Dave @ Dave @lemmy.nz

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How do you come up with/discover the personas?

You talk to people! Something that's a lot harder for a FOSS project to arrange. User Experience (UX) is a whole job, including interviews with users. And a related job is Service Designer.

"Design thinking" is a good starting point to Google😉

This is a rambling tangent but one of my super weird memories from the late 90s was being asked to a market research focus group where all they did was give us cell phones and sim cards and video us trying to open the backs and insert the sims. It was new tech for most of us at the time and it's really funny to me now how challenging we found it.

That market research group sounds like the above UX stuff I was talking about!

SIM card swapping is an interesting line of thought. Because you could sell phones with them installed, so problem solved. But if it's hard to do, you might struggle to convert customers from a competitor. But at the same time, it might help prevent your customers leaving.

Do you know what they were trying to learn?

Are there enough trampolines on earth that we could reasonably expect that at any time there is at least one person in the upper part of their jump on a trampoline?

I mean 30,000 feet is 9km. The Kármán line is 100km. The ISS is at an average altitude of 400km.

It's a bit like saying people in planes don't count as flying because then people on trampolines should count.

It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.

Opened in 2020! Your link also says "The Ngāwhā geothermal field is the only high temperature geothermal resource in New Zealand, outside the Taupo Volcanic Zone." so I think I'm allowed to be surprised 😅

While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station so turns out I was wrong about that!

It can be fascinating reading the list of power stations in NZ.

I noticed one that's believed to be one of the oldest continually operating hydroelectric plants in the world. Mokopeka, since 1891. Some photos here.

One of the big things these days is "personas", which is basically sitting down and thinking about all the different people who might use your software. Which might be some guy called Fred who drives trucks doesn't really use a computer very much. It might be some chick called Jessica that has used the software for years and likes the current layout, or it might be Susan who has used photoshop but doesn't like the new subscription model so is looking for another tool.

All these people have very different needs, and you need to make sure it works for them all. They will all have quite different expectations about how things should work. Ideally you'll find people that fit each of your personas and get them to test and give feedback.

Unfortunately when software is made by volunteers, a lot of this side of things can be lost.

Wait what why does GIMP not have shapes!?

If you want to do a circle, there are multiple ways but e.g. you can use the ellipse selection tool to select a circle area, then select the outside of it (perhaps with the border select option, setting the width you want), then use the fill tool to colour it in 😅

To do it properly, there's a lot of pre-work required. It's listed here: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-layer-types

It's listed simply as "No" 😆, I think this means there is no one actively working on it, but there are people working on the prerequisites.

There was a bit of conversation on Lemmy about it recently: https://lemmy.nz/post/20638412

Kudos to you for being able to find your way around its GUI. It hurts my brain.

It's just what I'm familiar with. I struggle with photoshop, I'd rather use GIMP. But it has it's limitations!

Is there an active geothermal area in Northland? I once saw a proposal to use forestry slash in combination with geothermal. Use the slash as fuel to get the geothermal heated water up to the next level for better power generation, then capture the CO2 and pump it underground. I think this is the article I read.

I think Northland has a lot of forestry, so if you have geothermal you could do this idea!

Work is another beast. You really need to have your whole workplace on LibreOffice. Microsoft loves to tuck proprietary stuff into things that mess up the compatibility we could have.

GIMP latest release seems to finally have non destructive editing so I will have to take another look.

Last I checked, still no basic shapes though 😅

Pumped hydro is basically pumping the water from a hydro dam back to the top of the dam to be used again. It's basically a form of battery, use energy on days when you have too much so that you have water in your hydro lakes for days when you don't have enough power.

The incoming government cancelled it pretty early on, I think this long term thinking was getting in the way of tax cuts.

This is really dumb of me but I just realized someone tried to describe this battery facility to me and I somehow thought they were talking about this fish farm.

Ah interesting!

Batteries will be a great way to cover peak shortfalls.

Pumped hydro might have been a better way, rather than all that battery manufacturing, but I haven't given up hope on the pumped hydro yet.

I think it's reasonable to respond with something like "I'm really not a kid person, I don't much enjoy talking about kids or being around kids. I'm still happy to meet for coffee, but maybe we plan to keep it a short chat and see how it goes?"

They’re mostly just going to be the focus of the occasion because they need constant attention, and I don’t really like kids in general. And, if they cry or act up and attract attention I will hate that.

Many places will have toy areas for kids, maybe you can find one (or ask if they can suggest one since they are more likely to know which ones nearby have that). A 2 year old can probably keep themselves mostly entertained off and on for 30 mins or an hour, depending on the specific kid and if there are a good selection of toys. The 6 month old will need more attention but may well spend a lot of the time sleeping.

An old friend/aquaintance I’ve not spoken to in a few years popped up recently and we got chatting a little over text.

I don't want to put you off, but I'd probably have a plan for what you're going to do if they start a MLM pitch.

I can't see anywhere on the box it claims it's fun for the entire family. It's a two person game after all.

It says

As these installation methods are used for the development of Home Assistant, it will still be technically possible to update them. We still would recommend migrating to a supported method, but that’s your choice.

And then towards the end:

Will the developer documentation on these things remain?
\ Yes, those will remain. The developer documentation for running Home Assistant’s Core Python application directly in a Python virtual environment will remain. This is how we develop. This proposal is about removing end-user documentation and support.

How I read it is that these methods are actively used for development so will still be maintained and updated, including developer documentation because developers will continue to need to use these methods.

If you read the Home Assistant official announcement, it basically says all the different methods were confusing to new people so they will remove them from end user support documentation and won't take support questions from people using these methods.

However, outside the deprecation of 32bit OSs (which they point out a large portion are on 64bit capable hardware), they are still going to be documenting the other methods in the developer documentation.

I honestly think this is the right move. Their time is being wasted by confusing new users, and supporting 32 bit OSs is literally preventing the development of new functionality. If you want to use a Python environment instead of docker, the developer documentation is there to support advanced users.

Try 8 years ago, in a regular bundle not a monthly one: https://barter.vg/bundle/1698/

Full list of bundles here: https://barter.vg/bundles/3/

Yes I did a deep dive research project as I was sure it was closer to a decade ago not a year or two 😅

I liked the first one too! I don't remember how I even heard about it. Was it in a Humble Bundle or something?

Presumably standing seats means standing up? Hopefully not squatting seats.

This week's dumb thing I did: I thought I would like to experiment with local voice control for home assistant, instead of the current cloud one. I thought "I wonder what the best text-to-speech voice sounds like", so I selected the most intensive Whisper model. I have Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, and it pretty much immediately locked up. I couldn't get into Home Assistant to disable it. I restarted it, but it automatically re-loaded it and proceeded to lock up.

I was worried I'd have to restore from a backup, but luckily I worked out there was a 30 second window between startup and lockup and so I plugged it into a monitor and used the command line to edit the addons config to remove Whisper. It ruined an evening but otherwise no harm done.

Auckland Council said it is aware of the issue and there will be increased litter patrols, but denies the removal of a bin has contributed to the problem.

What do they think bins exist for?

I wonder if they really got their 8.5m savings or are they replacing one known spot to get the rubbish with a more expensive litter patrol team?

I guess I just don't really understand why, if they think the bin is underutilised, why aren't they getting their savings by only emptying every second day or whatever. Why are they spending money to remove 30% of their public bins?

From Wikipedia, he was just a mascot until:

The Timberwolves struggle in the championship game and an injury leaves them with four players. Buddy shows up to the crowd's cheers. After it is discovered that there is no rule preventing a dog from playing basketball, he is added to the roster and...