azimir

@azimir@lemmy.ml

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azimir,

The storyteller can sit next to me. 8 hour flight? The only conversation will be settling bags/items, to/from bathroom trips, and nothing else. I’ll sit there for hours without even acknowledging anyone’s existence without any compunction.

azimir,

Based on the various other descriptions of the DBUS features, I kept thinking “this sounds like a message passing model with a bit of CORBA hiding in there”. It’s got a bit of SLP and AMQP/MQTT to it, just on a local machine instead of a distributed network. It’s solving a lot of problems with service discovery, message passing structure, and separating transmission layer details from service API design. Raw sockets/pipes can always be used to pass data (it’s how DBUS does it!), but there’s additional problems of where to send the data and how to ensure data formatting that sockets/pipes do not have the capability of solving by design since they’re simple and foundational to how interprocess communication works in the kernel.

azimir,

One of the other commenter made the analogy of being in a restaurant. With a mouse you can only point and grunt at things to communicate when you want. A terminal let’s you speak out your order and any other requests you might have.

azimir,

When teaching programming classes it’s awful trying to figure out every IDE’s git interface that my students are using. Each IDE puts the buttons in very different layouts and they even change the names of the buttons because they don’t like the way git itself named operations. It’s untenable to know them all and actually be efficient and helpful as the instructor.

Instead, I say they’re welcome to use the IDE, but the class materials use the canonical underlying command line tools and terminology. They just need to search for how to translate the real git interface to however their chosen tool does the same operation, but it’s up to them to figure it out.

When they do ask for help, I bring up the terminal (usually even inside the IDE) and run the git commands just like we went over in class.

azimir,

I live and die by ssh and scp. Sometimes rsync for larger moves.

Once you’ve got ssh for terminals (used to be x sessions too!), then port forwarding and socks proxies, add in scp for file moves, and layer in sshfs for whole file system mounts it’s a potential combo for remote work and network tunnels. Such a phenomenal toolkit.

azimir,

I was in Salzburg back in 95 with a HS exchange program. We were traveling around and having a great time. That day we went up to the castle kinda near closing time. The entry booth was unmanned so our group walked on in.

We walked around, saw lots of the castle and the views over the city were enchanting. Most of our group left, but about six of us were still in the castle later. It turns out they close and lock the main gates once all of the tourists are out. Since we didn’t get tickets in, we apparently went uncounted and got locked inside.

On my my buddies came running up to me as I was sitting on a battlement being morose (summer fling issues) and declared with alarm “we’re locked in!” so I jogged to the gate with him.

This is pre cell phone and we weren’t great at German. I told him to rally the rest of our stragglers and stood by the gate to think of how to get out. As the group was walking down the path to me, I heard keys jangling outside the gate.

After a moment the smaller postern door opened. Standing outside was a kid about 13 years old with a sack of groceries. I said entschuldigung and blocked the door open. Our group all piled out through the gate and ran off down the road while the kid just stood there looking shocked.

That was the first time I accidentally got locked in a castle in Europe. They’re remarkably effective at keeping people both in and out, both are issues I’ve had to deal with at various times.

azimir,

Not as often as I’d like, but it’s happened a few times in my roaming the world.

I also had this short stint as an illegal immigrant in the UK. No one (not even me) noticed that my passport was expired before I entered the country. The dumb part was that it was noticed as I tried to fly home, but my home country changed the rules a couple of weeks before then to only allow valid passports back. So… I couldn’t immediately go home and I didn’t have a valid visa in the UK.

In an unrelated face, did you know that embassies often close at 3pm? That’s really early when you’re racing from Heathrow on the Tube and around London trying to get a valid passport for a flight the next day.

What inconsequential or surprisingly good thing can I get from Aliexpress?

Im curious as I usually use the site very occasionally to get certain electronic parts or order from PCBway like I just picked up some cheap but infinitely better than stock gps antennas for my LoRa T beams and im about to get a set of also still cheap but much better than stock 915mhz antennas but i kinda wanna throw some other...

azimir,

That’s a great price for some cheap zip ties.

