@thees@emacs.ch avatar

thees

@thees@emacs.ch

random thoughts on computer science and geeking out on permacomputing and solarpunk | Guix System & Emacs-User | 🏳️‍🌈 | he/him

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thees, to emacs
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

Shared some notes on using a elisp function with timers instead of a cron + script based status_command for STDIN based status bars:

https://me.literatelisp.eu/a-minimal-elisp-statuscommand.html

#emacs

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

my comfy minimal (almost) lisp machine - hacked a bit on my dwl-guile config yesterday and added a bar that matches the elea-dark theme of emacs :guix:

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

guess #dwl (as in dwl-guile) will be my new wayland compositor on my x230; it has less input latency than sway on my machine plus it's one more thing I can hack on using scheme.

thees, to emacs
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

this is the best guide to transient menu development for #emacs I've read so far => https://github.com/positron-solutions/transient-showcase

abcdw, to guix
@abcdw@fosstodon.org avatar

Bug tracker for RDE.

RDE is already quite big project with a few subprojects and it's hard to track feature requests, reports, milestones, their dependencies and to collocate and organize them properly and share publicly.

That's why for last few weeks I was looking at different project management/bug tracking solutions.

From what I found so far it seems that Bugzilla is the best option at the moment.

Thoughts?

https://www.bugzilla.org/

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@abcdw Bugzilla is a good option, even though I personally prefer redmine (https://www.redmine.org), probably out of mere convenience (can’t imagine Bugzilla not being on par with it); it supports creating issues by email, organising issues in projects, has a “good enough” VCS integration, following issues via RSS and so on.

ctietze, to php
@ctietze@mastodon.social avatar

#PHP on #Emacs users, what can't you live without anymore I should check out to type less?

  • Eglot/LSP is running
  • I have yasnippet but no snippets configured

Do you have favorite snippets?

I'm betting bored of having to type test case boilerplate :) Or typing out function signatures and curly braces everywhere.

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@ctietze I use my own php snippet collection with yasnippet for boilerplate code/stuff I tend to type a lot that grew over many years. If the goal is to type less, I’d recommend collecting snippets. Maybe I should share mine somewhere even though I’m not sure how useful it is for other people than me.

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

The more I read about mach & #hurd, the more I prefer a microkernel based approach over monoliths.

thees, to guix
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I'll be in BXL as of wednesday for #FOSDEM as well as the #guix days 🎉​

this also marks the one year anniversary of my first guix system installation as I started using it after having attended talks on guix at last years FOSDEM & decided to give it a try as I have a preference for all things scheme-y and lispy (which resulted in me switching over all my machines from NixOS to Guix during the last year thanks to the welcoming and awesome guix community) :guix:​

daviwil, to random
@daviwil@fosstodon.org avatar

Rust, Go, or Zig?

If you have an opinion (or two, or three), I want to hear it.

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@daviwil I have a rather strong C background, but out of the three possible options I'd say Rust. Not so much out of mere technical reasons as you, in most cases, could get work done in all three of these languages (work being whatever tasks newcomers may want to solve; as you specifically scoped the question towards people learning a language to get proficient enough to get payed using it), so I'll solely focus on the developer experience here:

  • Rusts compiler gives useful feedback/a functionality to access aditional resources related to err quickly (rustc --explain).
  • linter (clippy) and formatter (rustfmt) out of the box
  • lots of documentation available

Zig is IMHO still not stable enough/doesn't have enough traction to be market relevant; Go would be a close second, but IMHO the tooling around it isn't as good as rusts is for people just starting out/trying to land their first programming job.

thees, to apple
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

Just read about the recent changes regarding the DMA and #apple and I strongly dislike “sideloading” as a term to describe… installing and running software. That’s just installing and running software; which should be a users right. And which should happen without the company selling a device being involved in the process at all.

It was predictable that Apple acts in a maliciously compliant way that’s ultimately anti user freedom, as they don’t want their gilded cage ecosystem pried open bringing up bogus “security” arguments up (bogus as I have to trust the software supply chain of Apple, the compiler my iOS app has been built with, iOS as a platform et cetera with no way to inspect and verify any of these things).

I hope that there’ll be cool mobile open hardware projects and more resources for projects like postmarketOS this decade and more anti-trust legislation against big tech gatekeepers, as that’ll be the most viable way to improve user freedom by providing an alternative to the bleak reality of corporate ecosystems.

thees, to debian
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

was woody (or sarge? somewhat around 2005) if I can place this right, I got it on a CD from my cousin who himself got the CD from his soon-to-be university & installed it on my pentium II Toshiba laptop.

louis, to random
@louis@emacs.ch avatar

My language of the year 2024. There’s a lot of work ahead.

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@louis Ada is pretty cool, never got to use it too much so far though. Hope you’ll have fun and a good time learning it this year!

mntmn, to random
@mntmn@mastodon.social avatar

MNT Pocket Reform has 67 screws (preliminary).

