[-] sxan@midwest.social 8 points 1 day ago

Both pretty names! I'm particularly fond of "Genevieve."

I suspect there are several names no longer common in the US that are more common in other countries. I think "Genevieve" is still fairly common in France, and it's making a comeback in the states! You're doing your part!

[-] sxan@midwest.social 15 points 1 day ago

I agree with you, but kinda don't?

The important thing is to engender a culture of engagement, and a big factor of that is getting people to the polls. Yes, I think voting for Trump is a vote to end Democracy in the US, but I think we should separate the messages. There are two distinct ones:

  1. It is important that you vote.
  2. It is important that you vote for Kamala.

Point 1 is the more enduring one; point 2, this election, ensures we continue to have point 1. But I don't believe we need to stop reinforcing the first point, especially because if 100% of the US voted, Kamala would win handily. That's why Republicans are so keen on voter suppression. People, in general, will be more receptive to message 1.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago

Taste?

I loved it; it's in my "classics" list. But I loathe Game of Thrones - both the novels and the TV series, and those were wildly popular with a lot of people.

It's just personal taste; I'm not sure there's an explanation.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This has been a thing in Japan for a while.

But $700 per what? Month? That's insanely high everywhere but SF. You can't get an in-city anything for $700/m.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Your use case is obviously different, but I've gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.

When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that's the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 2 days ago

Could you use that in a sentance?

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

Create an account there. Dip your toe in. It's worth seeing, just to know; like seeing what's going on in Truth Social.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

the frequency of which they're happening which is the concern.

You have storms which were once in a generation happening every 20 years or so now, and we're the cause.

Absolutely. I hope I was clear: we're absolutely in a man-made climate crisis, and our global addiction to cars is part of it.

The only reason only the cars were affected wasn't because nature hates cars, but because we build buildings betterw than we used to. Mud slides and floods have been wiping out entire towns since... well, since humans started building houses.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 2 days ago

I do however have to think of my wife who loves the oracle because it is zero hassle for her.

Oh, yeah. The a Leva of not a good option. It's not quite as manual as pulling shots fully manually - the lever has a big spring that controls the actual pressure, but you have to charge the lever, and the common complaint in reviews on RoastMaster (back in the day) was that it requires upper body strength, and many women found it hard to work.

There's nothing automatic about it.

I also thought about just getting the grinder first as then if she feels confident to do her grind and tamp herself it’s fine but if not she can continue to use the standard grinder.

Have you considered the DF54? It's getting quite good reviews, and the price is reasonable.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 31 points 2 days ago

Now I want to read a book that starts with the sentance:

"The war in heaven started with a spelling bee."

[-] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 2 days ago

I'm... skeptical.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 3 days ago

For a slightly more manual espresso maker, I've had my Elektra Micro Casa a Leva for nearly 20 years now, and will probably never replace it. It's simple enough that, of anything goes wrong, you can fix it yourself. It's a beautiful machine, and the steamer is peerless. The boiler is capable of continuous operation of pulling shots and steaming, limited only by the amount of water in the boiler, which is fairly large. It heats in a few (5?) minutes.

It's solidly made. The entire machine is brass and steel, with only the gaskets and the drip tray being non-metal. Oh, the lever handle grip is plastic(?), as is the grip of the portafilter it comes with; but the first thing I did was replace the portafilter with a naked portafilter with a wood handle, and I'll eventually replace the lever handle with wood - it just screws off. It will certainly outlive me. My niece has her eye on it, when I die, and I don't doubt it'll last for her as well. I've replaced the heating element once, at its 20th anniversary, and the gaskets every year or two. There's really nothing else to wear out.

Looks like they're running a bit more expensive now; I paid closer to $1000 new when I got mine. The current price is a bit shocking; maybe they're less in Europe, since they are made in Italy.

The downsides to the machine are first that the portafilter is smaller (49mm), while the standard in the US is 52(?); it makes for fewer accessory options. Second, if you do run low on water, you have to completely depressurize the boiler to add more water. There's no reservoir. It's literally a tank with a heating element that you fill and seal, and then pull either hot water or steam out of. So if you need to fill it, you turn it off, open the steamer, and wait until the pressure drops. It's an inconvenience I only ever encountered when we have a house full of guests, but it is then an inconvenience.

So, aside from the eye-watering current price, it's a fantastic machine.

37
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linux@lemmy.world

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.

1
Moar Borderlands (midwest.social)
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/gaming@lemmy.world

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.

8
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/commandline@programming.dev

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
14
submitted 6 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linux@programming.dev

Rook is a lightweight, stand-alone, headless secret service tool backed by a Keepass v2 database. It provides client and server modes in a single executable, built from a reasonably small (auditable) code base with a small and shallow dependency tree - it should not be challenging to verify that it is not doing anything sketchy with your secrets.

