sxan

joined 2 years ago
[–] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 3 hours ago

It seems as if he can do it up until election day. The hitch is that Vance has to step down, but I can't imagine that he'd resist if, behind closed doors, Trump told him to beat it.

I am not an expert on presidential election rules, though, so if you have a different source saying that he can't, I'd appreciate a link. And, no, "9 News" is not an ultimate source of truth, but I didn't find anything that said otherwise.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 9 hours ago

I've had an Aeropress for about a decade, and for the price I think it's a great tool to have in the cupboard. It has positives and negatives.

On the plus side, it's portable, fast, and makes a single serving.

On the downside, it's single serving, and it produces mediocre cups (IMO, YMMV).

I use mine to make my wife's once-weekly decaf, and when I run myself out of cold brew and am not in the mood for an espresso drink. Maybe 5x a month. I'm really glad I have it; I'd be unhappy if it were the only thing I had.

If you do get one, look on YouTube for best Aeropress method. Aeropress runs a competition and declares a winner for best method; the current winner is a rather fussy inverted method - but given the design, "fussy" for an Aeropress really isn't hugely different in effort from Hoff's "simplified" method. It's a pretty simple process and you really have to go out of your way to make it hard, unlike pour-over which can be fractally and infinitely fussified.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 10 hours ago

OK, let's look at only the effort, then.

"Effort" is energy. Whether on a bike, in an EV, or in an ICE vehicle, it takes energy to stop and then accelerate. The arguments in favor of Idaho stops applies equally to all vehicles: if the study does prove it increases safety by making drivers more paranoid - and it's not clear that it does, as others have pointed out - then it applies equally to all conveyances. Drivers being more careful at stops because anyone else could be legally rolling through a stop sign applies whether it's a bicyclist or a semi truck. If the argument is about less energy use, then the argument is even stronger for cars because it's far more energy expensive for them to come to a complete stop than it is for a bicycle.

Basically, if Idaho stops are good for bikes, they're even better for cars. If they're legal for bikes, they should be equally legal for cars. But the study is flawed, and before we legalize rolling stops or drive-through-red legal, we'd need far more, and better, studies.

As an aside, we now know that you're going to burn about the same calories whether exercising or not. Calories not burnt in exercise get used by the body to produce fat and to overdrive expensive biological processes, contributing to disease. The difference in total energy consumed through reduced food intake by legalizing rolling stops is negligible; it'd have almost zero environmental impact.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

F-Droid

Most of the apps I have and use are installed via Droidify. The ones that aren't are company apps, like banking or airline. I could just used the web sites for those; they're only conveniences.

My phone isn't rooted, and I didn't read the article so I don't know how this will affect me. If push comes to shove, I'll simply bite the bullet and get a phone I can install Linux on next time, regardless of how polished for daily driving it is.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 14 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

I think John F. Kennedy qualified; he's been practically deified since his assassination, and his supporters were MAGA-level enthusiasts. Just the sheer level of conspiracy theory around his assassination, missing from all other assassinations - successful or attempted - is a good indicator. Even the attempted Trump assassination, which generated considerable tin-hat response, is now almost completely forgotten; certainly, nobody's talking about it in mainstream forums.

In my opinion, Kennedy was an incredible president and great statesman, but yeah, I think you could reasonably claim there was a cult of personality around him.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But in an emergency, him being able to stab that button would save 2-4 seconds, which could save the ship. It sends the ship into a series of maneuvers, and the pilot takes over as soon as he can.

Anyway, I'm just saying, if transporting things could be automated to a single button push, there are a ton of other things that could be, too.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 1 day ago

+100 on roundabouts. We have not nearly enough in the US, although they're becoming more popular. A little troublesome for cyclists, though, because cars never stop. It's a worst-case situation for bikes.

