thinker5555

I was just telling my 10 year old about QNX last night, and how it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc. Since he's missing so much of the context of "the ancient times", he didn't exactly share my enthusiasm, but at least he humored me a bit for my trip down memory lane.

I use multiple Firefox profiles because I have a couple of websites for work that seem to wind up with issues loading every few months, and for some reason keeping those sites in their own profile keeps that from happening. I use Firefox Sync to keep things in sync between the two.

Anyway, I've had a different theme for each profile for a couple of years so I can tell them apart at a glance. My main profile is dark gray, and the other profile is green. With this new update, now the themes keep syncing and winding up the same. I tried changing the sync.prefs for all of the activeThemeID keys to false in both profiles, but the themes keep syncing up. Either that, or the themes keep getting reset back to the default theme, which I'm not using for either one.

Has anyone else noticed something like this?

I gave it a try and ran into a situation where the 8 of hearts was the open card at the bottom of a column, and I had a 7 of spades sitting alone in another column, and when I tried to move the 7 to the 8, it refused to let me do it. It's been forever since I've played Klondike, and I've never looked up the official rules, so I'm not sure if there's a rule I'm unaware of or if it's a bug.

In the same game, I just ran into another one where I turned over the six of diamonds from the stock pile, and when I tried to move it onto the 7 of spades, it also refused that move.

Just make sure you watch it all the way to the end. Or at least pay attention to the date in the title.

I remember "cat lipstick" being a big joke/meme 20 years ago on Fark.com. Ceiling Cat was omnipresent and FB- was the father of the multitudes.

Maybe I'm just really out of my depth on this, but it feels like there's not a lot of information about _why_ these particular steps and tools are used. Why are 4 different Linux images needed? Why are there all of these steps to create a one-time use "init.iso"? Is it just so the cloud-init script can run? I see the call to mkisofs is referencing "cidata", but it's the only place in the whole page that "cidata" shows up. Does that mean mkisofs is cloud-init aware? And why use emulation instead of virtualization?

I guess part of why I'm asking is because I've set up virtual machines in UTM on Apple Silicon before, and I never had to go through all of this just to get Linux installed and configured. The post makes me wonder if there's something I'm maybe missing, but it doesn't give any explanation for me to be able to figure out if that's the case. Maybe the post is meant more just as a checklist for the person that wrote it, for their own reference? But the way the post reads doesn't quite sound that way.

Hmm... that's all coming out sounding more critical than I mean to. I just want more info and I am curious about the approach.

> I ask our clients to build a list of their impressions for the first month (or even more) and then revisit that list after a month. A lot of requests magically vanish off that list.

That's a really great and simple idea. Change is hard and it takes time for people to adjust, even if they requested change in the first place. Things like muscle memory and habit can cause a lot of up front discomfort, but basically requesting that they take the time to allow those things to catch up can really shift their perspective of the new normal.

I'm probably an oddball compared to most, but I use a VM as my main work environment. My main reason is because it's super easy to create a backup and test anything like OS or major software updates there first to make sure it doesn't hose anything. Or if I just want to tinker and try new things without risking breaking anything. Also, where I work they get us new hardware every 3 years, and it means I don't have to spend a long time trying to set my environment up on a new computer. I just copy over the VM and jump right in.

I just tried it out, but for some reason it's complaining about missing a pivot_vtab module when I try to open an existing database. (MacOS ARM/Ventura)

That's fantastic! I really appreciate it. I'm going to give it a whirl later this week.

This is pretty cool! I recently started keeping "one text file per month" for my work stuff, and it's been really helpful to have one place to go to see what my next plans are, what I was doing recently, picking up on old trains of thought, and finding those lost examples or exceptions that I made note of previously, but could never remember where I kept them before. I don't have any of the rust ecosystem installed currently, and I know nothing about it, which is a little bit a of a limiting factor for me, but this may give me the push to try it out.

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, but a data analyst in a very small ecommerce company and fulfillment center. I do quite a bit with light-to-medium automation and "development", as needed, but my skill level at anything development related is probably at the level of a hobbyist.

For the workers that are capable of working from home, my workplace asks us to be in the office only on Thursday morning each week. This gives us a consistent time to do things like having our company-wide meetings or social events like company sponsored meals, fun events, etc.

During COVID, I was perfectly happy working at home. My workplace ensured that I had a desk setup that matched what I had in the office, and my home "office" was removed enough from the chaos of the rest of the house that it worked well.

My decision to start going back to the workplace was in the middle of 2022, when all the COVID related stuff finally started calming down and things like mask regulations started to relax. Some of my decision was due to needing to work in a location where I couldn't distract myself by going and doing things around the house. I had started to do that more and more frequently, mostly due to my ADHD and the fact that the novelty of working from home had worn off.

But another really big part of my decision was because I REALLY did miss seeing my coworkers in person. I'm in this rare unicorn situation where I absolutely love what I do, I love the company I work for, and I love the people I work with. Being there just makes me happy at all levels. This isn't even about an "ideal office setup" in the strict sense you're thinking of. I'm currently in my own office, but I spent the first 3.5 years working in an open office with 3 to 5 others, and that was just as good.

I know a lot of people that have that "Sunday Dread" about having to go to work on Monday, but I honestly get almost giddy Sunday evening knowing that I'll get to go to work the next morning. The really funny thing is that I consider myself to be a pretty extreme introvert. But all in all, I'm well aware that this whole outlook is extremely uncommon, so it's probably not truly considered a "blind spot" on your part, but more that I'm just an outlier.

