• 1 Post
  • 23 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle

  • Yeah, but then you have to use Evolution.

    Maybe, after a few months (or a year, as I may or may not have experienced) of “communication” you’ll be allowed to use Thunderbird. Only for it to be suddenly blocked again later because some dude didn’t understand why can’t everyone just use Outlook.

    And don’t even dream of having a script to, say, sort and preprocess your mail.



  • Recently had an electric Fiat 500 as a replacement while my car (Mazda 3) was in service and I absolutely loved how it drives. Nice consistent acceleration, immediate reaction to the throttle. Much better than the automatic transmission cars I drove before. 3 problems though:

    • range (duh): I often need to drive for 280km in one go, vast majority of EVs can’t do that reliably (with AC and going 130km/h). If you can survive a day on one charge it is awesome though: plug it overnight and you’re ready to go in the morning
    • the price of the car (it felt waaay too simple and plastic-y inside compared to 30K euro price I googled)
    • big brother software on the headunit, although there is no escape from it with any new car these days


  • I’d go for HLS due to its simplicity: just files over http(s). VPN or not - depends on your network. If your machine is accessible from the internet, just putting the files into a webserver subdirectory with a long random path and using https will be secure enough for the usecase. Can be done with an ffmpeg oneliner.

    The downside of HLS is the lag (practically – 10s or more, maybe 5 if you squeeze it hard). It is in no way realtime. Webrtc does it better (and other things too), but it is also a bigger pain to set up and forward.

    Also, just in case, test that the webcam works fine if left active 24/7. I had (a cheapo) one that required a powercycle after a week or so…





  • Whatever works for you. Just do it. It is convenient as f when you are just starting. You can always improve incrementally later on when (if) you encounter a problem.

    Too much noise/power costs to run a small thing - get a pi and run it there. Too much impct on your desktop performance - okay, buy a dedicated monster. Want to deep dive into isolating things (and VMs are too much of a hassle) - get multiple devices.

    No need to spend money (maybe sponsoring more e-waste) and time until it’s justified for your usecases.


  • Better dependency control. I strongly prefer software that only depends on the stuff I can get from the package manager. This lowers the chance of supply chain attacks. Doesn’t prevent them, but I expect repo maintiners to do a better job looking at packages, than a developer who just puts another pip/gem/npm install in a dockerfile.

    Also if something is only available in a container, it sort of screams “this code is such a mess, we don’t even know a simple way to run it” to me.










  • Something like that, where I just write a function that spits out a numpy array or something like that and it gets plotted, would be great, but there is one thing Grafana can do and vega-altair, plotly and even matplotlib (*): a UI that allows to select a time interval to view.

    So I can freely pan/zoom in/out in time, and only the required part of the data will be loaded (with something like select ... where time between X and Y under the hood). So if I look at a single day, it will only load that day, and only if I dare to zoom out too much it will spend some time loading everything from the last year.

    (*) yes, you can do interactive things with matplotlib, but you don’t really want to, unless you must…