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@mntmn what type of screws does the pocket reform use, phillips m2? already looking forward to tinkering with it in the future

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@mntmn sure thing! torx are awesome in terms of durability & I prefer them over philips for this; they tend to be a bit more pricey though.

thees, to Steamdeck
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I changed the analog stick of my #steamdeck to ones using hall sensors, as the stock ones will be prone to stick drift sooner or later; it only took 20 minutes and went pretty well. It's usually my go to modification for controllers as it boosts their longevity.

mntmn, to random
@mntmn@mastodon.social avatar

kicked off the keyboard/trackball PCB manufacturing process for MNT Pocket Reform (750 units). now to order some keyswitches.

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@mntmn that's a lot of switches :o any reasons (probably shortage/avail.?) choc browns weren't selectable for the pocket reform on crowdsupply?

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I finally found a good solution to the "file accessibility across computers" problem: #gitannex and #tor (ssh onion service with tors v3 client authorization for the git remotes). That way I'm able to fetch files from my other other devices without having to rely on a centralized service (be it having to maintain wireguard as a VPN where all my clients can join, cloud storage and so on) from whatever network I'm currently in. It's not the fastest solution, but free, quite minimalistic, comes with less maintainence overhead, and decentralized!

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

why does text almost always work better for me than watching something? whenever I try to watch a recorded talk on topics I'm interested in I tend to double the playback speed, skip around in the video, and ultimately start focussing on something else...

louis, to foss
@louis@emacs.ch avatar

Just replaced Uptimerobot.com with self-hosted Uptime Kuma, because my "Legacy plan" money wasn't good enough anymore.

Can totally recommend it.

https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

Thanks to @galdor 's new Firefox extension, I can confirm it's 100% Open Source.

#FOSS

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@louis @galdor thanks for mentioning uptime kuma! I was actually looking into self-hosted services for uptime monitoring earlier on today & this looks like a decent fit!

thees, to vim
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I started programming in around 2005/2006, and started using #vim a few weeks after having written my first line of code. So Bram Moolenaars vim has been the biggest consistency in my career so far, and I say that as an Emacs user who still uses vim for plenty of things. Reading about his passing today made me incredibly sad as his work had been a huge positive influence and consistency throughout my career as a developer so far.

thees, to NixOS
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

If you were to give an introduction to #nix and #nixos to a crowd of developers mostly unfamiliar with its core concepts, what aspects of nix would you emphasise/highlight?

I'll be giving such an introduction next week to my colleagues and thought it'd be a good idea to check-in with the NixOS community on here (or at least see if my take on what aspects I'd hightlight align with what you folks think is important)

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I’ve read the hacker news comments on an article that suggests to reuse old computers and I’ve to disagree with comments suggesting that as a software engineer you have to invest in your tools by buying the newest laptops. Despite having more powerful and “modern” options I still use a decade old laptop on a daily base and ensure that software I build runs on it. Why? Because:

  1. the hardware equivalent of a racing car is a poor metric if the majority of your users doesn’t own hardware that’s on par to that.
  2. The tasks people expect to do on computers haven’t changed much, thus hardware requirements tend to increase as our industry tend to treat computer resources as infinite or at least as always increasing.

Here’s the thing: My first computers were a pentium II Laptop from 1999 and a Powermac G3; both systems despite their age feel (I still own them) way more snappy in terms of UX than my modern machines do. Modern applications have latency issues as well as performance issues, due to unnecessarily introduced complexity and the tendency to shoehorn electron and zillion dependencies into everything.

So I’d actually advocate for the use of old hardware, especially if you’re an engineer and you’re earning your bread by writing software. Having the most modern recent hardware as a default isn’t sustainable nor necessary.

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

I also finally got to upgrade my x230 with an additional NVMe SSD using a ExpressCard to NVMe Adapter; so now I'm using 3 SSDs in total with it (having switched WWAN with msata years ago); which is impressive given its form factor as a 12.5" laptop.

simon_brooke, (edited ) to debian
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Is there anyone here who has switched from #Debian (or a Debian derived distribution) to #Guix? I'm considering making the change, and wondered whether there were any particular snags to look out for.

thees,
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

@simon_brooke I still use Debian on a daily basis on servers at work, but my personal computer and workstation is on Guix nowadays. There are three things to consider:

  • it’s easier, if you’re depending on the availability of non-free software, to add non-free software on Debian than it is on Guix (and as of Booworm Debian includes its non-free firmware packages in the installer and the Debian wiki talks about the existence of non-free; whereas guix doesn’t)
  • the approach to package management and system configuration is completely different. You’ll probably have to get used to a declarative system configuration as well as to Guix not complying to the FSH-Standard; which means configuring software and working with the directory tree will be different than what you’re used to.
  • Guix doesn’t use systemd but shepherd as it’s init system. This means all the fancy systemd stuff won’t be available.

Others than that I think that both Debian and Guix are pretty solid and stable Linux distributions; I’d recommend to spin up a VM with Guix and just see if you like it or not.

thees, to random
@thees@emacs.ch avatar

Why are there rarely any devices with the form factor and keyboards of the Toshiba Libretto 20 or TRS-80 Model 100 anymore? I'm aware of the MNT Reform Pocket but... that's about it? An modern ARM or RISC-V based Toshiba Libretto 20 would be so damn cool

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