I live in Minneapolis, which is graced with 98 miles of bike lanes and 101 miles of off-street bikeways and trails. When industry turned from blue to more white collar last century, they tore out all of the old railway lines and converted it to paths. It's the most incredible bicycling in the US, bar none. "Share the road" isn't an issue, because you can get nearly anywhere in the greater metropolitan Twin Cities in dedicated bike paths, often without ever having to share a street with cars, except to cross.

I'm in a closed suburban neighborhood; within two miles are still farms and horses. Yet I can get on my bike, ride 5 blocks through the neighborhood (OK, with cars for that part), get on a Rail Line (they're still mostly named after the rail lines they used to be), ride to a park, through it, onto another line, and all the way up into the nearest town 5 miles away to an organic grocery store. I have to cross 1 road on that entire line, and along a road-ajacent bike path for a half mile. And I could ride all the way across the Cities to a suburb on the far side - 47 miles - on dedicated bike paths. Some of those are bike lanes, but still; I've lived here for 7 years now, and it still blows my mind. The network is truly incredible, and something to be proud of. Most of the native cyclists, from the online bitching I read, have no clue how good they have it.

Many cyclists here - the spandex & clip-shoe types, still ride on the road with the cars, even when there's a perfectly good, paved bike lane next to them; I chalk that up to basic Midwestern passive-aggressiveness, but I'll grant that maybe there's a good reason for it.

Anyway, that kind of strayed off the topic of round-abouts, but if you're a cyclist, Minneapolis is one of the best cities in the world in which to live.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 day ago

Yes! I read something recently about how, while making reading and writing ubiquitous was an unarguable net benefit for humanity, it did irreversible damage to oral traditions.

People used to tell fairy tales to their kids from memory. Now, we read them books. I was discussing this with my in-laws; the 30% of us who never had children weren't able to recite more than a few lines of more than a couple nursery rhymes. You just forget stuff over the years.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of books. I love reading. But we've also lost something in the process.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 7 points 1 day ago (6 children)

No sympathy for the environment, huh?

With drivers decelerating and stopping at lights, then revving up to move quickly when lights go green, peak particle concentration was found to be 29 times higher than that during free-flowing traffic conditions. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/why-traffic-lights-are-pollution-hotspots/)

In a city the size of Atlanta, 269,000 tons of CO2 emissions could be prevented, equivalent to the CO2 absorbed by a forest 3.3 times the size of Atlanta, according to Inrix. (https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135482_poorly-timed-traffic-lights-add-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions-here-s-an-estimate-of-how-much)

That latter article is talking about how many tons of CO2 could be reduced just by better optimizing traffic in the city so that fewer cars hit red lights.

No argument, getting rid of cars would have the biggest positive impact, but failing that, optimizing lights for cars, while not helping cyclist safety, would be a much better investment if we want to reduce pollution. Idaho stops for cyclists from the OP post would actually be detrimental to the environment based on the conclusions from the study: that allowing it makes drivers more cautious, implying more full stops, more time idling, and more CO2 produced per car trip.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

I get the joke, and ha ha.

However: it's been a long time since I've watched through TNG, but in TOS operating a transporter was a bit of an art, requiring skill. Like piloting the ship. It wasn't a "push a button" exercise; it was reading meters, adjusting variables, acquiring locks... and frequently, something would interfere that required real work on the transporter operator which could result in loss of the transported persons. You wanted a skilled transporter operator if you were the one being transported. I don't recall it having changed much by TNG; transporting was skilled labor, and experience counted. It wasn't a fully automated "push a button" operation.

Not always, but often it was a senior engineer operating the transporter when bridge crew were being transported, especially in hostile situations.

I can appreciate the premise of this series; they're funny and creative. When it gets to this level, the dissonance distracts me from the humor :shrug:.

Edit: no, really. Like, operating a transporter was always portrayed a little like playing a musical instrument. It makes less sense than Picard being able to raise shields or set alert levels from his chair with one of his buttons, than having to tell someone to "go to red alert." Why didn't Picard have an "evasive maneuvers" button? Transporting has to be at least as complicated as targeting phasers or torpedoes, right?

