Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@snow Do you have a link for it or was it in print?

@jordan31@fosstodon.org Bourne-family shells like bash are definitely great for quickly banging out simple stuff but, compared to a modern scripting language like Python, they can get hairy very quickly.

(I'm not a fan of using `trap` to ensure temporary files get cleaned up no matter how the script exits, for example.)

You'll probably want http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ at some point.

@rvlobato One thing that article doesn't mention is that, if you want the LibreOffice/OpenOffice or Standalone LanguageTool options to be as smart as the hosted service, you'll need an SSD and to download the optional 8GiB (compressed) bundle of n-gram data in addition to the hand-written rules it comes with by default.

https://languagetool.org/compare
http://wiki.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-data

@aluaces In my experience, the audio stream may also be exposed as a USB audio device independent of uvcvideo... so be sure to check that. Otherwise, you might wind up with what is essentially a $1 stick-on sliding cover except that it can be disabled with just a remote root exploit.

I just recently ran across this blog post on the core flaw in the Go programming language's focus on simplicity that I felt like sharing.

https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/

TL;DR: They seem determined to force a veneer of simplicity, even when things are fundamentally complicated, and that makes things painful when the abstraction leaks.

It occurs to me that I'm going to have to get used to this whole idea of having timelines that are slow-moving enough to follow everything that happens among strangers.

It looks like it's leading me toward impulsive faving/boosting behaviour when the better choice would be to make a note and then wait to see if I can fave or boost someone else's more balance/rational/calm-headed toot on the same article.

@ndegruchy@fosstodon.org I know the feeling. When things get close enough to start to evict disk cache, the whole system thrashes itself to a standstill long before the OOM killer triggers.

Thankfully, it has rarely needed to trigger since I realized that having swap was necessary for proper RAM defragmentation and added zram-based swap to my 16gb of RAM.

@SciencePhysicist As enthusiastic as I am to see Wayland developing, there's one papercut on X11 which would turn into a deal-breaker under Wayland and I haven't seen anyone but Enlightenment acknowledging it:

There needs to be some mechanism for preventing a compositor crash or forced reload from kicking the user back to the login screen.

As someone who leaves my X11 sessions logged in for weeks or months at a time, I've never had a KDE session that didn't need Kwin restarted at least once. (Usually more unless I turn off compositing.)

When I joined Twitter in 2009, I was just mirroring my Identi.ca, where I'd coined #fic_rating for fanfiction micro-reviews with machine-friendly structure.

The reference I wrote is still up:

https://gist.github.com/ssokolow/3793644
https://hashtags.fandom.com/wiki/Ficrating

It wouldn't make sense to summarize those, and I stopped updating Identi.ca when I stopped the micro-reviews, so I'll just point at it for now.

https://identi.ca/ssokolow

Maybe later I'll use Mastodon's higher limit to revisit them for a "top 5" run-down.

I'm still not completely satisfied with sending people to look at my Twitter, so I decided to go back through it and write some themed highlights round-ups of tweets that are still relevant.

In order to gather the data for them, I've written a little Python script to chew through the tweets in my Twitter data dump, which I've put up on GitHub Gist in case anyone else wants to play with it.

https://gist.github.com/ssokolow/e3efc2300347a0b83f6b42b7860dac60

@design_RG Thanks for clarifying that. I've added an "Old Posts" link.

Oh, since I don't yet know whether the Mastodon APIs allow me to write an importer which would insert stuff earlier than existing content, here's a link to my old content:

https://twitter.com/deitarion

Hello, everyone.

For those who aren't the one or two people following me over from Twitter, I won't post very often but, when I do, it'll usually either be an especially good YouTube video or technical stuff, like announcing that I added some content to one of the lists on my blog or sharing something interesting I discovered while puttering around in old files.

I do have a bunch of programming projects, but, if you want to judge me based on my GitHub, bear in mind that I'm still trying to pick up the pieces after a long interval when I didn't have time to work on anything.

Once in a blue moon, maybe you'll see me post about my retro-hobby programming project to write an installer builder for DOS.