[tlug] So-called "locale" problems in Thunderbird

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

I am trying to get a Ubuntu system usable, for which I need the 
mailreader to show dates in ISO order (2020-12-31 etc). As always I am 
enmired in a Kafkaesque fog of confusion (theirs, not mine) between 
languages, places, and date formats. I understand that I cannot expect 
to specify a date format, but have to do some "locale" nonsense; my 
general strategy, which seems to be quite standard, actually, is to 
pretend to be somewhere called "English-in-Denmark". This gets most 
things OK; it tends to mean that spreadsheets use the continental 
"decimal comma", but I can live with that. I have a copy of Thunderbird 
working on another computer, but it's about 12 versions older, so there 
is no correlation that I can find between the "Preference" settings on 
the two systems.

Here's the response to command 'locale':

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

How do I find out how to change these settings?


All I can find in Thunderbird is a bizarre choice between: "Application 
locale: English (United Kingdom)" and "Regional settings locale: English 
(Denmark)". This seems to means someting like using the "locale" 
corresponding to the "language" set in Thunderbird or using ??the system 
settings??? (What the f could "regional" mean, other than a repetition 
of the "locale" idiocy?) Anyway, I have three "languages" in the list of 
Thunderbird preferences, "English", "Danish", and "Japanese". Switching 
to Japanese does seem to give me Japanese, ie ISO dates, but both 
English and Danish versions use the traditional dd/mm/yyyy format.

Is there a better way? Like an operating system that uses text 
configuration files, which you can find in the place the documentation 
says they are, and allows you to select things like date format?

I'm sorry, this is awfully ranty, but this stuff seems to get worse with 
every year of the endarkenment.

 * * *

Meanwhile I have some arcane questions about HTTP, and wonder if there 
are any experts here? For a taste, loading a page from the site 
https://www.yanoman.com into a browser (Firefox, Chromium, I have tried 
works, but "wget https://www.yanoman.com"; produces  ERROR 500: Internal 
Server Error. Is there any way this could genuinely be a server error? I 
mean, what magic does Firefox know about that makes the server work? I 
am trying to read pages to get puzzle details, using my own curl 
function, but despite considerable efforts can get nowhere. Grateful for 
any help or suggestions of places to ask.

Thanks
Brian Chandler

Jigsaw puzzles from Japan
http://imaginatorium.org/shop