matthiaswh

This made me laugh nostalgically. A Geo Prism was one of my first "$1000 cars" as a kid. Fun little car, but once it hit 40 it started shaking like a tree. I always joked that if I drove it on the highway it would shake itself apart around me and I would end up with suspended in air with only a seat and a steering wheel left, looney tunes style, before plummeting to the ground.

I sold it off for a different $1000 car before it happened, but sounds like that's precisely what happened to you!

Tell me you use harvest without telling me you use harvest.

Matrix?

https://actualbudget.org is fantastic and self-hostable, but or can be installed locally on a desktop. There's no cloud version but it still largely fits your criteria.

You might take a look at https://github.com/tcgoetz/GarminDB

The quotes on the homepage made me chuckle.

This looks right up my alley, looking forward to playing it.

If you're doing data manipulation with server state, you would probably want to create a Fact[0]. This is a straightforward Python class.

If you're doing data manipulation locally you would simply write Python code.

Operations[1] are Python functions which execute (yield) commands which will be run on hosts.

That's the gist of what it takes to write custom modules for Pyinfra.

[0] https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/facts.html [1] https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/operations.html

I switched from Ansible to Pyinfra for my homelab, and continue to use Ansible at work.

The biggest difference is that Pyinfra is simply Python code. It's incredibly easy to control the system in whatever manner you need to. You can probably do the same thing in Ansible, but it's never quite as obvious how to do it. This also means it's much more clear where and why things work the way they do in Pyinfra, where in Ansible I end up digging through numerous role files to try to find where some variable gets injected.

You didn't ask, but I would offer a few suggestions for games to introduce your children to soon.

Dinosaur Escape [0] if you can find it, it's basically a cooperative memory game but introduces them to some very gentle strategy. (Incidentally, there's a similarly themed game[1] on BGA that is also good.)

King of Tokyo is very fun, and it's easy to slim down the rules for someone who cannot read. It still allows them to understand the mechanics and make decisions about which dice to pick and which to re-roll.

Similarly, we started Kingdomino with simplified rules (no multiplication, just a tile matching game) and it was easy to graduate into full game play later.

Outfoxed is a logic / deduction board game that doesn't involve too much advanced strategy. Since it's cooperative it's easy to work with them so they can begin reasoning out the clues.

[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175497/dinosaur-escape [1] https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=babydinosaurrescue

Board Game Arena in turn-based mode.

I have been playing multiple games daily non-stop for 6 years now with a consistent but sometimes shifting group of local friends.

We still play live either virtually or in-person at times, but the async games never end. Playing live on BGA still reduces the game time by as much as 50% for more complex games since it handles setup, teardown, and scoring.

This should answer most of your first question: https://frame.work/laptop13pro?tab=upgrade-to-pro

Can confirm, they do. This set of 1500 pieces, for example, comes with two instruction books with many different small animals you can build with it.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/building-instructions/110...

Oh you're that Wesley. Big fan of your podcasts!

We were there a few weekends ago. The C&H exhibit had quite the crowd!

It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.

Well worth the trip!

Hi 76j67kj67k67, I'm matthiaswh. I use the nub every day and admire its ease of use and precision. In fact, I like it so much I went out and bought a separate keyboard with its own nub that I can use when the laptop is docked.

Now you know someone.

P.S. The drift usually happens when you hold the nub in a particular direction for too long, or on occasion if the screen is pressing on it when closed. It's irritating, but can often be addressed (although some models are worse than others).

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I feel this way at times too, but the ability to sync state really is key. Traditional native desktop apps rarely had to consider this because users would only ever interact on one device. Now users are moving between a computer and a phone, if not more devices.

If I were to frame it succinctly I would say applications = local-only which is distinct from local-first.

Installing heat pumps doesn't require a ton of domain knowledge (assuming you're already a handy person), but it's a lot of work. It took 3 guys who do it for a living 160+ man hours to install our mini-splits. They had to drill through walls, attach channels to the siding, crawl into a tight crawlspace, do some plumbing when they hit a water pipe with their drill, wire up electrical, and add breakers to the panel.

