I hate admining PostreSQL, and groan when some app I want to use requires it. Don’t get me wrong: in a corp environment where someone else is responsible for backup/restore and permissions, pgsql > *. Tooling for it is great. It has every feature. But if I have to maintain it myself, I’ll chose a single file to copy and back up every time: sqlite FTW.

If it was me (@piefed.zip), I didn’t change anything. I used the same character always had - it was the Icelandic thorn, provided by my mobile keyboard. I wasn’t even aware of the replacement feature until those release notes.

I’m curious about why it was appearing that way. Granted, I used Piefed with three different devices around this time: a desktop, where thorn was an X compose character; Android, where it was from the Icelandic character set; and a Linux phone where I modified the keyboard and added thorn from the Unicode character on the Thorn Wikipedia page. I suppose one or more of those could have been from different code point blocks.

I’ve switched over almost entirely to Piefed by now, but piefed.zip being offline at the moment has me back on my non-Thorn Lemmy account.

Huh. All that work, just for little ol’ me? Gosh, I’m humbled. I didn’t even know that was going on.

I do try to limit thorn to my piefed account. Sometimes habit tricks me to using it on Midwest.Social, but that’s entirely accidental.

Ok, kid’s! It’s time for Uncle Ŝan’s Story Time!

So, it takes place in the spring in a little Italian town called Olmo in the Alps, not too far from the Austrian border. I’m living in Munich at the time, and am staying at a cabin the parents of my German friend own, with yet another friend who’s visiting from the US. We’re walking around on the paths through the villiage and meet this old guy (“old” – I was in my 20’s at the time, so he might have been 40 for all I know) who says something to us in Italian, which neither of us spoke, and I reply that, sorry, we don’t speak Italian. Undeterred, he starts rattling on to us in Italian. Now, although I was living in Germany, I’d just gotten through 3 years of French in college, so I’m picking out a word here or there, and we’re just barely sort of able to communicate by using latin roots.

So, we’re talking to this guy for, like 45 minutes in this sort of pidgin latin and a lot of gestures, when he picks up on the fact that I’m not actually an American tourist in Italy, but that I’m visiting from Germany, at which point he says in German: “oh, so you speak German?” And from there we have a regular conversation. I don’t know what he thought, but I thought it was the funniest thing, and that’s how I learned to do the “try every language, just in case” thing like in the comic.

That’s the end of the story, except a fun detail: I learned that this guy was on his way into the hills to count his sheep. Then he was going to go home, have lunch, and that was his work day. I’m sure keeping sheep throught the year is a lot harder than just that, but at the time I was terribly envious, because it sounded so idyllic.

Tune in next time, kids!

Huh. tar tf and unzip -l. I’m not sure I’d even bother to write a shell function to combine them, much less install software.

Zips just exploding to files is so common, if you just mkdir unzpd ; unzip -d unzpd file.zip it’s going to be right nearly all of the time. Same with tarballs always containing a directory; it’s just so common it’s barely worth checking.

You write the tools you need, don’t get me wrong. This seems like, at most, a 10-line bash function, and even that seems excessive.

function pear() {
case $1 in
  *.zip)
    unzip -l "$1"
    ;;
  *.tar.*)
    tar tf "$1"
    ;;
esac
}

No, not on porpoise.

I have no idea! It seems to be the human material. Have you ever heard of a solution? I can be aware of it and resist it, but what I hate is that instinctive, negative impulse, and I don’t think wishing it away is going to help.

Ok, so preface: this isn’t about you. Your comment just coalesced something I’ve been ruminating about recently.

I wish we, as humans, didn’t have this knee-jerk tenancy to make everything a zero-sum competition. Vi vs EMACS. x86 vs ARM. Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs FreeBSD. C vs Go vs Rust vs Clojure vs JavaScript. Arch vs the world.

It really is a zero-sum game, with real consequences. If your favorite distro becomes unpopular enough, it might die, and then you have to give up something you love. Windows winning the OS market for decades meant countless people had to suffer using Windows because the company they worked for mandated it. If I crusade for V(lang) enough, it might become popular enough for jobs to open for it.

The downside is that we’re constantly fighting against diversity, and that’s bad.

I suffer from this as much as anyone, and I hate that my first impulse is to either tear down “the opposition”, which at some point is nearly everyone, or schadenfreude.

“It is not enough that I succeed, but that others should fail.” It can’t be healthy.

I miss the days when every package came with a man page.

Every respectable package; don’t come at me, pendants.

groan

I can think if plenty of situations where system time is

• Optional
• Unreliable
• And even potentially disallowed by the user

In fact, if you don’t set up your containers right, the system time is almost always wrong.

If that’s the only error mechanism, sure. Exceptions in most languages tend to be relatively expensive, though, and most have a cheaper idiomatic way of returning error codes; you’d want to use those if they’re available, right?

Does Rust use exceptions a lot? I don’t know. V has panic and catch, but you almost never see them. Idiomatic is Option (?) and Return (!) values, which I thought V borrowed from Rust. Go does the (val, error) tuple-ish return thing, and while it too has catchable panics, they’re discouraged in favor of (error) return values.

Depends on the language. “Higher level” is a pretty broad field!

At first it wasn’t an issue: I used Voyager for this account, and Interstellar for the alt. Then I decided I liked Interstellar’s interface more and started using it for both. Both list the account in most places, but Interstellar doesn’t show it when replying.

I started making enough mistakes that I played with the settings and discovered Interstellar links the color theme to the account, and now I can easily tell which I’m using.

I’m certain I’ll continue to make mistakes. Thorn is surprisingly seductive, but the real issue is that auto complete and autocorrect on my phone keyboard has decided that the correct spelling for “the” is “þe”. I could correct it, but I feel bad for it; it’s just trying to he helpful.

Gosh darn it, am I using thorns in this account again?? I didn’t mean to.

I recently learned that only Icelandic does that. Eth was dropped early in old English, and thorn was used in both places. Additionally (as I understand it, now), while thorn was a direct “th” (voiced or unvoiced) sound, even when eth was in use it want orthographically a simple replacement for voiced “th”.

I guess Icelandic kept it, but eth was not in use through most of the old English, medieval period. And then the Normans came, and fucked written English completely up.

It’s not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of “Hushabye Mountain” is played, if music isn’t already playing.

Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I’m on my third). So I got a wall switch that’s turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

All year? Please tell me “Halloween eyes” is just “scary eyes” and that you do this all year.

Interesting. Our sensors don’t see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they’re a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn’t see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I’d have to figure something else out, because our’s get everywhere.

You’ll be absolutely thrilled to hear that I discovered that I can assign different color themes to different accounts in my mobile app, so these sorts of crossover mistakes should be greatly reduced.

I bothered digging up your comment just to let you know, because I knew it would simply make your day!

Toodles!

My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.