• 2 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle


    • Practice triage: start with small, achievable projects that can be done on a weekend. Don’t get overwhelmed. Be kind to yourself. Not every problem is immediate or needs fixing.

    • If you have access to a local tools library, avail yourself of it fully. The staff are a treasure-trove of wisdom and knowledge. If not, talk to the oldest, crotchiest person at your local bardware store.

    • There are so many single-use tools out there (favorite one is so you can unscrew the faucet bolt under a sink). If not, see if there’s a community online board and post a request.

    • Vintage appliances, windows, doors, etc are cool. A little elbow grease and they’re in good shape. Junkyards and recycling centers are a treasure trove.

    • If it involves anything hazardous or too heavy (gas, electricity, foundation), bite the bullet and seek professional help.

    • Ants and cracks are small-fry. Baits and fillers are easy fixes. Focus on big ticket items. And remember, some things are best left alone (see triage, above).


  • Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

    The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

    Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.




  • I live in an earthquake zone and have been taking CERT emergency training courses. Have been looking at these as part of a neighborhood emergency network.

    Turns out SeedStudio sells these with a base that comes with a display and a bunch of grove connectors, as well as a cheap GPS module. Will have to think a bit more on what else may be needed (keyboard, display, battery, vibration, or other environmental sensors?)

    It may be possible to build one of these for < $50USD and hopefully cheaper, then have each emergency sector in the city keep one as part of their emergency cache. Would be useful if cell networks and power go out.





  • I saw the security article, but that sounds like it needs to be tackled by MSFT, the way Google has to handle Chrome extensions.

    Have been a paid Jetbrains user for years, especially PyCharm. But recently, I had to do some front-end web development with ionic/Capacitor and Vue, and ionic only had a VsCode plugin. A few weeks later, came across Cursor which is a fork of VsCode with LLM support, and all the same plugins worked.

    Still keeping my PyCharm subscription, but am wobbly on whether I’ll re-up next year.



  • The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

    Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

    Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.

    The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.



  • 72 hours to finish a design project for a client. Hard deadline to make it to the printers in time for a trade show. By the end, I couldn’t see straight. Slept for 18 hours after handing it in.

    Saw the end product at the trade show. Horrified to pick out so many small errors. Customer was happy, though. Got two more projects.

    Never did it again, but it was good to know I could.





  • A works/construction department in a medium-sized town. They had an Excel spreadsheet that had a HUGE number of screens. Anyone wanting to do commercial real-estate construction had to not only fill out these forms, but keep them uptodate and submit the updates at end of each work day.

    The thing was HUGE and had lots of interdependent screens, where if you picked an item from a dropdown menu, it unlocked a bunch of other complicated screens or panels, and so forth. Each screen had 30-40 items and fields on it, and there were multiple dozens of screens you had to tab through.

    To run it on the jobsite, construction contractors HAD to buy a pen and touchscreen Windows ‘tablet’ ($$$). The whole thing had been written and maintained by one guy over the course of a few years.

    EVERYONE hated it. The guy who had written it wanted to get promoted to management, but nobody else wanted to maintain it so he was stuck.


  • Sorry, but this country fully deserves where it ends up.

    I shut off all news and social media, stopped checking newspapers, TV, and podcasts, and unsubbed from all politics and news mailing lists and communities. Told family and friends and they’re being cool about it.

    Dove into 60’s detective novels. Anything by Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block. Have stocked up on at least a year’s worth of out-of-print epubs. Will reevaluate once they run out. Mixed with a lot of outdoor walks.

    It’s been glorious.