• 4 Posts
  • 167 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2022

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  • I’m almost a year in to a job where I was given this task with no admin access on my local windows machine, with a team that had never used an IDE or git before, and with only Google Drive as my allowed cloud tool. When I got here everything was just a bunch of Jupyter notebooks that would get run in Google Collab that were stored haphazardly over a shared Google Drive.

    It’s been a slog, but Python for Windows, VSCode, Git for Windows, and Poetry can all be installed without admin access, and we got limited access to Azure DevOps. I’ve taught my team how to use powershell, git, VSCode, and Poetry, and taught them about testing and documentation (this is a slowwww process). We finally got a desktop computer with admin access this week that we can RDP into (that I requested basically right when I started), so we can run scheduled tasks on Windows and hack together some kind of a CI/CD system. We started a wiki on Azure, have most of our stuff documented and in a well organized monorepo, and track our work in boards now.

    Now that other teams are starting to see how we’re doing things, they want in, too. Thank god these people are wonderful and excited to learn because otherwise this would be very frustrating.




  • I cannot access my homelab from my work network, so I cannot sync via Nextcloud. Syncthing would be better, but they just stopped supporting Android sync, which I need. Proton Drive doesn’t sync files on Android. On top of that, I don’t want to deal with sync issues because keepass isn’t designed for syncing like that. I’m not gonna go back to using Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox just for keepass. I’ve considered just keeping my db file on a flash drive, but all of the keepass Android apps I tried won’t automatically detect that the file exists when I plug in the drive.

    If someone has a better way for me to use it, please enlighten me.

    Bitwarden is slowly turning their stuff closed-source, and I hope they don’t turn to shit, but right now it’s what works.


  • Yeah, I’m talking about not just Nix, but NixOS. Nix (the package manager) can do a lot, but NixOS + disko + home-manager can literally be all of the configuration for your machine from drive partitioning through to dot files. Throw in nixos-anywhere and impermanence and you can have an insane amount of control over all of your computers.

    Ansible, Terraform, Chef, etc. do have some overlap, but the main difference is that those tools iterate through the system modifying it piece by piece and NixOS is declarative.

    If something fails in some of my bigger Ansible playbooks, it could mean 30 minutes of just running through all the steps again. I could probably break it into sections, but then I have to worry about making sure they all get run when things get updated. In my NixOS install, it’s way faster, I can roll back to a previous state, and troubleshooting is way easier in my opinion.










  • The main thing I have learned after switching to Linux full-time is that weird, proprietary hardware like this is almost never a good idea, for many reasons. It’s very easy to make labels for keys if you really want to, and if you need more functionality, having more buttons instead of layers is always going to be faster to learn and use. Especially if you are trying to use this as a home automation interface, it’s probably a better idea to have either a touch screen or a separate screen and keypad.

    Sure, this thing looks nice, but in a couple years (at most) it will be e-waste.