quaddo

I was a huge tilix fan for ages, but ran into an issue with long URLs being unclickable.

Circa 1997 a coworker lamented that he had signed up for some email list, and attempts to unsubscribe weren’t working (more of a manual thing, IIRC). I made the suggestion to set up a cronjob to run hourly, to send an email request to be unsubscribed. It would source a text file containing the request to be unsubscribed. And with each iteration, it would duplicate the text from the file, effectively a geometric progression. The list owner responded about a week or so later, rather urgently requesting that my coworker cut it out, saying that he would remove him from the list. Apparently the list owner had been away on vacation the entire time.

I’m in a similar situation and hadn’t thought of it that way. My take on the email I receive is that they fall into one of these categories: a) genuinely intended for me (and not spam), b) spam, c) genuinely intended case of mistaken address (they forgot to include another character), d) someone using mine as their throwaway (site sending verification email), and e) someone using mine as their throwaway (no verification process, ergo not altogether different from spam).

I do something somewhat similar which has evolved for myself and in part for my team. What follows is heavily abridged in the interest of time.

I use Obsidian as follows:

1. Daily log in bullet-point format. Title in YYYY-MM-DD format. Bottom of log has [[YYYY-MM-DD]] with tomorrow’s date.

If I get into a task that starts to get a bit ‘chatty’ and/or would benefit from capturing stdin/stdout/stderr snippets, I’ll use the [[blah]] trick and dump it there.

If a particular priority task didn’t get tended to, I copy that into tomorrow’s daily before stepping afk for the day.

Gets shared with manager, etc.

2. Weekly summary using the ![[Week ending YYYY-MM-DD]] embedded view Obsidian feature in my daily log page. For that at-a-glance warm fuzzies. This boils down to:

- retrospective - highs - lows - 1:1 notes - incoming week’s tasks/priorities

I use this page for my 1:1’s of course. I’ve only very recently started copying the retrospective to my manager via Slack to ensure he’s got the goods.

I prep my incoming week with a new weekly summary, and pre-populate the bare bones for the daily notes.

Is it possible they’re trying to separate out candidates who studied English literature as a matter of typical high school education vs those who studied ESL back in their home countries?

Back around 20 years ago I was with an MSP. We depended heavily on having a well written - as current as possible - prod guide for all operations.

At some point it occurred to me that there was likely a way to draw upon the experiences of those who came before us. In my case, it seemed fitting to use newspapers as a reference.

Somewhere I’d come across a concise guideline, a list of do’s and don’ts. The only thing I clearly recall now is keeping the key info “above the fold”, which is likely something that might puzzle someone who has never handled a newspaper. Even so, the concept is easy to share and grasp.

I wish I’d kept that list. I’ve tried looking for it within the past couple years, to no avail.

Sci-fi drama?

Also: man, I really enjoyed that show.

Random: is the Niche Duo made by a US company?

Asking, as I noticed the power switch on the side: the "|" symbol was at the top, which doesn't jive with the UK's "up is off, down is on" typical switch.

As someone who is something of a coffee nerd (QM67 machine, Fiorenzato grinder w/ timer), I'll admit to balking at doing any of the more fiddly/fussy things.

But out of curiosity, how much time does the coffee nerd community spend pondering and tweaking environmental variables?

For example, ambient room temperature and relative humidity? Can't do a whole lot about pressure, short of tracking historical trends vs present air pressure and setting expectations, I suppose.

Other factors: tamping down physical, emotional irritants, such as screaming children, freshly burnt toast, headaches, etc.

And something that is adjustable but not quickly so: the (paint) colour(s) of the room. It's been something like 30 years, but ISTR hearing that different colours can affect us in subtle ways. For example, red can help stimulate the appetite. I imagine good lighting (eg, warm lighting, avoid fluorescent) is another variable.

All this to ask: do coffee nerds consider tweaking any of the above, or only those things that are in very close proximity to the grinder and espresso machine?

I've heard you get better results if you spritz them.

I used to think that isopropyl alcohol was the last word in cheap-and-convenient surface sterilization, such as hands.

For better or for worse, watching a handful of YT videos from doctors saying "just wash the wound with soap and water" or even "all you need is to wash your hands with soap and water" has made me dial back the "douse it with alcohol" thinking.