Reasonable auditability, the desire to use KeePass files, and to do so through a headless tool that doesn't spawn off the better part of a DE through otherwise unused services, were the main motivations for Rook.

You might be interested in Rook if one or more of these are true:

  • you use KeePass v2-compatible tools to store secrets already
  • you are not running a DE like KDE or Gnome (although Rook may still be interesting because of secret consolidation)
  • you prefer to minimize background GUI applications (KeePassXC is excellent and provides a secret service, but doesn't run headless)
  • you run background applications such as vdirsyncer, mbsync (isync), offlineimap, or restic, or applications such as aerc that can be configured to fetch credentials from a secret service rather than hard-coded in a config file.

Pre-built binaries for limited OS/archs are built by the CI, and Rook if available in AUR. There's an nfpm config in the repos that will build RPMs and Debs, among others. I consider Rook to be essentially free of any major bugs and fit-for-purpose, although I welcome hearing otherwise.

Utility scripts in zsh and bash are available for providing autotyping and entry/attribute selection using xdotool, rofi, xprop, and so on; these are YMMV-quality.

Changes from v0.1.1 are:

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
5
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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.

13

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.

22
Help with QMK issue (midwest.social)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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

29

I've been looking around for one; search (in my Lemmy client) doesn't find one, and while there seems to be at least one in Reddit, the only communities listed on qmk.fm are Reddit and Discord.

Is there a good place to ask questions in the Fediverse?

13

I have been using a piantor built for me by beekeeb.com, and am enjoying the more agressive stagger than my previous Ergodox. However, my typing experience is being spoiled by how tight the key spacing is. I have large hands, and can span an octave on a full-size piano; the Piantor is downright cramped.

In looking for a possible replacement (the Kyria was my primary option, but I guess splitkb.com has entirely given up on selling pre-builts, and I don't solder), what should I be looking at for specs to get some wider spacing on the keys? Is it simply "key spacing?"

Most commercial keyboards are fine; my prior was an Ergodox and the spacing was fine. The Piantor supplies that - it might even be a touch too much, but it's still better than the tepid stagger on the Ergos.

17
submitted 9 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

What are the terms for language anachronisms?

I had a conversation about a year ago with someone about anachronisms in language. We both felt that there were terms for these things, but could neither recall nor find (via web search) satisfying answers. This came up again recently in a different discussion in a Lemmy community, and it's driving me a little nuts. Help me Linguistics-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.

So we have the term "skeumorphism," which refers to oramental anachronism. I may be using "anachronism" incorrectly, but it's the hammer I have. Skeumorphisms, in computers, refer to the graphical representations of things, but not the underlying concepts. There are similar linguistic anachronisms that I feel also have specific labels:

  • "disks" which are still in use, but are largely being replaced by solid-state, rectangular SSDs; but most people still call all persistent storage devices "disks."
  • "film" to refer to movies, regardless of the media (increasingly digital and having nothing to do with film).
  • "rice" to refer to the process of fancifying something, like computer desktops
  • "desktops" to refer to computer GUI window managing interfaces
  • "files" and "folders" in computers

Are these all the same category of things? Is there a term for them?

22
submitted 11 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Can commodity products detect which pixel you're looking at on a screen?

For a number of years, I've wanted a system that eliminates mouse pointer devices. In my imaginary system, there are hotkeys bound to left & right mouse clicks, and what gets clicked is whatever you're looking at.

When I've looked at this before, the tech field tends to suffer in granularity and/or physical limitations, like needing to limit gross head movements. Most products talk about what they can do, but avoid talking about their limitations. It can be hard to find out what devices are capable of - accuracy, working with corrective eyewear, speed, head movement, software (OS) support, etc. Many products are geared at research, leading me to believe the tech isn't there yet.

Anyone have, or used a device that would be able to replace a mouse?

23
submitted 1 year ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I got tired of pinentry popping up and interrupting whatever I was doing; I didn't find a solution elsewhere, so I wrote a little bash script to address this. This is designed for (poly|i3|way|...)bar users. The blog entry (no ads, no tracking) linked has the script verbatim, plus some rambling about the why and wherefore.

It's 22 lines of does-stuff; the rest is whitespace, comments, and instructions -- including a little blob example of using it with polybar.

A known issue is that it does occasionally pop up pinentry twice in a row when unlocking. I'm not surprised, and it has happened to me only once since I've been using it -- not enough for me to need to bother trying to address it. But I wanted to call it out.

It's not rocket science, but it took a bit of time to make sure it functioned correctly (enough), and hopefully it'll help someone else.

view more: ‹ prev next ›

sxan

joined 2 years ago