Daniel Quinn @ danielquinn @lemmy.ca

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

What about blog spam though? Surely this would relinquish controls like moderation for your site?

Ooh! Thanks for this! I had no idea it existed.

I recommend writing everything in Bourne shell (/bin/sh) for a few reasons:

• Bash is more capable, which is nice, but if you're fiddling with complex data structures, you probably should be using a more maintainable language like Python.
• Bash is in most places, but crucially not everywhere. Docker-based deployments for example often use Ash which is very similar to Bash, but lacks support for arrays and a few other things.
• Bourne's limitations force you to rethink your choices regularly. If you find yourself hacking around a lack of associative arrays for example, it's probably time to switch to a proper language.

Also two bits of advice.

1. Use shellcheck. There's a website that'll check your script for you as well as a bunch of editor extensions that'll do it in real time. You will absolutely write better, safer code with it.
2. If your script exceeds 300 lines. Stop and rewrite it in a proper language. Your future self will thank you.

Ahh, yeah that's about what I remember. Too messy for me. This sounds like it'd be better as an actual package (apt/pacman) then.

Well that looks promising. Last time I looked into it, I was put off by a shell script that called sudo, but if it's bound to a Flatpak, I can work with that.

I did just that. It's not about security. It's about messing with my machine's setup. I don't want to run a bunch of rando commands that might mess with how my actual package manager manages my system.

Oh really? Boo.

Retrodeck looks good, but the recommended install instructions were just too nutty for me: curl https://... | bash is not ok.

I think Emudeck is available as a Flatpak, so you should be able to install it on your desktop too.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough to with the genre to speak about any particular category being good or bad, but I can give you an idea of what I like/hate.

For theatre, I loved Wicked. I saw it three times and would do it again. Hamilton was also brilliant but Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera were really hard on my ears. I think it's the whole "We need some dialogue here, but it's a musical, so let's have them sing it" that does it. If that's your experience with musicals, believe me when I tell you, they aren't all like that. Some are heart-shatteringly beautiful with complex harmonies and the sort of music that makes you feel like you can fly right out of that theatre. Wicked's "Defying Gravity" still gives me chills when I think about it, and the way Hamilton is stitched together with callbacks between each song: "my shot", "running out of time", "wait for it", "that would be enough"... it's just amazing work.

There's also an excellent off-broadway musical called "Evil Dead: The Musical" and it's as bad-in-a-good-way-campy as you think. There's zombies, a splatter zone, and some seriously smart & funny songs in there, including my favourite: "What the Fuck Was That?". I mean, it's not good music, but it's fun :-)

But Cats... that was cancer for my ears. It was my first musical and nearly soured me on them entirely.

But it's not just theatre! I love movie musicals too! Moulin Rouge's Ewan McGreggor is just jaw-droppingly talented. The finalé (until the curtains close anyway) is punch-the-air-feel-amazing. Another good one is The Greatest Showman: not quite as amazeballs as Moulin Rouge, but surprisingly inspiring, and the duet between Zac Effron and Zendaya definitely has that "life is beautiful" feel to it. Also, "Never Enough" is great too. I also have a deep, deep love for Pitch Perfect.

Then there's tv! The Buffy musical kinda started it all, and while it's not nearly as musically complex as the aforementioned, it's clever, funny, and 20 years later I can still hear it in my head. "I think this line's mostly filler" was a nice touch. Since then though, there have been a number of attempts at musical episodes of favourite shows. Most recently, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did a fantastic job with some right bangers. The reigning champion of course is Glee with some awesome stuff [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

So yeah, it ranges. I'd recommend Wicked & Hamilton to anyone not sure if they can get into musicals, largely because they don't do that "sing dialogue" thing that I think grates on a lot of people. After that, look for shows starring people you know to be awesome. Kristen Chenoweth for example is a guaranteed win for me. She is absolutely delightful on stage.

I haven't! But I'll check it out. I am however Very Excited about the new Wicked movie.

Yup. I've had more than a few people claim I had to "give up my man card" because I love musicals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sex in the City.

Excluding the obvious choice of Jeffrey Combs as... well anyone really, I'm rather fond of Andreas Katsulas, though I may be partial to him for his phenomenal role as G'Kar on Babylon 5.

"Yankees, in six games" -- "One Small Step" is comfort food for me. A close second is "The Siege of AR-558"

There have been some great answers on this so far, but I want to highlight my favourite part of Docker: the disposability.

When you have a running Docker container, you can hop in, fuck about with files, break stuff as you try to figure something out, and then kill the container and all of the mess you've created is gone. Now tweak your config and spin up a fresh one exactly the way you need it.

You've been running a service for 6 months and there's a new upgrade. Delete your instance and just start up the new one. Worried that there might be some cruft left over from before? Don't be! Every new instance is a clean slate. Regular, reproducible deployments are the norm now.

As a developer it's even better: the thing you develop locally is identical to the thing that's built, tested, and deployed in CI.

I <3 Docker!

I'm not sure. https://mycroft.ai/ appears to be gone, redirected to https://community.openconversational.ai/. Since the Mycroft devices depended on a central server for configuration (you pushed your config to their website which in turn relayed environment variables to your code), my guess is that the project is dead, but like all good Free software, still out there.

Don't get me started with Mycroft. I bought the 1st gen device and invested a year of my life writing the first incarnation of Majel built on top of it. When it was ready to share I announced it in their internal developers group and was attacked repeatedly for using the AGPL instead of a licence that'd let them steal and privatise it. Here I was offering a year's worth of free labour (and publicity, the project exploded on Reddit), and all they could say was: "use the MIT license so we don't have to contribute anything".

I'm still bitter.

Aren't there a bunch of charges she could fall under? Incitement, threats?

yt-dlp might be able to do the job. It has options for you to specify credentials too.

Nifty! I wrote something similar a couple years ago using Vosk for the stt side. My project went a little further though, automating navigating the programs you start. So you could say: "play the witcher" and it'd check if The Witcher was available in a local Kodi instance, and if not, then figure out which streaming service was running it and launch the page for it. It'd also let you run arbitrary commands and user plugins too!

I ran into two big problems though that more-or-less killed my enthusiasm for developing on it: (1) some of the functionality relied on pyautogui, but with the Linux desktop's transition to Wayland, some of the functionality I relied on was disappearing. (2) I wanted to package it for Flatpak, and it turns out that Flatpak doesn't play well with Python. I was also trying to support both arm64 and amd64 which it turns out is also really hard (omg the pain of doing this for the Pi).

Anyway, maybe the project will serve as some inspiration.