I am seriously learning how to plumb gas lines to save like $600. So if you don’t hear from me, it will be because I killed myself and probably injured several neighbors.
I taught myself plumbing once so I could still fuck up and cause $2k in direct damage, plus grow who knows how much mold in the ceiling.
Water heater repair?
Just make sure the gas if off before you touch it, and maybe don’t light a match right away.
The flu. The flu has been my rabbit hole for the week 😭
get well soon!
Wait until you see the pounds just melt away on the flu diet. /s
Linux
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get my two LUKS encrypted drives to unlock by using a yubikey on boot.
I’m also realising this rabbit hole with every second I spend on Lemmy. Hell I was reading up on arch at 2 am last night when I couldn’t get to sleep….
Honestly I would skip Arch and just use something like Fedora or Debian. Arch is way over rated. You can build a Arch like system out of anything.
Yeah, but the difference is quite huge IMHO. Arch philosophy is user centric so it is deliberately minimal because then it is up to you what to add instead of having to remove something to get what you want.
You can do that with any distro really
“Minimal” is such a weird concept to focus on in 2025. What are are you going for? Low ram usage?
Yes, but as I said the way to get there is different. With a minimalistic approach you add stuff that you know you want. With the default approach you either remove stuff that you may not know yet if it was a part of something else that you want/need, or you just let it be.
Minimal concept in 2025 is not weird at all. It’s a preference really. I just prefer my system to be as minimal as possible (not necessarily small mind you). The same reason why I setup my VSCode plugins to be disabled except to enable the needed plugins at different workspaces. So I will not be distracted by something that I do not use.
I’m using Ubuntu across a few devices atm. All the arch memes and the sleeplessness just drove me to go find out what the fuss was all about.
Don’t you get annoyed by snap?
So far only because of Firefox. Get everything else off apt
CachyOS or EndeavourOS are good arch spins if you choose to be insane.
Start with something like mint and works your way to other distros.
You should be able to live boot mint to see how it runs before committing to installing.
Been using Ubuntu for a bit but mint does sound like a good next step if I decide to swap.
International Humanitarian Law which defines war crimes and such.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1
As it turns out most people who cry about war crimes on the internet don’t know the first thing about them.
Ham radio. Still at the discovery stage of whats what, thinking about what I want to get into, which means lots of fun learning about everything, as usual in a totally random manor. Trying to avoid getting sidetracked by the VHF/UHF stuff as it would just rapidly spiral out of control.
Just need to knuckle down and study for the foundation exam so I can actually get started transmitting. I think I have the QRP setup I want more or less nailed down that would tide me over till I can move up to intermediate later on. Would give me a nice QRP setup for travel and allow me to treat myself for passing my intermediate with a proper shack radio with a bit more power.
I’m more interested in its lesser known cousin, Rum Ham Radio.
New Zealand birds
Oh cool! Which bird from New Zealand has impressed you the most and how so?
From my memories from growing up in NZ long ago there are lots of funny/rock-n-roll stories about the Kea (very cheeky and charismatic parrot-like bird). I remember finding a funny CCTV video from about a year ago in NZ, showing some Keas screwing around with construction workers working on a road. Every time the workers were out of line of sight they moved the orange traffic cones to change the traffic.
I’m fascinated with them all. New Zealand has been seperated from other contintents for a long time, and until mankind arrived here (only around 1000 years ago), there were no large mammals on the islands, and for the land birds at least, the only predators were other birds. So the birds here have adapted to fill niches normally filled by mammals, and they also tend to be large, long lived and flightless (or poor flyers), because flight didn’t help them escape predation, but size, strong legs and camoflage did.
Unfortunately, they died in large numbers when mammals were introduced (mankind as well as their companions/stow aways) and many have gone extinct.
New Zealand is leading the way in establishing completely predator free spaces (initially mostly islands, but now mainland areas too), so you have spaces where rare birds are flourishing again.
I’ve been in New Zealand for the last couple of weeks, and honestly, my favourites are the North and South Island Robins. They appear fearless, because they follow larger animals around (like people), and hunt for insects that they stir up. What it looks like though is this friendly little robin comes right up to you and starts following you! I also love the Kererū (New Zealand pigeon). They’re big clumsy birds, but so gorgeous! And speaking of pigeons, it’s interesting that rock pigeons don’t dominate city spaces here. They’re around, but mostly, the niche normally filled by pigeons is filled by gulls and house sparrows…
I wrote an Excel macro in VBA that opens a file select window, imports the selected files as new worksheets, copies the data from each worksheet recursively into a master table, prompts the user to delete the imported tables, then prompts the user to save the workbook as a new file.
Excel does have functions that achieve basically the same thing, but it was being too finicky with how it wanted the source tables formatted.
I barely know VBA and idek wtf a Boolean variable is, but I fucking did it and it’s going to make mine and my team’s life so much easier at work. That was my whole Friday lmao
I frequently have to dump a bunch of data from our accounting system, and the process afterward involves a ton of manual cutting and pasting. When I have to do it 70 times, it’s physically and mentally exhausting. I’m not the only one who has complained about this process, and nobody has done anything to make it better. So I’m fixing that shit. I’m not a programmer. I’m an accountant. But I’m also so lazy that I’ll to learn how to program a little to save myself a lot of work over the long run.
Programming is a tool, you don’t have to be a knife enthusiast to want get the correct knife
Awesome, if you have any questions, shoot. Started down that rabbit hole 20 years and never really came up for air :)
Actually it just leads to many more data type manipulation, SQL, VBA connecting to the other Microsoft app, etc. never regretted it aside from the 3am sessions trying to figure out one more thing, which leads to one more thing… But then that is the rabbit hole piece.
