Shinji_Ikari [he/him]

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  • 36 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • I’m gonna comment and say that’s the point.

    You start out with bare minimum and install what you need. As you go you generally have an idea of what is and isn’t on your system. It’s not as annoying as Gentoo with all source compiling, not as anal as nix.

    If something breaks, you go to ArchLinux.org and 95% of the time it’s mentioned on the front page so you follow the instructions and move on. It’s a very transparent distro, little drama to follow unlike Ubuntu/canonical or fedora/redhat.

    It used to be harder to install and which gave some street cred, but they simplified it a bit which is nice.

    The Stans give an unbalanced look at arch. I use arch because I want the latest packages, I don’t want to segment my packages between my repos and tarballs when there’s a game stopping missing feature on a package pinned to a 2yo version. I don’t want to learn a whole scripting language to carefully craft my OS like nix either. I want a current OS that’s easy to fix and easy to install packages so I can go back to what I was doing.


  • I really didn’t want to go the medicine route years back. Like OP Im a guy who always kept it long. I decided to give the basic regimen a try and went with a keeps like service because dermatologists are by far the worst doctors I’ve had to work with.

    And although it thinned, the thinning totally stalled, to a point where it’s a little noticable but on a good day isn’t at all.

    I haven’t cut my hair in years and despite it being annoying to take care of sometimes, I get to look in the mirror and see the version of myself that I like to see which makes the little bit of medication worth it imo.

    I always hated the “just shave it and own it, bro” attitude because damn my hair is part of my identity, I love having it. I’ll put some effort into keeping it.






  • Its not dead simple but its also not extremely complex.

    I’m currently working with some interns and there’s just concepts they were never exposed to. Without decent mentoring, git can be difficult because a lot of the workflow does come with experience.

    That being said everyone needs to stop acting like its an impossible task to properly do source control. There is some truth that if you don’t care enough to do your source control, you don’t care enough to write decent code. Its not a moral failing, just take some pride in your craft.

    Show the newbies how to care and they’ll care enough to want to do it right. Measure twice, cut once and all that.







  • I found a brother laser printer for 8 bucks at a thrift store and it printed with linux over USB as soon as I got it home without any tweaking.

    I then directly networked it to a raspberry pi, configured it with cups and shared the printer over my network. Every device was able to discover it instantly and I can print from anything, android phone, ipad, mac, linux laptop, etc.

    It’s absolutely freeing. I found an OEM toner cartridge for like 30 bucks, so I have like 2000 bw prints ready to go for like 40 dollars all in.


  • Yes, vim is a command line program.

    If you look up “Cli file manager”, there’s a bunch that you can check out and try.

    Tree, grep, and find are usually my three go-tos. Tree to get a general view of a ton of nested files/folders, then if I know a name I’ll use find . -name "filename", if I know a bit of contents, i’ll use `grep -re “content string” to find files containing that.

    I recommend reading the man pages because you can often chain together these in fairly powerful ways.




  • I watched a lot of youtube before I dove in. There’s a LOT more content on watch repair now after covid so it should be easy. Pay specific attention to how the seasoned watchmakers use their tools. You should never have to force anything in a watch. Go as slow as possible and really savor each movement.

    If you don’t have a camera with good macro abilities, grab some of those cheap clip on macro lenses for your phone.

    Take a pictures at every step until you don’t need them anymore. I specifically was interested in 2-3 movements but you start to see the commonality between them if you’re just working on a simple hour/minute/second/calendar watch without extra complications.

    I really suggest buying one of those little plastic trays with a clear dome on top that have dividers. With that, I divide the parts and screws by the aspect of the movement. ie I’ll use one compartment for the automatic winder components, a compartment for the stem and winding mechanism, one for the main drive, and another for the date complication. I repair a lot of misc things so I have a decent memory for where parts/screws go. If you dont, take pictures of the screw next to the hole you took it from so you can compare scale. Screws inside watches are usually at most 2-3 sizes, if not all the same but its good practice to ensure you put the right screw in the right hole.

    Also check out the forum watchrepairtalk. Its an international group of old men who love to help out. It has a completely different atmosphere to watchuseek and is an endless fountain of knowledge.



  • I struggle with frontend too, it was a super basic jinja templates with html and a plotly js applet that I just fed data to. Its ugly but functional.

    I Started to re-write the server in Go, I have like 90% feature parity with postgres instead of mongo, but I need to figure out vue when I have a chance to make something a little nicer. I have an old obsolete ipad with a bunch of touch deadzones I’d like to load up in kiosk mode for a nicer data display.

    I really liked the ESP32 ecosystem. I figured out the ESP-idf and really liked the build system and freeRTOS. The examples given are really exhaustive and super useful. I basically did format strings into static HTML headers to send the data to the server since it only has like 3-4 readings.

    Interfacing with any common hobbyist sensor is mostly a matter of finding a basic C driver and adapting it for the ESP build system.