incanus77

Is then logging into your Google account (if you have one) also without cost and tradeoffs?

Love Picol, and love this! When I first revisited Tcl, I was a bit miffed about needing [expr] but now really appreciate both it and the normal Tcl syntax.

A similar app in this space that I discovered recently is Supercharge.

https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge

I was skeptical that I’d find it useful since I can do all of these shell commands and such, but one feature I like is being able to effectively pare the feature set down to just what you need, making for a small but very useful menu.

In case it's not clear, 'Halt and Catch Fire' was more or less based on Kidder's Pulitzer-winning 'Soul of a New Machine'.

Was it tigert? Or maybe Garrett LeSage?

Though I also have a home chest freezer in the garage, I take this approach to my camper van setup as well. I have a converted (vintage) van, which means it wasn’t intended as a camper, and part of my build-out strategy has been to use removable things that also serve me at home in the event of an emergency or an expansion need, things like a solar panel, LiPo battery, fridge/freezer, cooktop, and space heater.

The fridge is a Dometic CFX 35 which opens at the top and tends to allow for getting at things without losing a lot of cooling. At first, it was also nice to be able to set things on it or use it as a seat (horizontal surfaces are the biggest hard-to-find in a camper van) but that became annoying when needing snacks or other quick access. So I recently built a small cabinet with a pull-out slider on which the fridge lives. Then, I always have the top storage but don’t need to move anything to get at the fridge, but can also briefly use the fridge as a footrest or similar.

I knew of "Walker, Texas Ranger" but the jokes definitely kept him relevant to my generation (age: 49) for a resurgent period of time.

The only one I remember offhand:

"Chuck Norris doesn't do pushups, he pushes the world down."

FWIW, if you prefer Lua, all of that could be accomplished with it instead of Bash. You'd probably still call out to Chrome for those bits.

I mean, in this case, the Hammerspoon part is really just the hyper keybind and the easy run of AppleScript text inline. But... once you've got some stuff going, it's easier to hook into Hammerspoon as the "frontend" for other things as your systems grow.

Obsidian is good! This use of Bases is really my only "proprietary" use of anything Obsidian-specific. The rest is a combo of personal reference, brainstorms, intricate client work specs or outlines, and the beginnings of a personal wiki. The keybinds are great, everything is in one big folder for now, and the fuzzy search makes it fast. For sync, I just have my vault in a folder that is part of my overall Syncthing, so all my computers can access it. On mobile (iPhone moving to Android, and iPad) it's just read-only for now; not using their sync or doing any writing into the system from mobile.

Somewhat relatedly, I just got Standard Notes going on all systems (Mac/Linux/iPhone/Android/iPad) which is good for reliable capture at all places for me right now. I'm not paying, so I don't have (Markdown or other) formatting like in Apple Notes yet.

It's fairly sprawling right now — a small init.lua that sources four other files, most over 100 LOC. What are you most interested in?

Totally resonates with me. I was a kid in the country from a yard sale-scrounging sort of family, and we didn't have money for a computer, but we had a strong ethic of DIY and of education. I had a TI-99/4A (1981) in the late 80s, and an IBM PCjr (1984) in the 90s, but I still stretched them both to the limits of what I could figure out, find in any book I could get my hands on, experiment with $1 shareware I'd find at the mall, or learn about from talking to someone. No net, no meetups, no one else with a computer like mine. I'd come across a Packard Bell at the mall Sears, or a Tandy at Radio Shack, or a 486 setup for Wolfenstein 3D in the university bookstore during a journalism field trip. Figured out how to make a RAM disk to fool a PC game running on my PCjr into thinking there was a C: drive, all kinds of stuff like that. Just kept hacking and pushing and learning.

Nice, thanks for the vote on it. Been meaning to look into a personal archiving solution, and now the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of homelab for me so it's on the list.