Btwa boolean is just data stored in a single bit, either a 1 or a 0 on the backend, but usually presented as something more obvious to the user like yes/no, true/false, on/off etc
I’m interested in SQL. I just need to learn SQL.
Being interested is the most important part :)
I’d love to learn SQL. I’m going back to school later this year because I have a bachelor’s degree with 127 credit hours. I’m 23 hours shy of being eligible to hold a CPA license in my state. So I found a local community college that offers a computer science program with a focus on database management, and there’s a whole class on SQL that I’m kinda looking forward to. And because I already have a degree, all of my gen eds are out of the way. Taking the core classes for the two year degree at this community college sits right at the intersection of 151 hours. All I have to do after that is pass the CPA Exam lol It’s that easy.
Ha, cpa exam being easy aside, the biggest hurdle with sql is finding data handling interesting which you seem to be in the right position for. Good luck on your journey and feel free to ping for any questions or just to chat
Just to give you another rabbit hole, you can also manipulate pretty much any data source, including Excel using powershell. I regularly use powershell scripts to mass import data that the script processes into an Excel workbook that the powershell formats. I find powershell to be faster doing this (if you use .net framework/LINQ, powershell sucks at large scale data object processing natively), especially if it’s large amounts of data, I typically process combined logs of over a million rows.
What’s the advantage of VBA in this use case over other options?
They said they barely know vba. So it’s probably the integration into MS tools.
So I had tried using the data import wizard or whatever it was that’s built in to pull an entire folder into the workbook, but I had roughly 70 workbooks, all with 40 columns and anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 rows. At the end of it all, I probably had over 20 million cells. The built-in tool was being finicky. I think it was that the sheer amount of data I was working with was too much for it to handle. But it kept giving me errors about formatting.
So I gave up on it, and I spent several hours of my life reading manuals and forum posts on how best to achieve one step and testing code on backups. It was truly an all-day thing. But when you’re dealing with dozens of files, this macro takes maybe 45 seconds to do its thing whereas the manual process could waste an hour of your day. And I plan to share it with the team once I get it a bit more polished because it’s not exactly where I want it. But I think the rest of my colleagues will love it.
I know a little VBA. I spent a whole weekend writing a macro because I did my personal budgets in Excel, and I wanted to automate some stuff because I could conceptualize how it could be done. I don’t use Windows at home anymore so I want to figure out how to bring it over to LibreOffice Basic. Still, since the business world uses Microsoft products, knowing VBA is a much more marketable skill so it is useful to practice in VBA whenever I can.
Rain World Modding
I already know C# so I thought it wouldn’t be that difficult, but I was very wrong. Rain World is a game made with Unity, but the only part they use Unity for is rendering. And the game also doesn’t ship with debug symbols. Doesn’t help that the modding wiki is outdated at places and incomplete. Took a lot of guess work and looking at other mods to figure out what to do, but I got there at the end and learned a lot.
Motorcycle gear. I now know I can buy armoured(!!) leggings that go under my jeans, and an armoured(!!) leather jacket that looks kickass over a hoodie.
ATGATT!
Please rate the effectiveness of these garments against zombie attack. Asking for a friend.
I second this. But I’m asking for a future friend.
Ooo. I just bought a klx 300. I should look into armour.
International Humanitarian Law which defines war crimes and such.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1
As it turns out most people who cry about war crimes don’t know the first thing about them.
Well, I crocheted a beret today and started a trihexaflexagon for my wife’s birthday the other day. So I suppose it’s crochet this week.
That’s rad. How did the beret turn out?
Also, this is the first time reading out trihexaflexagon and also getting a refresher as to what it is. It’s a really fun word to say. Makes me feel like a top tier rapper when I say it out loud. haha
It turned out pretty well, it was my first time improvising a pattern from looking at a finished piece. I ran out of yarn right before transitioning from the top of the beret to the head band, but my wife let me use some of her black yarn to finish it off.
There’s a little bit of a visual indication that the black starts before the end of the round, but it’s only like 10 stitches (out of 100) so it’s not very noticeable.
The creativity and inquisitive curiousity in this thread is honestly inspiring and heartwarming.
My week was spent in object oriented code and log burning stove installation. The cherry on the top was putting my knee through the glass so last night was devoted to thinking about how it can be repaired without spending more money.
One of my 2025 goals is to learn to draw well, and I’ve been making slow, steady progress at that. My goals are 2-fold - make quality drawings of furniture for my other new hobby, woodworking - and draw cursed shit that is disturbing to friends and family alike. Here’s a texture study I did yesterday in about an hour.
We used to call those “doodles” back in my day /s
War thunder and some weird electrical issue in the house connected to the servers
I bought a new domain name for my indie web presence, so that I can keep my boring professional stuff separate.
I have 3 domains… I need help
That’s a totally reasonable number!
Also, just an FYI you can use nginx as to serve multiple domains/websites from a single server on the cheap. ;)
Yeah, I know how to manage a server thankfully lol. I am planning to split the 3 domains for different purposes since as of now I only use them for my email.
Oh nice. What kind of ‘indie stuff’ are you making?
I did see that you’re into writing. That’s cool. I’ve been trying to stick with it. I have a decent amount of ideas for stories but not enough typed out. =/
Oh nice. What kind of ‘indie stuff’ are you making?
So far, it’s just my morning pages. I figure if I share my most raw and unfinished stuff, then it will be mentally easier to share the stuff I actually put polish into.
I have this server running an Quartz frontend, that I can just push markdown files to. But yeah, that’ll probably move to a subdomain, and the main site will be wacky neocities type stuff, idk. Something rough and fun, though.
