sdfjkl

Unison efficiently and reliably syncs my website (static blog mostly) between OS X and FreeBSD. It's one of those extremely underrated pieces of software that just quietly does an excellent job, yet most people never heard of it and continue to struggle with rsync or similar (syncthing fulfills a somewhat different role). Perhaps because it's written in an oddball language, or because the website isn't flashy enough.

I often evaluate a wide range of software before choosing what I consider best for a job, and many years ago, Unison came out way ahead in such an evaluation. It never failed me.

Nice writing, and very educational for someone who never had reason to take a lens apart. Explains part of why they're so expensive! :)

I think it's a bit more glue than I like, but still reasonably serviceable for something with small parts in a restricted space. About on par with a Toshiba laptop, not as good as a Thinkpad (based on my experience with now outdated hardware repairs).

Yay, Ada doesn't suck! :)

So I wasn't just paranoid when I used to shred all my papers at home before throwing them away.

Related, when I moved out, I sold/freecycled most of my stuff, then invited some people to take what they want from the leftovers and finally left the stuff nobody had wanted in a big box in the bin room downstairs. Minutes later I saw the building cleaners haul the entire box into a car.

Heh, you have no idea how lousy Google Maps data really is until you go somewhere away from big cities and countries which Google cares about. In the remote corners of Greece for example, it's completely normal to find nothing in a spot that has a supermarket. It's either in the wrong location, mistranslated, closed 5 years ago or never was there and is just maps spam. Often squinting at the satellite data offers more of a clue where the paths are and sometimes you can glean a shop sign from above. We've had similar experiences in thinly populated areas of Galicia (Spain), Sardinia and Sicily.

Been meaning to blog about it, but not got around to it yet. Essentially it's just a (bunch of) USB-serial converters and the Seatalk data is converted by a Raymarine E85001. If you have N2k, you need a different converter, e.g. Actisense or better yet, a translator to NMEA0183, which is the de-facto standard for NMEA over TCP/IP.

It used to run kplex to bridge NMEA data (wind speed, depth soundings, boat speed, etc.) from our SeaTalk network to TCP/IP. Now a GL-AR300M does the job though, along with all the Wifi/GSM routing, saving one computer and power (when running strictly off solar and batteries, this matters).

Go to "about:profiles" and make your old profile ("default" by default) the default profile again, then restart Firefox.

This was indeed a fucking terrible way of doing this: "Hey, we've just hidden all your profile data from you and to get it back you need to sign up to our web service!"

> At what point in the past were our programs stable, robust and just worked?

DOS was rock solid, at least around the era of DR-DOS. DESQView 386 was absolutely stable too. The BBS software I ran on them in those days was a wobbly piece of shit though.

I also recall Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler and the accompanying text-mode IDE being ultra reliable.

After DOS I've used OS/2 which was also extremely stable, although suffered from limited hard- and software availability.

Mac OS X used to be rock solid too in the heydays of the Powerbooks and earlier Intel Macbooks. Every now and then there were hardware design flaws though, and now the quality of both soft- and hardware seems to have taken a tragic turn for the worse.

You still do play Russian roulette whenever you plug a USB device into your computer, see "USB Rubber Ducky".

The lights and "buzzers" seem to be part of the problem, rather than a solution, according to the article:

> The loud noise and dazzling illumination of the lights is thought to disorientate the birds, who are unable to escape and end up being sucked into the machines in large numbers.

Considering the birds seem to come out more or less whole (alas none too healthy), it's probably trivial to sieve the olives from the much larger bird corpses.

Ubuntu 18.04: https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg

Your car dashboard is broken. Instead of fixing it, you write an app that provides a lousy workaround. Is this meant to be a bad example?

Also DIN 1451: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451

I've looked into touchscreen support on Linux and it was very disappointing. You can fiddle most things to a workable level eventually, but no matter which implementation, there does seem to be a lack of integration for the virtual keyboard, i.e. it doesn't pop up when I touch an input field or won't go away when the input field loses focus. Overall it was pretty awful. Since I wanted to use the device in tablet mode (without hardware keyboard), I have to run Windows for now :(

Sounds a bit like a modern version of Scientology, or perhaps just an art project?

On Mac there's Omnigraffle, which is excellent, although $$$.

There's a few issues with the master password derived password system, including:

What if you need to change your password for a site to a different one?

What if the site changes its URL?

I found 720p quite sufficient for almost everything. I think I once selected 4k on a YouTube video that was showing how to do something technical and didn't zoom in close enough to really see what was going on. The extra pixels were helpful there, but a better detail shot would've been better.

I don't understand why searches can be done by private parties, with no police present. This seems extremely wrong to me. How can this be?

Cherry tomatoes (because they're smaller and lighter they don't require much support), chili peppers, maybe strawberries (mine ended up getting aphids though).

I've written a bit about this back when I played with indoor gardening: https://sdfjkl.org/blog/starting-hydroponics/

For obvious reasons I was only interested in food plants :)

Because DDG doesn't bloody geolocate you and then shove some dreadful localized content in your face, in a language you do not understand. If you travel, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Nope, as part of the golden visa, he would've paid an immigration attorney to set up a Canadian company, shove some money into it and hire the minimum amount of employees. This is unrelated to the coffee business and doesn't have to be profitable, it's merely a requirement to gain residency.

After 6 years of residency, he can then apply for citizenship.

Investor visas (aka Golden Visa) aren't really a loophole, they're quite intentionally designed to bring money into a country and provide employment for existing citizens.

numpy, Jupyter (formerly IPython Notebook) and probably Mathematica anyways.

FreeBSD. The quality of the code (and documentation!) is a notable step up from Linux.

With a bit of tech and a lot of (good) marketing.

Keep track of people you've enjoyed working with. They are hard to find.

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012). I've done it, because Final Cut Pro demanded it. Regrets, because Photos.app is now severely broken and causes high loads to the point where my mouse pointer (or beach ball) freezes intermittently (which, in my opinion, should be impossible on a modern computer system). Can't really process photos now. Extremely shameful work from Apple there.

Finder bugs have been persisting since Yosemite, with a very common one where drag & drop stops working until Finder is force restarted. APFS conversion went well and problem free. Even homebrew survived (mostly).

Strange USB problems persist, but they seem to be hardware related and ever present on this generation machine (first one with USB 3).

I got my iPad in May 2010 and it still works fine, including (amazingly), the battery. Except of course, the software has become useless. YouTube doesn't work unless I do special URL mangling in the browser, which crashes every 2 seconds anyways. The latest OS release is so old it's from the days when Apple had a YouTube app, which Google later shut off the API for.

I really feel it deserves a second life running some kind of alternate OS and can think of several uses for it, but last I checked there wasn't much of that happening.