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ndegruchy

431 karma · joined May 25, 2022

Nathan is a technologist and Open Source enthusiast living and working in Florida. Often, he can be found playing board games with his family, video games by himself or breaking technological things in order to fix them "better".
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ndegruchy··on Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier
It's no less true, though. I'm sure there is a cohort of HN folks who don't have or maintain a social media account (either any more, or ever), there are likely many more that do.
ndegruchy··on Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier
> The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.

Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.

[1]: https://www.monicahq.com/en/

ndegruchy··on If you love a website, back it up
I use AnyBox on macOS to do this for bookmarks. It saves a WebArchive copy and a stripped 'reader'-esque version. SingleFile can also pipe into AnyBox, if you want to use that as the archive.
ndegruchy··on Firefox Enterprise
There's already Island browser that competes in this space. Plenty of companies pay for browser control that goes beyond what the normal policies can provide.
ndegruchy··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
Yeah, in scripts I try to be as explicit as possible. `$HOME` for the home directory, `$XDG_DATA_HOME` for `/home/foo/.local/share/`, etc.

The more specific you are, the less gotchas you're going to fall to.

ndegruchy··on Namecheap Extreme Price Hike
Is this just for `.com.co`/`.co` or is this a hike across more than that? It seems like there is either missing information, or it's just specific TLD.
ndegruchy··on I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
I've added a button that just triggers `navigator.share()`[1]. I know most users do the copy-paste dance, but I find this is a good middle ground. Adding functionality for my users, but not adding special social media share buttons.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

ndegruchy··on BBEdit 16
That is genuinely a neat usage, but I don't find myself needing to search through images for text. I am glad they're still updating and working on BBEdit, but the major revision feels a little flat with features.
ndegruchy··on BBEdit 16
> Support for vi keyboard emulation, for basic navigation and editing;

I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.

ndegruchy··on Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
The same company is trying to build an AI Zuckerberg...
ndegruchy··on The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client
In addition to this guys app, there's also brutaldon[1]. A web1.0 client that serves as a web interface for mastodon.

[1]: https://brutaldon.org/about

ndegruchy··on Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
Yeah, toggling in any manner you see fit (a Shortcut would be useful in this case) the location services in its totality or in the context of the Camera app would accomplish the same result.
ndegruchy··on Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
Yes. You can turn it off for Camera if you don't want the geotag to be included in the photo when taken. You can also, as part of the share media picker, opt to include or exclude location data on the photo.
ndegruchy··on Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL
Fossil is great. Not only is it a full suite of tools associated with the repository (discussions, tickets, wiki) but the tool is a single >10mb binary and can run as a web server (or CGI-like interface) for remote hosting.
ndegruchy··on Monosketch
Absolutely. Handy for making diagrams or just doodling and making custom headers for config files with `fig` and some boxes and shadows!
ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
Just as a quick follow up, I completely forgot about the tool BackupLoupe[1]. It allows you to slice into your existing Time Machine backups and find out all manner of information on what's going on, what is backed up, when and what is taking up so much space.

[1]: https://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
100%

My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.

While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.

I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.

I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.

My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.

However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.

Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.

Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.

ndegruchy··on TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
ndegruchy··on Self Sanitizing Door Handle
An interesting take. There is also brass and coppers that self-sanitize, albeit more slowly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11279221/
ndegruchy··on iCloud Photos Downloader
While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

ndegruchy··on GNU recutils: Plain text database
I love recutils. The database format is simple enough, it has a bunch of options for constraints, and it has Bash integration and a great Emacs mode to search, edit and verify the integrity of the database.

Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.

ndegruchy··on A beginners' guide away from scanf()
It's always interesting to see how many sharp edges that C, as a language, has still. I know it's a language that eschews a lot of the ergonomics found in more recent languages, but it makes me sad that we're still teaching beginners the poor form these basic operations.

I like C, but it feels like you have to have an unhealthy amount of paranoia to write it well.

ndegruchy··on Bitwarden Lite
Nice!

I wonder how this stacks up to Vaultwarden, which is really good.

ndegruchy··on Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance
Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.

[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au

ndegruchy··on Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance
Yeah, same with OpenOffice for years. It was a hack to get the program already resident in memory and ameliorate some of the startup costs.

Again, this was a hack. They should really be looking at fixing the issues with the startup time and slow performance of explorer, because even on vastly lesser machines, we've had near-to-instant startup times with, effectively, the same application.

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