about any contest that can’t be objectively measured.

At least they’re trying to do fun, interesting, and useful. 🙂

Not sure if you’re familiar or not with the Ig Nobel Prize (the “ig”is important - it’s not the same as the Nobel Prize), but it’s a kind of parody-but-not of the Nobel prize. It typically covers off-beat or weird science, to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

It’s about as quirky as the science it covers:

Miss Sweetie Poo, a little girl who repeatedly cries out, “Please stop: I’m bored”, in a high-pitched voice if speakers go on too long

Throwing paper planes onto the stage is a long-standing tradition. For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official “Keeper of the Broom”. Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards because he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.

Calling each subsequent event the “first” is definitely on brand!

I knew what was coming and I looked anyway. I don’t know why, because it will never not make me sad.

Missed opportunity - the hands on the clock should clearly be at the 6 and 9 positions.

Something something South Park, something something Ookie Mouth.

🫠

Don’t know much about the training side of things, but I have Piper set up with home assistant using the Wyoming protocol and it just goes. Some of the out-of-the-box voices are pretty decent too.

This photo confused my brain, which initially thought it was a green screen wall with trees projected onto the upper half as if looking through a VR headset.

Maybe I need to go and touch some grass.