The only thing that might catch you up is designing the system and ensuring you right size it for your heat load requirements. I'm sure you could research this pretty well, but your HVAC guy might also be happy to consult on that portion.

It looks like that unit may have 3 indoor heads. Two lines per head. Power to each head. Power to the outdoor unit.

If you're interested in installing heat pumps, there is a similar open data initiative started by some redditors to aggregate heat pump pricing quotes.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hBebytdBOzLQ4eoAbdFQ...

Similarly, I wanted to love Stephenson. I even enjoy the intense technical details in a good sci-fi story (I'm talking to you Red Mars).

I started with Seveneves and could not finish it. After 20 pages I wanted to quit, but I stuck it out for another 150 pages before folding. The premise of the story was fantastic, but the writing was not enjoyable to me, and IMO, not very good.

Where Robinson and authors like Weir and Clarke weave the technical details into the story in a fascinating way and show understanding of the topic, I felt Stephenson was copy-pasting Wikipedia articles into the middle of a book. Furthermore, he treated the reader like an idiot - by the end I couldn't help but laugh painfully when he felt the need to explain to us for the 30th time that A+0.150 means 0 years and 150 days after the agent event.

His characters are vague and annoying. While Robinson's characters were similarly lacking in depth in Red Mars, at least they represented something bigger, were deliberately chosen, and served a storytelling purpose.

Here's an example I pulled out of Seveneves that made me cringe.

"In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no mass. Once Amalthea (a comet) had been attached, it was like a kite with a big rock strapped to it."

Weir would have pulled that line off easily as a slightly sarcastic, self-aware remark. I didn't get the impression that Stephenson meant it anything other than a serious statement.

PHP is akin to, I don't know, the Subway (fast food restaurant chain) of programming languages?

You don't hear too much about it. You almost never notice it unless you're actually looking for it, unlike McDonald's with its ostentatious golden arches.

It's popularity is waning. But it's still everywhere. [0] There are a hundred other sandwich chains that have tried to do it better but none have managed the ubiquity of Subway.

People like to look down on it and espouse the alternatives, but when it comes down to it fast food can only ever be so good.

I guess that means that JavaScript is McDonald's?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...

You're in luck. Email forwarding with Yahoo is now a paid only feature.

Now imagine how bad it is for the guy with the verbatim email address `firstname.lastname@gmail.com`.

I've been trying to order from non Amazon sites as a habit lately. A large percentage of them use the same platform, maybe it's Shopify?

During checkout, they have a checkbox asking if you also want to receive promotional emails. It's annoying that this is checked by default, but I can tolerate it to some degree since I still have the ability to opt out.

I always uncheck it. Always.

Almost without fail, I end up receiving marketing emails from these companies. (And not just followups from my purchase or even review requests, which would be bad enough.)

I never buy from those brands again.

You probably want something like https://cryptomator.org/

This tutorial addresses the practice: https://doordash.engineering/2017/05/15/tips-for-building-hi...

There's also a long, uh, spirited discussion about it here with some decent arguments going both directions: https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/why-do-we-need-apps/827/19

Let's be cautious where we attribute credit. Daily journaling has been a thing for, oh, centuries.

At the very least Zim has had the same journal feature dating back over a decade. I'm sure others can't point to similar software stretching back at least another decade before that.

My wife has been making Russian buttercream lately, which uses sweetened condensed milk added to whipped butter. It tends to be less sweet than most varieties which I count as a plus.

German buttercream sounds good.

You want something that manages different versions of Python itself. pyenv is a popular option for doing this, but I'm partial to rtx which is largely language agnostic and also handles Python virtual environments in a very elegant way.

https://github.com/jdxcode/rtx

That so musically wells?

From the bells, bells, bells, bells.