wind me up

  • 2 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Ive been using zsh for most of my linux time cause it is trendy.

    Im actually planning a move to bash. All else being equal, i prefer gpl-style to mit-style. (Tried fish didnt like it.)

    Dyk the “monopoly man” illustration was created by the grandparent of the original developer of bash? And was uncredited by the company who owns Monopoly until a relative publicized this recently.


  • Honestly i could live without fast. If its a text file there is always grep, ripgrep, silver searcher etc. But there is nothing in my deleted email demanding immediate attention. Any situation i forsee would accommodate waiting hours or days. I was kind of hoping to continue interacting with it in a webmail kind if way because piling up too many new things for something i wont be working on regularly is just asking for a mess.

    The mutt/notmuch proposal is a solid solution for the right person. To me, learning like 5 new major tools just for one project is a big risk. I played around with this stuff a couple years ago and failed at creating even a simple setup to do regular mail stuff. It is absolutely not clear.

    So i might try one if the intermediate solutions mentioned elsewhere. A solution that digests mail be acceptable as an addon extra.


  • Oh no!

    This kind of tool needs to be something you can rely on if it’s to be used in the way I am intending. If there is a master copy of the mail (as it sounds like you are working from) it’s not as big a deal as you can always go back to that. But if the application is relied upon to be doing its job, possibly in silence for long stretches, it can’t just combust.

    I am not sure I really like the word “database” in this context. I don’t understand them and I can’t fix them. Am feeling that maildir, where each email is simply a text file, should be the primary storage. If there is another tool that can index or interact with the maildir then that’s handy, but the mail itself should stay in a plain, interoperable filetype. (Unless that is how mailpiler works? I might be mis understanding.)

    I also see that mailpiler encrypts everything. I do not love that. My hdd is already encrypted. I do not want things further encrypted because it also means I am unlikely to be be able to fix any problems.

    I think this application is too complex for me. I need something that I can easily administer. Hopefully set up and leave it to be for a long time and not have too much to relearn if something needs to be fixed. It is perhaps suitable for a more advanced user/admin.







  • I want to keep mail on the server at about 80-90% of quota. Because when I am outside of my home, that will continue to be what I have access to. So the local copy will only be as a backup in case I delete something that I later realize I need to refer to. Since most emails are very small individually I should be able to keep the majority of them on the server. I will selectively delete either very large emails, or emails which there are so, so many of like notifications, which I will probably never need to look at.

    I have used Sylpheed a bit in the past. I prefer it and a very similar project called Interlink to tbird. I just said tbird because I figured everyone would know it. But also I thought all of those were forks of tbird and wouldn’t differ much in how they work. Do they have much different internals?




  • Hi that is kind of you to reconsider. No offense taken or intended. :) It’s just that 3 people commented to tell me to make an issue as though asking a question about linux software was inappropriate. Whereas 0 people commented with anything about my question. I still wonder if I am doing commenting wrong somehow.

    I am pretty sure I opened some kind of issue with these folks in the past and it was closed because I couldn’t submit a PR. I thought it was some sort of policy but I can’t find anything about it; either I am misremembering or whatever I read before is gone.

    I really truly do not begrudge any devs for running their FLOSS projects how they feel is best for them. It takes all types to make up the world. I think on the whole it is better for the FLOSS community to be open to feedback even from those who aren’t able to provide a solution, in order that the needs of non-developers can be met. But when it comes to a project which is explicitly aimed at developers, idk what can I say? It’s probably better that people who prefer issues be in the form of PRs be creating tools for other developers rather than normy end users.


  • OK I went to their tracker. Which jogs my memory even further on why I gave up on it and am unmotivated to open issues in this case.

    Here is a similar but not exactly the same issue: Tool to Comentent lines fail and can be more elegant · Issue #3554 · geany/geany. I suspect my issue is probably related to theirs. The developer response is:

    Since nobody has asked for this formatting before (@osergioabreu you did search for existing open or closed issues before you raised this didn’t you? 😁) users either don’t care because they only use it to temporarily comment out code and will remove it quickly, or they like it like that.