[–] sxan@midwest.social 25 points 1 day ago

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of "awesome lists". Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for "awesome list" on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for "awesome list" in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I know. When a technology is replaced by something better, we tend to lose common knowledge, and sometimes all knowledge, of how to do it most effectively.

Sometimes, it's not replaced, just lost and we can't replicate it (Roman concrete, until recently). Sometimes, it's just not relevant and the majority of people never learn or know how to do it anymore (knapping). Sometimes it's lost because nobody has done it on so long and there are few or no records - we can reverse engineer and make educated guesses, but we can't be certain about how they did it, and we probably can't do it as well without cheating with newer technology (Egyptian pyramids).

I completely agree with you, and knapping is one of my favorite examples. It's something nearly everyone could do, and do pretty darned well, at one point. And now now almost nobody can do it, or even know how to, except for some indigenous communities and a few enthusiasts. Giant public works projects, like Stonehenge, Pyramids, and Easter Island are even harder, because they did it all the time and were good at it, we have so little written record of how because nobody bothered to write a manual, and it required the combined effort of a community.

 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15132091

Bedfordshire Police have said just ten arrests were made over the Bedford River Festival this weekend (20/21 July) with Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology responsible...

 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15132091

Bedfordshire Police have said just ten arrests were made over the Bedford River Festival this weekend (20/21 July) with Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology responsible...

 

I vastly prefer to support community artisans over mass-produced material when I can. Is anyone in the community making Moopsies?

 

Cross-posting here, as the content under discussion is political in nature, and I feel as if the question might be of similar concern to other posters. Most probably don't care; data miners harvesting information to sell to HR departments and hiring managers are a real thing, though, so I think answers are relevant.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/14464872

A friend of mine would like to post an op-ed style political essay about the current turmoil in the Democratic Party about Biden's fitness. They are concerned about it affecting their career, should it be linked back to them; the US is highly divided and they know some of their peers are Republicans, and they're not sure about the affiliations of people in their upward chain of command. My friend is concerned that posting an emotional opinion piece might -- if attributed to them and seen -- negatively affect their career. They want to stay anonynmous.

I think getting something posted anonymously in Lemmy would be fairly easy; no-one is going to trying legally coercing an email out of a Lemmy instance over an op-ed. And getting a boost in Mastodon would be simple. I was hoping that there'd be something like WriteFreely where they could post, but anonymity appears to be not even a consideration by the main developers.

And then there's the question of how to get links to the essay out of the Fediverse, where 90% of the people are. I don't have a Xitter account anymore, and have never had a Facebook account.

What suggestions does Lemmy have? How, in today's world, does someone anonymously post content?

Subscript: I do not mean political anonymity -- not in the way that protection from law enforcement is needed. My friend lives in the US where freedom of speech is still more-or-less ensured, and the content is not illegal, incidiary, inciting, or even unusual. However, they want anonymity sufficient to guard against data miners, correlators, and brokers. They need to get something off their chest, express an opinion, but not at a risk to their career.

14
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
 

A friend of mine would like to post an op-ed style political essay about the current turmoil in the Democratic Party about Biden's fitness. They are concerned about it affecting their career, should it be linked back to them; the US is highly divided and they know some of their peers are Republicans, and they're not sure about the affiliations of people in their upward chain of command. My friend is concerned that posting an emotional opinion piece might -- if attributed to them and seen -- negatively affect their career. They want to stay anonynmous.

I think getting something posted anonymously in Lemmy would be fairly easy; no-one is going to trying legally coercing an email out of a Lemmy instance over an op-ed. And getting a boost in Mastodon would be simple. I was hoping that there'd be something like WriteFreely where they could post, but anonymity appears to be not even a consideration by the main developers.

And then there's the question of how to get links to the essay out of the Fediverse, where 90% of the people are. I don't have a Xitter account anymore, and have never had a Facebook account.

What suggestions does Lemmy have? How, in today's world, does someone anonymously post content?