I still use alcohol from time to time. Or hydrogen peroxide, depending. But at least now I'll get a fresh wound (cat bite or whatever) under a thorough rubbing with soap + water as the immediate first step. A thorough wash, at that.

TANSTAAFL

Man. Way to rustle the ol' memory tree.

I think the first time I saw this in print was in Programming Perl back in the mid-1990's.

Don't forget traffic calming features, to help with slower speeds eg in suburban areas.

Not everything needs to be regulated in such a way as to encourage or require more policing, and the associated budget increases.

Earthquakes.

Once we get settled at our new house, I plan to send out some postcards with a quick note on them. It's been a pretty big move.

I figure that's enough of a lost art that someone might actually think "oh cool" and either pin it to the cork board or add to a shoebox of keepsakes.

At the risk of going too far OT, here's a story of how I did something different that wasn't expensive but was still seen fondly by all concerned.

So ~15 years ago our son had been invited to his best friend's birthday party. Unsurprisingly, the birthday boy had a list of electronic toys on his gift list, as had become tradition.

While my wife and I were out shopping for said gift, she located one of the electronic items. Probably a game cart for whatever was popular at the time.

Meanwhile, I had come across something that had stirred up fond memories of my own: a sleeping bag + flashlight (+ some other related item) combo. Woo :)

We decided to get both the game and the sleeping bag combo, just in case the latter wasn't well-received.

At the birthday party, I think literally every other gift was for his gaming system. Once he opened the sleeping bag gift, he, his mom, and at least a few of the other kids had a "wait - okay that's different and kinda cool" reaction.

Even if he never went camping with them, I hope he got many hours of use out of that sleeping bag and flashlight. I know I did with mine.

Some knots are only useful under tension; absent that, they can get sloppy without too much effort. I'd say the clove hitch is one such example.

It's also possible that someone in debt would do something dishonest against the company, if a bad actor offered them money to do so.

When I was about 30 and wanted to scratch the same itch, I found an introductory electronics course being run at my local community college. From distant memory, it definitely covered off resistors, capacitors, coils, Ohm's Law, then worked its way to transistors and I think op amps. Somewhere along the way we got into the basics of creating logic gates, which also served to fill a void I had in my understanding of computers.

At a much younger age, I was interested in amateur radio. As luck would have it, I learned of a night school course being held at one of the local high schools that was meant to teach you everything you needed to know to get your license. The instructor (late 20s, if I had to guess) really knew his stuff. I think this gave me a far better grasp of the relevant electromagnetic and electronics theory and practice than I feel is made available through present-day amateur radio "memorize the answers and some context around them" teaching materials. My point is, if you want to stretch your understanding of electronics, it's possible a local ham might be another good option to consider.

Check out Vivaldi...?

Pictures/visuals just communicate differently.

A well-done graph can communicate data and the desired message quickly. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have poorly done or deceptive graphs.

An illustrated magazine will communicate a story differently, compared to a text-only novel. There's nuance to each approach that the other can't quite capture.

A photograph or painting can elicit a different level (breadth, depth) of mood/emotion that words might merely hint at.

Of course, what's useful in one context could be pointless in another. An introduction to photography would do well to include some illustrations, whereas a book on meditation could probably do fine with few, if any, images. Another example is Gray's Anatomy, which would probably be more challenging to consume if there were no illustrations.

Some subjects such as learning a martial art can be helped by using pictures/illustrations, but realistically when used as the only source of knowledge fall short of adequately communicating proficiency in said martial art, where only in-person instruction would really suffice.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" or some such.

That said, I've certainly heard that different people prefer different ways of learning/consuming knowledge. I myself will choose video for some things, illustrations/graphs/images for other things, and text/tables for yet others. I do have a fondness for well done images, though.

Even the style of text can have an impact. Bullet points for providing instructions, instead of a long paragraph of sprawling text.

Another thing I picked up some 15 years ago is borrowed from newspapers: the concept of "above the fold"; get the main points out there near the top, and keep it concise.

Not who you replied to, but I was wondering if I could get your take on my use case.

I work on the systems test automation side of things. I use TF to deploy EC2 clusters, including the creation of VPC, subnet, SG, LBs, etc. Once done, I tear down the whole thing.

