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scooble

191 karma · joined September 16, 2017

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scooble··on The Shingle Spit in Whitstable
I nearly ran around on this. Barrelling towards it in my gaff cutter because my crew read the depth above chart datum as the depth below. Turned aside at the last minute when the waves started looking suspicious.

Another friend rescued two children who had become stranded as the tide came in behind them. Ran his barge around, hoiked them on board and gave them tea as they waited for the tide to float them off again. Fun times.

scooble··on The Twelve-Factor App (2011)
I've read a bunch of tutorials promoting env vars to avoid secrets being accidentally checked into git. Step 1 is usually to create a .env file and add it to your gitignore.
scooble··on Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?
I made a 14ft oar to scull my sailing boat, a 9ton gaff cutter. Worked surprisingly well.
scooble··on Learn Vim (2021)
I feel that your last point is underappreciated. I enjoy my work more if I enjoy using my tools, and I enjoy using vim.
scooble··on Hitachi Wood Plug Cutter Works Perfectly in Hand Held Drills (2013)
At a pinch, drilling a hole the external diameter of the plug cutter and clamping that to the board you are getting the plug out of can act as a guide so the plug cutter doesn’t spiral out and cut a hole in the wooden stairs you are using as an impromptu bench (for example).
scooble··on Berry is a healthy, byte-sized window manager written in C for Unix systems
A really fun feature of herbstluftwm that I’ve not seen replicated is that monitors are virtual and can be reconfigured on the fly, so you can have e.g. a monitor that is bigger than your physical screen, or a little virtual monitor that you can pop in and out of your screen as a kind of notepad.
scooble··on I’ve spent my Easter break customizing Neovim
I mostly work with python and drop pdb into my code if I want to step through and see what’s going on. I run tests with the make command so I can use the quickfix list to skip between errors.
scooble··on I’ve spent my Easter break customizing Neovim
> multi-file find/replace

This is something I’ve found very easy in vim with bufdo , windo, or populating the quickfix list (or args list) and using cfdo/cdo or argdo to be really specific about where the replace should happen (e.g. replace FOO with BAR only on lines containing STRING or in files containing STRING).

scooble··on Bicycling Street Smarts, Chapter 6: Using Your Brakes (2001)
Too dangerous compared to what? Cars? If we replaced all the cars with bikes would you expect injuries/deaths to increase or decrease?
scooble··on I have no capslock and I must scream
I find it mildly uncomfortable to hold shift while typing. And as there is a key for that purpose, which is in the same place on all keyboards, it seems more straightforward for me to use it for its intended purpose rather than something else. I’m not even sure what I would remap it to.
scooble··on Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
‘Cattle’ always seems to imply spreading your infrastructure across multiple cloud services, and having infrastructure management tools etc.

I sometimes wonder whether we need another metaphor, something like a dairy cow, where you only have one, but when it fails you can shoot it and plug in another very quickly and simply (e.g. using a script).

scooble··on Learn accounting for free
For a business account, Metro bank has no monthly charge if your balance stays above £6000, and only charges for some types of transactions (none of which I've used in the 6 years MyCo has been active).
scooble··on Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers
I don’t think you can have the same desktop on both screens, but otherwise herbstluftwm allows this.

Also monitors are virtual so you can have multiple virtual monitors on one physical monitor. I want to one day try this with a 4K tv to have multiple monitor layouts.

scooble··on Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
> It’s unfathomable to think of a company having 3-4 woodworking teams each with different shops, tools, jigs etc.

Not really, depending on the company. Building something complex, like a house, could require at least carpenters, joiners and cabinet makers, which are quite different jobs.

scooble··on Redwood World – Pictures and Locations of Redwoods in the British Isles
I don’t know why, but I love this and was delighted to find our local redwood.
scooble··on A work-in-progress Magit clone for Neovim
Iirc you can edit the patch in git add -p. So fine editing is possible.
scooble··on When working from home is toxic
And it’s not just about the people’s preference. An office could be the google campus or it could be a crappy cubicle farm. Similarly, wfh could be a studio flat where your workspace is a table shared with a homeschooled toddler, or it could be a fully kitted out home office with a forest view. So comparing wfh to an office could be comparing completely different things depending on the individuals circumstances.
scooble··on Things I wish Git had: Commit groups
You also get to write a nice detailed commit message for the merge commit explaining the purpose of the branch being merged, which may not be apparent from the individual commits. Without the merge commit I’m not sure where this would go.
scooble··on A Project of One’s Own
I agree, but there can be some exceptions. I got auto-rejected when applying for a law conversion course because of my A Level grades. I have a first class degree, a master’s degree with distinction and a phd.
scooble··on What nobody says about startup moms
> If the article said it’s only hard for moms, then I’d disagree with it... but it doesn’t.

I took the authors claim that dads were less interested in spending time with their children to suggest that this wasn’t such an issue for dads.

scooble··on What nobody says about startup moms
The data could also be misleading. You could look at the numbers of women in the workplace in the 50s and conclude that women generally aren’t interested in the world of work. But this would completely overlook the barriers they faced - such as gendered stereotypes of the kind the author seems to subscribe to.
scooble··on What nobody says about startup moms
Indeed. I don’t think it really helps women in the workplace if we just go along with the assumption that men are more work focussed and women more family focussed.
scooble··on What nobody says about startup moms
I noted the article unquestioningly accepted the stereotype that men have less interest in spending time with their children than women.

It strikes me that questioning this assumption would be a very good thing for improving the situation of women in the workplace.

scooble··on The anti-pattern of responsive design
It is worth noting that responsive design is required for accessibility. The list of devices offered in the article omits, for example, ‘visually impaired users with zoom set to 400%’.
scooble··on In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway
I suspect that one cause of this is the fact that these contracts need to be rendered for, which means stipulating the requirements at the beginning so bids can be produced. So a change of approach would necessitate a change in how how contracts are awarded.
scooble··on In Defense of Finance
There seemed to be a sudden shift in the middle where we went from ‘it’s good for banks to lend people money to start taco stands’ to ‘it’s good for banks to take bets on how many people will default on their mortgage’. To my untrained eye these look like very different activities .
scooble··on Show HN: Time tracking with plain text files
Nice. I use a much simpler format which is basically the task name and the number of minutes worked. These lines are appended to a text file for the day that gives me a timesheet. I start a bash script when I start work which counts the minutes and writes the file when I’m done.
scooble··on A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
> Even worse is when you connect an external monitor which is not HiDPI and now everything is bigger than usual.

This has been a real bugbear for me. I'm a big fan of small sharp bitmap terminal fonts, but as my new laptop is now the same resolution as my external monitor I have a choice between comically small on the laptop display or comically huge on the monitor.

scooble··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
To add to this, a perspective I've heard working in the disability sphere is 'everybody is disabled eventually' - be that through injury, illness, or even just old age.

This really challenges the view that thinking about disabled users is catering to the needs of a small group of the population. Whereas in fact it is bringing benefits to the majority of the population (at some point in their lives).

scooble··on Our Dumb Security Questionnaire
To a point. I’ve been asked about the criteria used to evaluate third party suppliers, for example. Or the physical security measures at outsourced data centres.
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