Subscript: I do not mean political anonymity -- not in the way that protection from law enforcement is needed. My friend lives in the US where freedom of speech is still more-or-less ensured, and the content is not illegal, incidiary, inciting, or even unusual. However, they want anonymity sufficient to guard against data miners, correlators, and brokers. They need to get something off their chest, express an opinion, but not at a risk to their career.

 

It is not my intention to ignite an EMACS/vim war; I will say that I find it baffling that Lower Decks is ending while Strange New Worlds is being continued. I like Strange New Worlds, despite disagreeing with some of the artistic licenses being taken. But if I had to choose between the two shows, it'd be no contest. Not only as a viewer do I prefer LD, but it has to be the cheaper show to produce. The fact that next season is the last (both by design, it only being contracted for 5 years; and announcement) is sad and incomprehensible in the same way the cancelation of Firefly was - except LD is popular and successful, whereas Firefly merely had a fanatical (🖐️) fan base.

I don't understand it. Yes, you want to end on a high note. Maybe the writers are running out of plot ideas. Perhaps, given an initial life span of 5 years, the actors have all made other arrangements and aren't available. But I just can't believe the One Big Plot Arc that's been building would necessitate ending the series by its resolution.

LD is a strong show. It's lighthearted. It's a breath of fresh air after the more decidedly darker, ethically challenging, and emotionally straining runs of TNG, Voyager, DS9. And Strange New Worlds... the Gorn are basically Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.Who, despite being the existential threat of the show, somehow get entirely forgotten about by the time in TOS.

But I digress. I'm going to miss Lower Decks, badly. How can this happen? And why?

 

This is kind of a rant, but mostly a plea.

There are times when BusyBox is the only tool you can use. You've got some embedded device with 32k RAM or something; I get it. It's the right tool. But please, please, In begging you: don't use it just because you're lazy.

I find BusyBox used in places where it's not necessary. There's enough RAM, there's more than enough storage, and yet, it's got BusyBox.

BusyBox tooling is absolutely aenemic. Simple things, common things, like - oh, - capturing a regexp group from a simple match are practically impossible. But you can do this in bash; heck, it's built in! But BusyBox uses ash, which is barely a shell and certainly doesn't support regexp matching with group capture. Maybe awk? Well, gawk lets you, with -oP, but of course BusyBox doesn't use GNU awk, and so you can't get at the capture groups because it doesn't support perl REs. It'd be shocking if BusyBox provided any truly capable tools like ripgrep, in which this would be trivial. I haven't tried BB's sed yet, because sed's RE escaping is and has always been a bizarre nightmarish Frankenstein syntax, but I've got a dime riding on some restriction in BB's sed that prevents getting at capture groups there, too.

BusyBox serves a purpose; it is intentionally barely functional; size constraining trumps all other considerations. It achieves this well. My issue isn't with BusyBox, it's with people using it everywhere when they don't need to, making life hell for anyone who's trying to actually get any work done in it.

So please. For the sanity of your users: don't reach for BusyBox just because it's easy, or because you're tickled that you're going to save a megabyte or two; please spare a thought for your users on which you are inflicting these constraints. Use it when you have to, because otherwise it doesn't fit. Otherwise, chose a real shell, at least bash, and include some tools capable of more than less than the bare minimum.

 

I know it's tragically pedestrian; and I know there's supposed to be a 4 in 2025; and I also know there's many a slip twixt cup and lip, and the gaming industry is going through some pretty radical changes... but all I really want is another Borderlands.

There's not much they can do with it, not many places to go, and I'm sure everyone who's worked on the series over the years is thoroughly sick of it. But, damn. Every one of the main games (at least; I haven't loved every in-between spin-off) has his a sweet spot of mindless fun, funniness, and replay-ability. I've played 3 so many times through, and spent so many hours just running around in every location, even I can't work up much enthusiasm to fire it up anymore.