This is one of the various examples I use of just how amazing Aliexpress can be.

azimir,

I scored a pair of small wire cutters for a couple of bucks years back and they keep doing a solid job. I worried at the $3 price tag, but it’s been a solid investment.

That said, don’t buy solder on Aliexpress. It’s barely made of solder. Make sure to invest in a good iron and solder it’ll be a life changer for electronics work.

ajsadauskas, to fuck_cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.

For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney's Central Business District.

It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it's turned into a giant car park:

"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.

"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.

"Those travel delays have now blown out."

So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?

'Dude! Just one more lane!'

From the article:

"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.

"That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-planners-got-rozelle-traffic-modelling-horribly-wrong-20231129-p5ensa.html

@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism

azimir,

You really need to put a sarcasm tag on that. I almost got whiplash.

My city is doing the same thing. They let developers build out exclaves around the city and then ask the city to annex it. There seems to be no limit to how stupid the city council is about this. The latest one is on a hill with no water, police, fire, or school services that got annexed. Now the city has to build out everything. The ROI to the city is in the range of centuries based on the tax revenues. Add in that it’s 100% commercial district free and now we’ve added an eternal car snake on a tiny two lane road into town.

We’ve gotta start building some mixed use density or all of this infrastructure is going to collapse.

azimir,

The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn’t an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it’s been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there’s a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn’t use anything else. I’ve got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There’s just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.

How Commute Culture Made American Cities Lifeless -- Yet There's Hope (www.youtube.com)

This video outlines some of the relationships between US commuting culture and the perspectives that it’s engendered about the role of the city. The, when compared and contrasted to other nations’ approach to city design and perspectives shows that it’s possible to have a city core that’s more than just a workplace....

Hoboken, NJ reduces annual traffic deaths to zero (www.bloomberg.com)

The mayor of Hoboken, NJ came in with a vision of reducing traffic deaths to pedestrians and cyclists. He instituted several strategies of traffic calming, increasing pedestrian visibility, reducing city wide street speeds to 20 mph with schools and parks down to 15 mph. Within a few years of road improvements and redesigns...

azimir,

I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.

azimir,

All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That’s why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.

For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you’ll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.

azimir,

My Subaru Forester with a roof rack hauls almost anything short of large furniture or a yard of gravel.

azimir,

I’ve been seriously considering getting a hitch and a light trailer. It would be more than sufficient for nearly everything we do, especially if it could haul a motorcycle when needed.

azimir,

I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.

azimir, (edited )

I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.

Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.

azimir,

Hopefully we’ll have updates. It’s always a big unknown, especially when it’s not your day job.

azimir,

Mostly either cargo shorts or ragged jeans. The biggest hurdle is growing the badly maintained beard.

The programming socks and skirt are only required if you can’t work remotely.

azimir,

For me it was the lack of networking tools on Win95. That was far enough back that the MSFT leadership was still calling the Internet a fad and that individual workstations would continue to be the norm forever.

Linux could plop right on the college Ethernet and do all the things while the Win machines would keep crashing out for no good reason.

azimir,

For simple documents it also doesn’t work well, but at least it’s expensive and slow so it’s got that going for it.

azimir,

My recollection mostly had to do with the old way Qt was licensed, which affected how people wanted to include KDE in distros. Gnome managed to step into the void by leapfrogging other choices like CDE (way back!) and it managed to get wired into a few fast growing distros. Most notably, it was pulled into Ubuntu due to the Qt licensing on commercial distros, then many things based on Ubuntu, and here we are.

I’m sure there were other considerations about features, where Gnome had a good set of tools, but used to be lighter duty than KDE. There was also a window of time where Gnome was designed to be more touchscreen/tablet friendly while KDE stayed away from that style (good!).

Different licenses, different styles, different release times. A bit of “right place, right time, now the default” for Gnome.

I like KDE, but I’m mostly a Mint/Cinnamon user, and have been around since SunOS CDE systems, so it’s all better than that! I’ve got a couple of kids on Ubuntu/Gnome, mostly due to driver issues.

azimir,

Could they have been EU flags? Still a field of blue with stars like the Australian flag.

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