Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@glyph Everything about datetimes (and probably most human-centric things) is super context-dependent, so what time zone they want to tell the system may have nothing to do with what time zone they want to tell your program.

I don't know what your program is and why you need to serialize civil times with time zones, so it's really hard to have concrete advice here. The only thing I can think of where you'd want it to represent whatever the system local time is, but also pass it around as a civil datetime with an attached zone would be calendar entries, and calendar entries are definitely something you'd want to offer the option to choose a time zone for (since you may say, "Oh this event is two weeks happens at noon in New Jersey, but I live in London").

For pretty much everything else, you either care about the absolute time something happens/ed (e.g. log entries, something that must happen every 24 hours or something), or you care about what time it happens in local time (e.g. "install updates and restart at 2AM because that's when I'm asleep"). In the first case you can basically pass around epoch timestamps or equivalent, and in the second case you can pass around naïve datetimes.

@glyph Can you not ask the user what time zone they want to use?

@glyph What are you trying to do here? You can use `ZoneInfo.from_file` to use the file directly if you know it exists.

That said, with proper error handling and fallbacks I don't see why doing that wouldn't work in a lot of situations. If you want something more robust I think `tzlocal` encapsulates a bunch of these kinds of hacks.

@WindOfChange @aes__ Ah, I'm not using KDE and Cinnamon doesn't seem to have an equivalent thing, though yeah copying to the clipboard is not great either.

Does anyone have a good solution for typing emojis in any random box on #Linux? Right now I've got compose key shortcuts set up for [a few of them](https://github.com/pganssle/dotfiles/blob/eae76933960af891af4b68c4dc98dcfe378b197c/dotfiles/bash/.XCompose#L48-L53), but I have to remember which ones I've defined, and that doesn't exactly scale. Ideally I'd be able to define a hotkey that would bring up a little search box that I can type in "tada" for 🎉 and "flamingo" for 🦩.

#emoji #input

Might be a good idea to call your representatives about this.

@poleguy It is what I had lying around.

Sssh, no one tell my life insurance company.

#electronics #cursed

@glyph @simon I hate these things and it feels like some Soviet style bullshit that I can't turn them off on "my" phone BUT to be fair, I think "all the alerts to my phone using the system have been some kind of mistake" is approximately what I would expect here even in competent hands.

Considering that as far as I know there has never been a situation where the relevant features of the system would be useful, all such notifications are bound to be tests or mistakes. Tests must necessarily be rare for the system to have any kind of validity, and for rare things where you get one shot it's incredibly hard to anticipate everything.

To me, "Get the time zone right and don't notify people in the middle of the night" seems pretty basic, but potentially there are dozens of things that they did right that I wouldn't think of and that would seem like elementary mistakes to someone else.

Anyone have a recommendation for a case for the #Pixel8Pro? I basically want the thinnest thing that lets me put the phone down without the camera lying straight on the surface.

(Though also I guess I drop my phone all the time nowadays, and the back case of my old one is broken, so I guess impact resistance might be more important than it has been in the past)

#pixel

Though I guess they don't really make 2TB SDHC cards yet, so my plan to get a tablet with a 2TB memory card and keep the originals on it might not work out as well as I had hoped.

Given how much space I saved, it might be worth it to use 1080p and just have that be the main thing I watch on both phone and tablet.

Since my new #pixel8pro only has 1TB of space and no expandable storage, I decided that I would keep all my "on device" videos as 720p instead of the 4k 60fps originals (it's visually indistinguishable while watching them on the phone anyway, as far as I can tell).

450GB compressed all the way down to 21 GB, wow!

By the way if anyone knows of a better reliable way to get string than just randomly wandering around at night waiting for spiders, let me know.

#minecraft

This morning it became clear that I've been playing too much Minecraft when I saw some cobweb Halloween decorations and thought, "Ooh, I should collect those to make string!"

#minecraft

Aww yeah, Paw Paws delivered today.

#pawpaw #pawpawfruit

We'll see how it does against the Gom Jabbar in a couple of years, I guess.

New lesson this week is that a 5 year old will definitely earnestly repeat the Litany Against Fear if you teach it to them, but also it isn't as effective as you might hope for staving off fear of monsters at bedtime.