There's an occasional game that fills the same niche; Bullet Storm was pretty fun, but with low replay-ability. I just want a game where I can turn off the higher brain functions and run around killing stuff in interesting ways.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

 

Rook provides a secret service a-la secret-tool, keyring, or pass/gopass, except backed by a Keepass v2 kdbx file.

The problem Rook solves is mainly in script automation, where you have aerc, offlineimap, isync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, restic, or any other cron jobs that need passwords and which are often configured to fetch these passwords from a secret service with a CLI tool. Unlike existing solutions, Rook is headless, and does not have a bespoke secrets database full of passwords that must be manually synchronized with Keepass; instead, it uses a Keepass db directly.

Rook is in the AUR; binaries are available from the project page.

From the changelog, since the last Lemmy release announcement (v0.0.9):

[v0.1.3] Mon May 20 17:12:25 2024 -0500

Added

  • status command, a more lightweight way of testing if a DB is open. Using this instead of info in e.g. statusbar scripts greatly reduces CPU load.
  • case-insensitive search.

Changed

  • removing some nil panics that could occur when DB is closed while a client call is being processed.

Fixed

  • a hidden bug in the OTP pin code.
  • some errors being ignored (and therefore not logged)
  • TOTP attributes getting missed by otp generator check

[v0.1.2] Fri Apr 26 15:13:55 2024 -0500

Added

  • one-time pin soft locking
  • installation instructions for distributions that have rook in a repository
  • more of the special autotype {} commands are supported (backspace, space, esc)

Changed

  • getAttr adds a little delay before typing, allowing initiator tools (like rofi) to close windows before text is output
  • cleans up code per golint/gochk

Fixed

  • an autotype bug in outputting literals

[v0.1.1] Sun Mar 17 13:44:54 2024 -0500

Added

  • the original source rook.svg
  • ability to start the rook server passing in the password via stdin pipe.

Changed

  • assets moved to directory
  • documentation referenced Keepass v4; there's no such thing, it's v2.
  • license, was missing (c) from original
  • stop trying to remove the version number from build assets
  • documentation to clarify when the master password exists as plain text, in response to questions from @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz

[v0.1.0] Fri Mar 15 14:03:25 2024 -0500

Added

  • nfpm file
  • logo

Changed

  • clears out the password so it's not being held in plain text by the flags library.
  • some of the documentation, and fixes the duplicated v0.0.9 entry in the changelog.
  • CI build targets are more limited, but also include some distro packages
  • better README documentation

Removed

  • the monitor attribute was taken out, as rook no longer busy-polls the DB
1
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/coffee@lemmy.world
 

Update

On a whim, I tried searching YouTube instead of search engines and found a short video which led me to this shop in Etsy. It looks quite promising, so I'm going to update the title as "solved."

Original post

I've had an Elektra Micro Casa Leva for a number of years, and a while ago I bought a naked portafilter for it. It was (and still is, on the product site) as "for the Micro Casa." It is, without a doubt, one of the poorest quality things I've ever bought. The wood appears painted, not stained; it's been resistant to oiling, and lately the paint has been flaking off leaving what I assume is cheap pine. The wood itself has been cracking and splitting. The portafilter itself is painted to look like brass; I can tell this because that paint has started chipping and peeling. It looks as if it's some type of steel underneath -- I'd suspect aluminum, except for the weight and I assume the maker would be concerned about having one literally melt on a user. In any case, it's horrible. The handle is not screwed in, or else it's screwed & glued; if the metal weren't so obviously crap, I'd consider routing out the handle and replacing it myself; as is, it's so poorly made it hardly seems worth the effort. Regardless, I've been using it for a few years and it hasn't outright broken yet, but with all the paint chipping and peeling, it's looking really rough, and you don't own a Micro Casa Leva for the convenience.

The Elektra takes a non-standard 49mm portafilter, which can make finding parts challenging. Is there a company that makes decent portafilters that fit the Leva? It's possible I simply haven't delved the depths of the web deeply enough. Or, is there a craftsman in the community who does this sort of work -- making nice handles, sourcing appropriate baskets, etc? Failing all of that, is there a place I can buy a naked portafilter of good quality for the Leva, and is there anyone making good handles for portafilters? I'm no craftsman, but I can manage sanding wood to fit a hole, and I can mix epoxy.

