“Motivation follows action”
Waiting for motivation to take an action often means you’ll wait forever.
1,523 karma · joined September 24, 2015
Waiting for motivation to take an action often means you’ll wait forever.
If it's a journaling app, a calendar app, a habit tracker or a drawing app and it wants me to pay monthly, it's a hard 'no' for me as well unless it has a cloud component that I feel justifies the price. There is mostly nothing in it that justifies paying monthly, it's just an offline app.
"But developers need a salary too" - yes, then price your app accordingly and charge for upgrades. Subscriptions make me feel if I stop paying I lose the app and can't access my data any longer. That, and subscriptions pile up.
If I subscribe to one app it's not a big deal, but if I subscribe to 10-20 apps and they all cost monthly, it adds financial stress on me and stuff I 'have to keep in my head'.
For getting the temperature of the room, I use other devices (a netatmo weather station) and used their API to pull the current degrees into a textfile on the server that is getting fed into the airconditioner plugin.
Bonuspoint: I use the same IR emitter to control my TV. I just have to make sure it's in a place that is in line-of-sight with both my TV and aircon, but given how small apartments here are - that was not a problem. The plugin has a functionality to frequently ping an IP for checking if something is turned on, so I use that to determine whether my TV is on/off.
Sadly they don’t ship to Japan so getting my hands on one is gonna be hard :(
I'd love for a really good notes app, but everything these days is in electron and I can't deal with the powerhog.
I'm now using Outlinely and Agenda mainly because of this
The reason for why I take the risk and keep go is pretty simple: Mental health.
When we had a lockdown, gyms closed and I was confined to my apartment 24/7 I felt horrible. Days just blurred into each other, I gained weight, my motivation to do anything dropped. My life was just work and I hated it. Of course I bought a set of dumbbells (which were also ridiculously expensive because everyone had the same idea) and tried running but that only gets you so far. I can't get more equipment at home because my apartment is like 35sqm
When the gyms reopned I started going again and kept my guard up: Disinfect everything, don't be near other people, be careful when I take my mask off, wash my hands before I touch anything after I finish. Since then I started feeling much better. Even if I don't do anything else like meeting friends, going out for drinks, or if my workday happened to be shitty, I have something that makes me think more about myself and my health. Sports has incredible benefits on mood, sleep and mental health, hence why I take the risk.
For all we know, this pandemic can continue for a very long time. I'm not saying we should all forget the virus and do what we did before, but we should still try to find a somewhat healthy day-cycle that doesn't knock us in lockdown depression. Going to a small, empty gym while keeping my guard up is my calculated risk of "with corona".
That are all countries though and not just Japan.
Korea has KakaoTalk that's undefeated as the defacto chat app (and now search engine and payment provider). It's not doing well in every other place except Korea.
Japan has LINE as it's primary messenger, payment app, etc. It has some foot in other south-east asian countries but the strongpoint is still Japan.
IMO it's not as big of a deal to cut out one companies services as posts like this make it seem to be
My aircon is infrared based so I bought a $20 infrared emitter, recorded all the button signals from the remote control and plugged it into HomeKit. Now I can voicecontrol/Remote control my antique aircon better than current models that still don’t support HomeKit
Bonus points: I put the emitter in line with both aircon and TV and use the same device to control both
That, or I use heroku/a private k8s cluster on digitalocean when it's a tad more serious, that I just throw the docker container on and have it over with.
Still good that we have the medicine available that we have right now. Born in a different time and ADHD wouldn't even be considered a real thing.
Hang in there and sometimes just let your brain do whatever it wants :) Constantly forcing and fighting things can get you stuck in a stress spiral.
That, and meditation also helps with being more aware of what your brain is doing
On dev I don't need a 10 node cluster if I had 10 containers running. One $10 vm is fine.
On prod I can start with a 3-node cluster for these 10 containers, then scale it up depending on traffic and needs while controlling my spending.