I've seen the "workspaces" thing in a few different browsers now. I know Vivaldi and Arc have them, and it sounds like it's a separate thing from profiles, but I don't quite grok what the difference is between workspaces and profiles. Can anyone help enlighten me? If you use both workspaces and profiles, what do you do differently between them?

I've used both DB Browser and SQLiteStudio, and I prefer the flow and interface of SQLiteStudio.

It's been a few years since I've used DB Browser, so I forget exactly what I didn't like about it. Maybe I should download it again and try it out one more time and see if I still feel the same way.

A little over a year ago I was struggling with python related to packaging and managing my own dependencies. I found a blog post called "Relieving your Python packaging pain"[0] that piqued my interest with its simplicity. A couple of days later, the author released another post called "Why not tell people to 'simply' use pyenv, poetry, pipx, or anaconda"[1], which included the how-to steps outlined in their first post, and generated a sizeable discussion[2] on HN. Being on a Mac, this really has made things so much easier for me. I'm not a professional developer by any means, but more like a hobbiest+ as I make things to help automate away some pain points within the small company I work for.

[0] https://www.bitecode.dev/p/relieving-your-python-packaging-p... [1] https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simply-use [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35379008

> It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that.

Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self checkouts.

For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start scanning items and placing them inside.

That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!

I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what, every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10 "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button after the scan.

While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.

I have one of these sitting on my shelf! I still get it down and flip through it every so often.

I used BeOS around 2002 and 2003, and it was so cool. One of my favorite things was when I figured out how to use file system metadata to essentially turn files and folders into a database. Having emails essentially be plain text files, but with all the OS searchable metadata of subject, from, time sent, etc. that could be viewable in a Tracker window was awesome. And at the time, it was one of the few systems I could get to work with my dual processor system.

Unfortunately at that time I was struggling with things that I needed to use via Windows that I couldn't do in BeOS. Even though I didn't use it a ton, I love it and I always wished it had taken off better. Every so often I load up Haiku for that hit of nostalgia, but it feels like a lot of modern software is missing from it. Even just being able to run a modern Firefox on it would be enough to keep it on my home computer for most things.

I haven't had the same experience with Yabai. I've been using it happily and without issue since April, and I don't think I've had to restart it once.

Before Yabai I was using Amethyst, but like your experience with Yabai, I felt like it would suddenly stop working and needed to be restarted. Maybe your experience would be flipped.

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

In the post link, there's a section called "See it in action" with a video, and in there he shows an example of installing gedit into a container and running it.

I've been using Amethyst for a few years now. It's not exactly a separate WM in terms of changing the window decorations, but it's more of a kind of an automation layer that works through the Accessibility access layer of MacOS. I've been relatively happy with it. The only bad thing is that because the Command key is used for so much in MacOS, it tends to need to be chorded with multiple modifier keys to ensure that there aren't keyboard shortcut clashes.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

I did some looking around, and it sounds like it fails to work correctly with namespace packages. Something about the way you have to add them to the path leads to them being later in the path, so there could be times where they don't get found because something earlier in the path gets used instead.

Thanks. I know that was the case with the M1 MBPs, but wasn't sure if that would carry over to the M2 versions, and I didn't see anything about charging via the USB-C ports in the press relese.

This may be a stupid question, but does anyone know if you could charge through one of the Thunderbolt ports instead of having to use the magsafe connector? My work uses Macs for all employees, and they've been generous enough to supply me with 2 docking stations (one for office, one for home) that both charge through a Thunderbolt port. I'm due for a MBP upgrade and they were specifically waiting on the M2 Pro/Max versions before doing mine, and I'm trying to figure out if I can stick with my old docks or if I'll need to request new ones.

I'd be curious to know what they are, as I'm interested in giving the -t flag a try myself.

It's funny how "pip help list" or "pip help freeze" works. :-) I found I can add --path .lib to list/freeze those. It's an extra step, but not too terrible.

I tinkered with this a little, and it's interesting. But what about using pip list or pip freeze? They don't show the packages in the .lib directory. Do you just add them by hand to the requirements.txt?

Yup. We have a bot that the user slacks directly with a product code, and the bot will query our WMS and return the location it's in and how many are on hand. Why not just query the WMS directly? Because our WMS charges per user account, but not for API/developer accounts. This way we can allow office personnel that only need to look up something every couple of days without being charged for accounts that hardly ever get used.

Granted, I'm more of a hobbiest than a dev, but I think this is part of the problem that virtualenvs are supposed to help solve. One project (virtualenv) can have numpy==3.2, and another can have numpy==3.1. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like having a one project with multiple versions of numpy being imported/called at various times would be asking for trouble.

This reminds me a bit of TiddlyWiki, minus the whole "you can edit the file using the file itself" part.

https://tiddlywiki.com

I haven't had a lot of time for reading this year, but one I got most of the way through that was the most beneficial to me was Delivered From Distraction. There was a "Hey, do you guys experience this?" post I saw on HN several months ago, and it echoed my experiences so much it almost felt as if I had written it. So many people suggested getting an ADHD evaluation and gave all sorts of resources (books, videos, etc) and Delivered From Distraction was one that came up again and again. It was a great book because I saw SO much of myself and my struggles over the years reflected in its pages, and thanks to the post, discussion, the book, and so many of the other resources, I was able to get an evaluation a couple of weeks ago and will have the results in the next couple of months.

Ah, found the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593462

If you read any of that and think it feels really familiar, I can't suggest Delivered From Distraction enough.