stuporglue

For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles...

I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.

It might have to do with our 120V electrical standard. I know our kitchen kettles and irons are lower wattage than European ones.

I miss how fast our German kettle heated water :-(

I started college with a white G3 iBook. By the end of freshman year I had installed Yellow Dog Linux, then Suse, Mandriva and eventually Gentoo.

Now, 20+ years later all my home computers are running Linux (Debian though), and my kids grew up using Linux.

But I'm going to send my teenager to college with Windows or a Mac. They're going to be 1200 miles away, and they're going to need to get support for their computer and I won't be there.

Yes, I like Linux 1000x better than Windows or Mac, but Linux demands a different relationship with the admin. This kid hasn't wanted that relationship with tech, and will rely on friends to help get Office or Zoom or whatever installed.

I'm still deciding between Mac and Windows now. I'll probably end up getting a quality used business laptop from FB marketplace, but the Neo is interesting too.

That's the freedom we're talking about when we say "land of the free".

Doesn't the baking powder makes its bubbles and run out, leaving behind flat batter?

For 1:1 conversations I think you're right. Having multiple channels for communication is fine.

Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.

A live image is an operating system image which you can boot from and use vs. an install disk which can only install, but there's no usable environment available).

A reproducable build means you can get the same source code and compile it, and it will be identical to the published image. This is important because otherwise you don't know if the published image actually used some other source code. If it used some other source code, the published image might have a backdoor, or something that you can't find by reading the source code.

Suburbs are for standard of living, for me.

I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.

I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.

I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.

I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.

My daughter is 11 and has been making simple games on Scratch.

There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well.

I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to help her over the hurdles (like signaling). The 14 year old was able to learn it on her own, though I did teach her some concepts like loops and variables at the very start.

I moved to Germany a few years ago and my kids have to use fountain pens for all their school work, even math. It's this way for grade school and high school.

Raspberry Pis also get put in to all sorts of places where an embedded board could be used, but the Pi is so much easier.

I want to build a digital picture frame with an e-ink frame that pulls photos from a server. The right way would be a low powered processor, but then I have to figure out writing the image, sleep states and wake up, setting up networking etc. in whatever programming language my embedded board supports.

Or I can just plug in a pi, and live with the always on power consumption.

It's not that I'm ignorant, but I have a limited amount of time and may prioritize project completion over doing it completely right.

I made Fastback Photo Gallery for my family and wanted to share.

We have 200,000+ family photos (including scans of parent's and grandparent's photos and slides) and needed a good way to easily enjoy them.

Fastback sorts all the photos it finds by date and lets you scroll through them. A couple of key features:

  * "Rewind" button to show media taken on today's date in previous years
  * Date picker to jump to a specific date
  * Map which can either show where photos were taken or be used as a filter itself so that only photos in the map area are visible. 
  * Filter by tags - if you have been tagging photos with faces or other data, you can filter by the tags

It's old school PHP and JavaScript. It uses ffmpeg to make streamable versions of the videos and either vipsthumbnail, ImageMagick or GD to make image thumbnails.

I would love feedback. Documentation issues, installation problems, suggestions, feature requests, etc.

In 2003 I was in college with a Mac G3 iBook.

A room mate showed me Linux and I wanted to try it out. Yellow Dog Linux (A fork from Red Hat) was the stable/best option for PowerPC newbies.

I loved YDL but quickly realized that everything was a year or more out of date and by the end of the year I had distro-hopped my way over to Gentoo where I could get updated versions of GIMP, Inkscape and Firefox.

It took a few semesters but I did finally learn not to do any exciting upgrades the week a project was due.

Maybe that's true up until you have a kid. Once you have a kid, spending expands as the kid does.

Baby require nothing but clothes, cheap food and love.

Teenagers require all sorts of things for school and activities. I mean, technically you don't have to provide them, I guess, but if you want a well developed kid who will have their own success, you have to do some investing.

I'm in a suburb of Cologne right now. Looking on PicNic, an online grocery delivery service I see:

Medium Eggs: €2.29 for a 10 pack (US$2.92/dozen) Whole HTT: (heat treated) box milk: €1.15/liter (US$4.46/gallon) Gala Apples: €2.35/kilo (US$1.09/pound) Unsalted Butter: €7.96/kg (US$3.69/pound)

I usually save a little bit by going to Aldi or another discount grocery, but this is very close to shelf price for the non-discount grocery stores.

Does a PostgreSQL plpgsql function count as a script?

https://gist.github.com/stuporglue/83714cdfa0e4b4401cb6

It's one of my favorites because it's pretty simple, and I wrote it when a lot of things were finally coming together for me (including GIS concepts, plpgsql programming, and a project I was working on at the time).

This is code which takes either two foci points and a distance, or two foci, a distance and the number of pointers per quadrant and generates a polygon representing an ellipse. Nothing fancy, but it made me happy when I finally got it working.

The use case was to calculate a naive estimate of how far someone could have ridden on a bike share bike. I had the locations they checked out the bike, and where they returned it, and the time they were gone. By assuming some average speed, I could make an ellipse where everywhere within the ellipse could have been reached during the bike rental.

Maybe. With programming though, the amount of actually new stuff I woukd learn with a new language is relatively small. With an MBA at least I'm learning every day because I'm newer to the topics.

A few years ago I just felt tired at the thought of learning another fad language. I ended up getting an MBA and switching into procurement. Now I just code on personal projects and it's fun again.

I went back to school for an MBA, emphasis in Supply Chain. The math and software side of my tech skills are valued because I'm pretty good at numerical analysis and learning the various odd software the company uses. Pay can be pretty great, depending where you go.

I've read them multiple times over my life, but slowly (like a chapter or two a day). This year I'm trying to read them all within the year, which has me reading a lot more than in the past.

Seems like individual verses hit harder when reading slow, but the larger narrative hits harder when plowing through the books quickly.

I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I read scriptures every day (Book of Mormon, Bible, Doctrine and Covenants) for 10-30 minutes. I turned 40 this year and have a goal to read all of those scriptures cover to cover before my next birthday.

I pray every day as well, at least at night, often when I wake up, and almost always before meals (unless I'm at a restaurant or something).

Weekly I go to church, and go help with the youth activities. I also go visit families and widows regularly — or at least I try to.

I try to worship at the temple (different than the regular weekly church) about monthly.

And I pay 10% of my income as a tithing and give some each month as a "fast offering" to help the needy.

Back to the day to day stuff, I try not to swear, try to be kind, honest, and all the other things Christ was and would be.