But from what I'm hearing from yourself and others in this thread, it sounds like I could (/should) be breaking those out separately, even though my use case isn't dev/test/prod(/prod2,/prod3) or even multi-regional.

To rephrase, it sounds like it might be useful for me to be able to create some separation, eg, tear down the EC2 instances in a given VPC/subnet while I ponder what to do next and still leaving the other AWS resources intact, for example. Maybe even deploy another subnet to the same VPC, but a different test intention. I know I can simply specify a different AMI and run tf apply and get one kind of desired deployment change.

Bigger picture: when I need to run one test, I'll copy a dir from our GH repo, edit the tfvars, and kick things off. Another test (in parallel, even), I'll do the same but to a fresh dir. (Wash, rinse, repeat.) And I suspect you're already cringing :) but I get why. It makes me cringe. Ideally I'd be working with a single source of truth (local GH fork).

There's also the consideration of possibly making edits to the stack while I deploy/destroy, while at the same time wanting stability with another deployment for a day or two. I suppose that would require having 2 copies of the remote GH repo. Which is several copies fewer than I'm working with these days.

Fwiw, I've already got "rewrite the stack" on my todo list, but can't get to it for probably another 2 months. So I'm eagerly collecting any "strive to do X, avoid Y like the plague" tips and recommendations prior to diving into that effort.

I'm trying to tell from your comment as well as the others' comments whether you're running screen locally, and what benefits that brings above and beyond iTerm for local shell sessions.

For anyone else using tmux locally, I'd be interested as well.

Genuinely curious. I'd consider doing likewise if the reason is compelling.

I had an office job ca. 1985-1988 during which my manager asked me for my thoughts on installing a pneumatic tube system. The office was located on 2 floors, ie, the 18th and the 39th. I don't quite recall her motivation and reasoning, other than to speed up the transfer of paper docs. Up until then, this was mainly the domain of the mail clerk. I think my manager intended for the tubes to transit between the 2 mailrooms on both floors, so the onus would be put on each employee check the tube room for anything that was due to them. At least the mail clerk delivered straight to everyone's desks.

I was less enthusiastic about it, and told her so. Ultimately, no tube system was installed.

I remember when the news came out that AOL was going to connect/gateway to the internet at large.

There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.

My wife fell in love with metal sculpting years ago, thanks to the local college offerings. Each of her courses exposed her to various approaches, such as welding and bronze casting. Her favorite by far was the once-a-semester iron pour.

There are 4 classes total, and you're allowed to take each class a maximum 2 times. So she maxed herself out because she couldn't get enough.

There was a road trip one year to another state, a gathering of like minds. It was held at a decommissioned iron foundry / museum. Various people gave talks on their style and techniques, which was super interesting according to my wife. She and the other students (and the instructor) had also brought along the molds they'd been working diligently on (wax filled) so that they could enjoy doing their iron pour onsite. My wife's project was 72 lbs once completed.

She said that between the weather (hot and humid), the locale, and the protective gear, she spent a lot of time uncomfortably hot and gritty. And loved every moment. It's her happy place.

She almost went with a group to Germany to do something similar; a metal sculpting retreat for a week or so. But the pandemic threw a spanner into that.

I just scrolled a little further in the DDG results to see a hit on Amazon.

After my unexpected laughter, I had to click. The first 2 hits align with my prior misunderstanding - cue more laughter. One is a t-shirt with a graphic of a very hairy chest/abdomen, the other has the likeness of Chewbacca with "Messy hair / don't care".

No need for anyone else to see for yourselves; saved you a click.

Thanks for clarifying "hair shirt". I'd seen you mention it at least 3 times previously in comments, and was trying to unpack it without doing a search. Thoughts such as "they're quite fond of stylish hair and t-shirts?" and "they like t-shirts with hair designs?". I think my worst take was "they fetishize wearing someone else's chest hair, like a shirt?"

Popped onto DDG just now, and the explains right there. Also "cilice" within the first few links.

I found I had to tap on the image (long tap, open in new tab), then tap on the image in the dedicated post. Pinch-zoom available after that.

But yeah, I'm generally puzzled when sites disable that very useful feature.