    So if “somebody” made a pull request which made the formatting an option it likely would be accepted so both tastes are accommodated.

    Or it was put in a plugin (if it isn’t in one already?)

    1. If my request is unique they are not interested because if it was important someone would already have posed it. If it isn’t unique than it would be a duplicate anyway. Unlike my problem, this issue #3554 is a real bug. The feature simply fails to work even on its own logic because it produces comments in such a way that the application itself does not recognize as comments. So impossible to later uncomment!

    2. They are basically open to PRs rather than suggestions. It isn’t just this particular case; it is the project as a a whole. It is a tool with a primary user base of developers so it is expected that many users will have the ability to do this. So-called “do-ocracy” I’ve heard described elsewhere. Which, fair enough, it is a FLOSS project and they have no responsibility to cater to me. I always am grateful for FLOSS developers and respect the right to runt heir project as they see fit. However I have no capacity to make a PR.

    3. Like me this dev wonders if it is a plugin. Also like me doesn’t have a way of finding out because the plugins are poorly described.

    Obviously we do not know each other but I will say that I have opened lots of issues like this in the past and will do so in the future. I don’t need a push to do it. That said, I appreciate the encouragement because for a long time I would never open issues and lots of people feel intimidated to do so. As I got more into FLOSS I came to understand that there is a sort of responsibility from users to give useful and constructive feedback to developers. And I have been blown away at how receptive developers are to my feedback, especially knowing that 90% of them are doing it on their own time. It really changes the way I look at commercial software when I have to use it at work. :) Where the relationship is transactional between my employer and the developers, rather than reciprocal between myself and the developers. My expectations are now so high based on FLOSS that commercial software seems so deficient. All that to say I understand what you are getting at.

    However I have also learned to evaluate the project prior to engaging with it to determine if my contribution would be welcome. When I am not the target user of the project, I find I am often wasting everyone’s time. The target user of this project is programmers.

    So in this case a forum post is more appropriate because the odds of a solution from the devs are like 1%. Maybe I will make an issue next time I’m logged in to github idk.

    A forum is a good place to learn from other users about undocumented features, or maybe there is a plugin someone knows about. That would actually be helpful.



  • Back in the 19th century when unions were powerful and innovative, a lot of people had jobs where they had to sit and do repetitive tasks in a room all day. A lot of it was handwork that didn’t have big loud machines.

    So one of the demands made by workers in such situations was that the employer would pay someone to come in and provide entertainment such as reading a book or giving talks on subjects of interest. The book or lecturer of course being selected by the workers via the democratic process of the union. And then of course the workers became way more educated because they suddenly had 8-12 hours daily to read books together. Since knowledge is power, the workers became stronger and more decisive in their collective actions.

    When you are listening to audiobook at work you can know you are in a long tradition of workers exercising power over their job conditions. Although now it is individualized in the implementation. The desire to have your mind even though the job has your body and some concentration is universal.



  • Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.

    Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don’t have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.

    Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.

    Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven’t tried it out but I guess I should.

    Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.

    I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.

    If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.


  • I mean in theory someone else might know the answer… I don’t want to bother the developers with every little problem. They are already busy making the software. I try to treat the developers with respect by reaching out to others for something like this. I do not know if there is a problem with the application. If someone else who uses the software would mention if they have this problem, or a different work style, or make a workaround. Possibly running the text through a script could do it? Maybe it is buried in one of the ambiguously named plugins.




  • check out dua. I usually use it in interactive most which lets you navigate through the file system with visual representations of total dir/file size.

    Here is a screenshot randomly found from the github issues

    screenshot

    I also recently found this gui program called k4dirstat buried in the repos. There are a few more modern options but this one blows them all out of the park.

    Screenshot from the github repo:

    screenshot

    Too bad they used such an ugly configuration for the screenshot… It allows you to modify the visualization to look better and display information differently. Anyway just thought I’d share as the project is old and little known.