Not everyone has thousands of dollars of VC money to throw at hosting
You can use the external services the same way if they are already setup with things like DATABASE_URL that holds a postgres connection string to amazon RDS, etc. Running k8s doesn't mean you have to move your entire stack into k8s, you can still use hosted services just fine.
In all my time with k8s, I never used Helm. If you don't need it, don't use it and keep it simple. k8s can do a ton of stuff but in reality, you barely need more than the basic.
k8s has a loooot of stuff it can do and reading too many blog posts that go into too much detail can be intimidating, so my advice would be:
1. Create a dummy cluster on digitalocean (or docker desktop with k8s support / minikube), then setup kubectl to connect to it.
2. Start with the difference between resource types: What are deployments, what are pods?
3. Create a deployment manifest that just tries to pull a container from some registry, apply it with kubectl -f foo.yml
4. Play with kubectl to inspect things: kubectl get pods, kubectl get deployments, kubectl describe pod xxxxxx, kubectl logs xxxx
5. Learn how kubernetes ties things together through labels: Create a ClusterIP/LoadBalancer service and try to get it to balance to your pods from above through labels (https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/kubernetes/how-to/add-load...)
Deployments/services/(pods) are all you need in the beginning for running containers on k8s and exposing them. Of course then there are things like persistent storage but if your app is made to run ephemeral, you likely have storage/db setup externally already.
For running through the CI, once you have your manifests you could run kubectl apply directly through the CI if you wanted to. We are using terraform in front of k8s with hashicorps hosted state, then run `terraform plan`. If it passes, on dev we automatically apply to the cluster, on prod there is a manual step through the hashicorp admin UI that needs an apply trigger. Then there are more advanced tools like spinnaker that can be used to setup more complex pipelines on what to do on push.
We do exactly the same thing! We have a one-node k8s for all these dev things that just works. Everything is containerized for local dev anyway so moving it to k8s was just writing the deployment manifest.
On heroku, all of these would be separate dynos (or one glued-together dyno that does everything). On a self-hosted VM we'd have to deal with managing that.
I liked this approach so much that I now have a small 1-node personal cluster that hosts all of my private hobby projects that aren't ready for prime time yet, that were on heroku previously. Costs me only $10 + (persistent storage + IP address if needed)
Sure it had a learning curve but now I just describe my deployments and k8s does the rest, which then reflects back on digitalocean. If I need more power for my cluster, I increase the nodes through digitalocean and k8s automatically moves my containers around how it deems fit.
I used normal blue/green deployments on self-managed VMs in the past, then worked with beanstalk, heroku, appengine and I much prefer k8s. Yes it's easier on heroku, but try to run 2-3 different containers on the same dyno for dev to keep cost down. On k8s I can run my entire stack on one single small digitalocean $10 VM if I wanted to.
I wouldn't even know what I else could pick that gives me equal flexibility and power?
I bought a elgato camlink 4K just recently because I wasn’t so happy with Camera Live but now I wish I hadn’t.
Everything (files, PDFs, etc) that’s important goes into DEVONthink for future referencing. The app is excellent for finding files that relate and can do things like “I think this file goes into the folder ‘water bills’ based on other files in that folder. Move it?”. It’s also e2e encrypted and syncs to multiple cloud storages at once.
Everything that’s not in DEVONthink is considered temporary. I have hazel on my Mac automatically clean up old files in locations like desktop/downloads that are older than x and move it into the trash. If something is important I have to decide this early otherwise it gets thrown (but I could restore it for a while until hazel auto-cleans my trash)
Folders like Documents/, I leave as is. If apps want to write in there they can, but I don’t consider that location important. For more important app data I use iCloud and each app writes in their iCloud specific folder.
For nuggets that refuse to write anywhere else and only into a folder inside Documents, I have hazels sync feature replicate that specific folder automatically into a other location, like inside iCloud Drive.
Then if anything goes wrong I have an arq backup :)