Readit Newsfinaard commented on Emacs is my new window manager (2015) howardism.org/Technical/E... · Posted by u/gpi
Thanks for the recommendation!
Also check out the pull requests on that repo if there's something useful - in my case I've been using eat as single terminal instance for a while now - but for replacing stand alone terminals just opening multiple instances via multi-sh or similar isn't really helping for finding the terminals again. My solution was patching eat to allow buffer renames to the terminal title, and for ssh sessions, initially set the terminal title to the host I'm connecting to. Now I can easily find the terminals when switching buffers.
On top of that I'm using eyebrowse to have multiple workspaces, and some hooks around buffer switching that switch to the workspace a buffer is on instead modifying the current workspace.
finaard commented on Minimum Viable Arduino Project: Aeropress Timer netninja.com/2025/12/01/m... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
My trick is to re-use the filters. After the first few presses, the filters clog up somewhat and coffee doesn't drip through them as fast. So you can stir and let the mixture sit for a while, without resorting to maneuvers like the inverted method, which are unsafe for groggy programmers who haven't had any coffee yet that morning.
But, I thought Arduino had become officially evil once it joined Qualcomm. Besides which a Raspberry Pi Pico is cheaper than any Arduino-branded board ever was. So I'd just program this type of thing in MicroPython.
I do see that in the article, the project used an Adafruit Trinket M0, a very cute little board that has CircuitPython already installed. So I wonder why not just use CircuitPython. Anyway though, it's a Cortex M0 board, rather than the traditional Atmega that the Arduino world grew up using.
> But, I thought Arduino had become officially evil once it joined Qualcomm.
They have - but for less technical users their IDE is not too bad, and there are way too many bits out there relying on it, including lots of stuff not arduino, plus it's open source. And as it reloads files on changes can be used with a real editor as well. So for the software side I'm inclined to stick with that thing.
For hardware side it's different - but every interesting arduino has shitloads of clones available. In the past I've been buying those only for special use cases where there were no genuine arduinos to support the project - now since they got crazy it's only clones, and whenever I touch any of my old projects I'm updating the list of materials to recommend buying clones. You can still get nano clones for just a bit over 1 EUR each, so for projects where that is enough that's hard to beat value for the money.
finaard commented on Emacs is my new window manager (2015) howardism.org/Technical/E... · Posted by u/gpi
Nowadays there's eat as excellent terminal emulator for emacs, which should replace the need to run external terminals.
I've been using it for a w while, and recently finally got fed up about terminals on my macbook not behaving as nicely as the ones on my linux box with proper tiling window managers, so spent some effort to make SSH into a terminal with completion easy from emacs, and now mostly handle terminals in emacs.
As a EU citizen: My only complaint is that the fines are not large enough, and enforcement often takes too long.
finaard commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
This is it.
I wrote largish systems in perl using its OO things and that was good.
The one thing I could never ever get was using a regex - not the regex itself but the line to actually use it.
Python was so much easier as it was simple define the regex and then use a function on it. I suppose I should hjave spent a few days to write some wrapper in perl - doing those few days would have saved me time overall.
As for one liners I was originally an APL programmer so not a problem. But it is just bad style to write a one liner much better to write it in a maintainable form and split up the operations so they can be seen.
Nowadays I ddon't use lambdas if possible - much better to have a named function you can refer to.
> Python was so much easier as it was simple define the regex and then use a function on it. I suppose I should hjave spent a few days to write some wrapper in perl - doing those few days would have saved me time overall.
That's funny. I avoid python whenever possible, but one of the things I hate the most is how it is doing regex. I find the way it works in perl (both for search/replace and in conditionals) just intuitive.
finaard commented on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/cspags
Apple trackpads are so good that I prefer that over a full mouse for work
Since I switched to a macbook from a (proper) thinkpad I just carry a trackball with me when I expect to do longer stuff that requires mousing - the track pad isn't bad, but gets annoying over time. That also finalized my switch away from mice - before that I had both a mouse and a trackball on my desk, and while I still have that I can't remember when I last touched the mouse.
finaard commented on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/cspags
XPS 13 has snapdragon x elite and is very well built. Not sure how good Linux support is, tho. I run Linux on my Intel-based XPS 14 and it's pretty good, apart from the webcam being totally uncalibrated and looking kinda shite, but at least it works.
Maximum 32GB of RAM, which is a bad joke if you want to use it as developer system nowadays.
TL;DR: Waited for a decade for somebody to make a non-shitty notebook, went for macbook as the least bad option when the old one was falling apart.
Also the modern thinkpad keyboards are crap, and the trackpoint is unusable in the low profile style.
I switched to a macbook pro last year after having some contact with apple hardware in a customer project, from a thinkpad x230 with a x220 keyboard I've kept barely alive over the years. Now _some_ non-Apple notebooks (mostly from framework) can take sensible amount of memory, but at the time of purchase that was the only 14" notebook capable of taking a decent amount of RAM. The only other ones that could take RAM were some xeon workstation type builds - big display, shitty battery runtime, and same or more expensive than a fully specced out macbook.
Apple also seems to have put some effort into keyboards - with the current macbook pro keyboard being one of the best notebook keyboards currently out there. Not as good as the classic thinkpad keyboards, but better than anything lenovo made in over a decade. Dell never was that great, and did a massive step back in their latest model. HP is somewhat close, but still noticeable difference.
finaard commented on How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM telefoncek.si/2025/02/202... · Posted by u/ementally
> To summarize: the device is riddled with security flaws, originally shipped with default passwords, communicates with servers in China, comes preinstalled with hacking tools, and even includes a built-in microphone
So like pretty much any BMC out there, just with the benefit that an attacker taking over that thing doesn't have direct access to reflash your bios with a backdoored version?
Any halfway sane person deployed any kind of BMC or networked KVM to a access restricted management VLAN for at least a decade now because all of those things are a big mess, and the impact of them getting owned typically is pretty severe.
concerning (1): I have no offline sync in place, all my emails stay on the server. The IMAP protocol has a decent server-side search included[0], combined with Gnus unified search syntax[1], I enjoy a hassle-free search experience.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...