RotaryKeyboard @ RotaryKeyboard @lemmy.ninja

Posts

18

Comments

145

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm curious how you actually turn a Lemmy site read-only!

I would like downvoted comments and posts that are below a certain threshold to be collapsed.

Yeah, this is usually the reason I will downvote a news article. Misinformation needs to be marked somehow, and a negative score is a good way to do that.

The USA hasn’t resembled anything near democratic for a bit

What fantasy land are you living in?

I'm making my way through the special features and commentaries in the Blu Ray edition. It amazes me that so much of the bonus content is apologizing for/explaining the bad quality of the show. I've never seen anything like it, really.

I have watched this series several times. There was one way to watch it that makes it pretty good: follow the skippables list. It tells you which episodes to omit and which to watch to get the full story. It's pretty incredible what it does to the experience of binging the show. Suddenly it feels Voyager-like.

Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.

how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

Choose not to save at all or

To my knowledge, this can't be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The "Save changes before closing?" dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the "Don't Save" button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.

Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.

For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:

1. Command-Shift-S (Save As)
2. Command-Shift-G (Go to)
3. ~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab) (which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)
4. (enter)

But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let's walk through that now.

In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:

touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don't have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:

nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

Now I've opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.

Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.

bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn't even exist until you save it.

So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.

Oh, one more thing: if you don't know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I've ever come across for computers.

Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.

This is the one group that seems perpetually pissed off about everything, all the time, even getting things they wanted and asked for

This is so true! One thing I've always loved about American liberal culture (yeah, I know; we're not really liberal here) is that we laugh at our mistakes. For most of my life, Cable and Late Night comedy shows have been helping us find the humor in the things we would otherwise be enraged about. I feel like it has helped me stay sane all these years. I kind of feel bad for the Fox News-watching conservatives who spend their days oscillating from outrage to fear to outrage again. It must be hell on their cardiovascular health.

I don't think people should downvote you for this opinion. What I do think you get wrong, however, is the popularity of legal abortion. It has been widely supported for decades. Popularity does vary by state, and it varies depending on how late the abortion is permitted, but it is still broadly popular.

I made this point above, but I'll state it again: the real purpose of this ad is to keep abortion being talked about. Republicans have been very silent about the topic since they began to see that their extremely hard-line stance against abortion was driving away voters. They would prefer to talk about inflation and economic issues, and not anger voters in key states. My bet is that any time abortion is mentioned in tonight's debate, if it is mentioned at all, you will hear "but what we really need to talk about is Americans' pocketbooks."

As for the demonic eyes, I have a feeling most of the people outraged by that are not voters that Biden can win anyway.

The ad is designed to keep the abortion issue talked about. Have you noticed how Republicans have gone radio-silent on abortion? They don't want it brought up. This is a smart move.

Given an average gas tax of 31 cents per gallon, and an average distance driven of 13,489 miles, and an average mpg of 15.7 (for passenger cars), the average driver might pay $266.34/year in gas tax in a year. Let's say that the driver had to replace all of their tires every 45,000 miles. That means you'd have to recoup that annual gas tax amount 3.33 times in tire taxes. This would add $886.91 to the cost of the tire purchase, or $221.72 for each tire.

I haven't had to buy tires in a long time (small blessings from Covid), so I had to look up the average cost of a tire at Discount Tire. 16-20" all season tires cost $100-$250 each. Woof! That would take a total tire cost from $400-$1,000 to $1,286.91-$1,886.91.

Don't drive on any dirty roads, I guess. Those flats are going to be painful!

That would have to be one huge payment, though. I can only think of a few cases in my entire life that I've bought a tire.

Seems better to me that they collect the taxes from everyone from the income tax and/or business taxes. Everyone uses the roads, even if they don't have a car.

Nemesis above Undiscovered Country? That’s a shock!

Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”

On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.

Roasting means to cook over a flame. Baking means to cook in an oven.

Oh god that's hilarious

Most of the built-in thermostats on barbecue grills are garbage. Before speculating on what might be behind the temperature difference, get a thermometer that is accurate with two probes and measure again.

It really is beautiful. I'd call it the most cinematic show on the air right now. It takes paying attention to follow, but the story has been satisfying so far. The acting is excellent. I recommend it, but you have to invest yourself in keeping track of what's going on.

TIL! Are there good GUI front-ends for Rsync for when you want to browse the file versions?

My friend's requirements were that the transfers be encrypted (which ssh does) and that his family have a server that was easy for them to use to upload and download files. The file server also had to be private -- meaning not stored in the cloud. They aren't technically savvy, so we needed an option where they could literally drag and drop a file from their desktop onto a web browser window. It worked well for them. My only regret is that the VPN was so complicated to set up. But on the bright side, Synology unifies the username and password between the VPN server and DSM, which makes it a little easier for my friend (and his family) to maintain.