What I'd really like to end up with is a brass portafilter with a beautiful wood handle with a nice grain and stain. I'd settle for a naked portafilter for the Leva that isn't a cheap piece of garbage.

 

Howdy Lemmy,

I'm announcing Rook v0.0.9, software that provides a secret service a-la secret-tool, keyring, or pass/gopass, except backed by a Keepass 4.x kdbx file.

The problem Rook solves is mainly in script automation, where you have aerc, offlineimap, isync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, restic, or any other cron jobs that need passwords and which are often configured to fetch these passwords from a secret service with a CLI tool. Unlike existing solutions, Rook is headless and does not have a bespoke secrets database, full of passwords that must be manually synchronized with Keepass; instead, it uses a Keepass db directly.

While the readme goes into more detail, I will say the motivation for Rook evolved from a desire to use a Keepass db in a GUI-less environment and finding no existing solutions. KeepassXC provides a secret service, but is not headless; it also provides a CLI tool, but this requires the db credentials on every call. kpmenu exists, but is designed specifically to require human interaction and is unsuitable for cron environment scripting. Every other solution maintains its own DB back end, incompatible with Keepass.

Rook also benefits from minimal external dependencies, and at 1kloc is auditable by developers - I believe even by ones who do not know Go (the language of implementation). Being able to verify for yourself that there's no malicious code is a critical trait for a tool with which you're trusting secrets.

Rook is fit for purpose, and signed binaries are provided as well as build-from-source instructions (for auditors).

The project contains work in progress: credentials are limited to simple password-locked kdbx, and so doesn't yet support key files. Bash scripts that provide autotyping and attribute/secret selection via rofi, fzf, and xdotool are provided, for GUI environments; these have known bugs. Rook has not been tested on BSD, Darwin, or any other system than Linux, but may well work; the main sticking point is the use of a local file socket for client/server communication, so POSIX systems should be fine, but still, YMMV.

As a final caveat: up until v0.0.9 I've been compressing with brotli, which is very nice yet somewhat obscure. With the next release, everything will be gzipped. Also included in the next release will be packages for various distributions.

1
Help with QMK issue (midwest.social)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml
 

I assume this is QMK, because changing the settings clears or introduces the issue. I'm using Vial for the programming/configuration.

I have a key configured tap-dance, like many others: - on tap, and ctrl on hold. The issue is that most of the time when I type something like -p, I get only the -. Then, the next time I type p, I get 2 of them. So something like this will happen:

I type foo -p bar baz, but don't notice the p is missing until after baz, cursor left and type p again, and end up with -pp

Most of my keys are tap-dance of some pattern: on tap, layer shift in hold, on tap-hold. I've noticed this buffered character after - on other characters; it isn't just p. Changing the timeout does affect the frequency, but doesn't entirely eliminate it. I haven't noticed it on any other combo, although they're all of the same pattern; it seems to be only happening with the -/ctrl tap-dance. Removing the multitap on - eliminates the issue.

This is my first QMK. I'd been using an Ergodox for years, and kmonad on my laptop for a year or so, although I recently switched to kanata (fantastic piece of software, incidentally), so I'm more or less familiar with the world of layers, multi-tap/tap-dance, combos, and so on. This one has me stumped, though.

I've checked and there's no combo defined that involves dash. I've never created a QMK macro, but it occurs to me that I didn't check if there are any defined.

Does anyone have a suggestion of how I can debug this? Could there be some bug, some bit that I accidentally set, that's causing this? Is there some QMK feature that does exactly this thing, and I've somehow enabled it? I've power cycled the keyboard, although I haven't yet tried a hard or factory reset.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Edit corrected "multi-tap" to "tap-dance", as QMK calls it the one thing and not t'other

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