• 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2021

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  • I always go with the following strategy:

    • Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn’t have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.
      • Buses or trams (if I want to be fancy) for shorter routes, metro for longer distances.
      • Passenger trains for inter-city and longest local transport.
      • Cargo trains in industrial hubs, but careful with those, as they tend to generate a lot of traffic when trucks come and go. I usually do some sort of a traffic sponge (one-way road that leads only to the cargo train station) for trucks to wait without blocking other traffic.
    • I use highways sparingly and only for longer distances, like connections between cities. I try to build them outside of the city, so it would also act as a bypass - the cars which are not going into my city but through it won’t generate traffic in the city itself this way.

  • I personally switched from NextCloud to Syncthing.

    Syncthing:

    • is easier for me to maintain,
    • allows for the “server” to be behind NAT,
    • lets me have multiple “servers” at the same time (eg. something at home and a VPS)
    • lets me have certain “servers” set as untrusted, so all data on them is encrypted, while others can have it unencrypted for easier access I put “server” in quotes, as Syncthing doesn’t really have a server, all clients are equal peers.

    On the other hand, NextCloud:

    • gives me a way to share files by link with others,
    • lets me browse files via a web interface,
    • mobile app lets me access files as I need them instead of having to synchronize everything.









  • Unpopular opinion: non-pro can handle the OS just fine and then some. Try out SailfishOS (unfortunately not OSS) - it’s as smooth as butter. Or UBPorts - it works great (unfortunately both Sailfish and UBPorts aren’t as polished when it comes to actual hardware support on PinePhone, but they show nicely what could be done). I don’t think I even need to mention Sxmo, which is no surprise that it works great, but its approach is definitely not for everyone.

    It’s just Gnome/Plasma that are mainly developed for “big” computers and are pretty wasteful. But the situation is definitely improving.




  • Matrix works, but it’s way harder and more expensive to selfhost than for example XMPP, which can be hosted even on cheapest VPS or first RPi. I would definitely take the cost and “how hard is it to maintain in the long run” into consideration.

    Mattermost also works and is pretty easy to selfhost, but it doesn’t have federation.

    Another option is always an email with delta.chat - I don’t think it offers voice calling, but email is one of the most basic services one can host, and many automated solutions to help with that exist.


  • Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience.

    Which Vim/Emacs/… starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses? I think that it’s its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I’ve tried) is what really matters in Helix. The rest is just an addition, the one that makes it a quite competent and convenient environment to work with, but an addition.


  • I have a PinePhone and the article is on point.

    My understanding is: Android is here for many years now. When it was just released I got the HTC G1 and it was only barely better than what Mobian + Phosh present right now. Add to that many years of polishing by some of the most powerful corporations out there and you end up with Android as it is today.

    Mobile Linux made unbelieveable progress. It is, in my opinion, almost as usable as a dumb phone as first Androids were. The problem is as others have pointed it out, we need people working tirelessly on thankless polishing of everything around it. It’s hard without throwing money at that issue.



    • ranger and mc - both are file managers, and their approach is so different that I choose one of them I need at the moment depending on what do I want to do (mc for traditional file management, ranger for looking around the directory tree and peeking into files)
    • htop, tmux - classics
    • weechat, profanity - for my IM needs
    • ripgrep - for searching through files
    • magic-wormhole for file and ssh public key exchange
    • mosh for when the network conditions aren’t ideal
    • nmap to see if that machine I’ve connected into the network is up and what IP did it get
    • bat for quick looking into files
    • gdb, with mandatory gdb dashboard
    • nvim for serious text and code editing, micro for more casual editing