It's not trivial, but roughly: use AppleScript/osascript to get the URLs, but mostly pass them to a ~50 line Bash script which:

  - Brings in the date path components for the dumped-to folder
  - Makes a hash of the URL for an Obsidian doc (each tab gets their own doc)
  - Uses Chrome command line (--headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom) to save a snapshot of the page contents
  - Uses it again with --screenshot to make a thumbnail
  - Create an Obsidian doc from a template
  - If it's a single tab dump, pass -o to the script, which opens it in Obsidian for review

Lastly, I use the relatively-new Bases feature in Obsidian to make a nice "cards" view of the docs with their thumbnails.

I'm hoping to clean it up at some point and maybe release it, but it's one of those classic one-shot systems that just works for me for now.

This is a great integration!

What school IT director does this?

Hammerspoon is the glue that holds my Mac together. For a starter list of things to do with this app, a partial list of the things that I'm using it for:

  - Dumping all open Safari tabs to an Obsidian doc
  - Adding 'hyper' (Ctrl-Opt-Cmd) keybinds to pop a new window for:
    - Safari
    - Finder
    - Terminal / Ghostty
    - VS Code
    - Notes
    - Editing Hammerspoon/AeroSpace/Sketchybar config
    - Reloading Hammerspoon config
    - Reloading Sketchybar
    - Quitting all Dock apps except Finder
    - Screen lock
    - System sleep
    - Opening front Finder folder in VS Code
    - Opening front Safari URL on Archive.today
    - Showing front Safari window tab count
    - Showing front app bundle ID
    - Posting notification about current Music track
    - Controlling my Logi Litra light (various color temps/brightnesses)
    - Starting/stopping a client work timer
  - Tying it to AeroSpace for:
    - Pushing a window to another monitor
    - Performing a two-up window layout
    - Swapping those two windows
    - Closing all other workspace windows
    - Gathering all windows to first workspace
  - Ensuring some background apps stay running if they crash
  - Prompting to unmount disk images if trashed
  - Binding into Skim to jump to specific sections of spec PDFs using terse Markdown URLs

Check out the Chicago95 theme for XFCE.

Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.

It looks to me to have:

- NEW

- GTO (GOTO)

- LST (LIST)

- END

- RUN

- FOR

- NXT (NEXT)

- LOD (LOAD)

- STP (STOP)

- RTN (RETURN)

All of which are BASIC commands, as well as GTS (go to subroutine, probably like GOSUB).

In addition, it would’ve lent itself well to loading programs from cassette (see TI-99 or TRS-80 of the era).

I have a 1984 Sharp PC-1246 handheld which is surprisingly programmable despite being about the size of a modern smartphone, an actual calculator form factor, and, you know, from 1984.

I bought it the next month (had been using Lite for a few months prior) and I'm still using it. Continuously. I mean, damn.

Best replacement I've seen: https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/

Note that i386 does not mean that the 386 is supported. Distros have removed support for 386 for many years, and some for 486 for years as well.

I should've been more clear. Sure, I started my Linux days on 2.0.36, which booted by floppy, on a Pentium 2. But what I want is some semblance of a distro, with tools and a way to do things, not just rolling my own technically-bootable kernel.

My search continues for a Linux that will run on my 386SX 25MHz with 8MB RAM. So far I’ve only been able to use ELKS, which technically isn’t a Linux.

My parents were forward-thinking enough to, when I wanted a tape player in 1985, get me a significantly less cool-looking but more versatile desktop model with the plugs to eventually hook up to a computer for saving & loading. Which one day, I did!

Went for the first time a couple weeks ago while on a road trip — incredible! However I counted about two dozen items on display that I own, which tells me I should slow down on the collecting / ramp up the downsizing.

Anyone else with progressive lenses just think "I already have this"?

Yes, same here. I have this setup replicated and do demos for people whenever there is interest. It's the strongest connection I have to the arcane old ways of computing as I came after punch cards and paper tape.

Same!

My earliest memory of anything computer programming is from the early 80s, when a snow day had the two neighbor kids, whose parents were teachers in another district, over to our house with their TI-99/4a. The oldest showed me the entry and running of the sample program Mr. Bojangles. I was enthralled.

A few years later I had one of my own, though at that point it was very long in the tooth. But I still learned its limits, playing (yes) Hunt the Wumpus, Tombstone City, and others, programming, and doing things like composing the Jeopardy! theme song in BASIC.

I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.