apple snorkel when?

back to the river to swim

did some ridiculous stuff with git trees and made #git-annex around 60x faster at importing from special remotes

turns out that git can be handy as a general-purpose merkel tree differ even when you're operating on data that git doesn't know anything about.. Just sha1 some internal data, shove the shas into a tree, and git diff away.

In my case, I'm hashing basiclaly inodes..

https://git-annex.branchable.com/devblog/day_649-650__speeding_up_repeated_imports/

Importing trees from special remotes still feels a bit like a new feature, although it was added to git-annex in 2019. I don't know if many people are using it. I've had some complaints about it being slow when the remote contains a large number of files (eg 100 thousand).

I've just finished speeding up repeated imports from a special remote a lot, when the special remote contains a large number of files, and few or no files have changed.

git-annex was spending a lot of time converting content identifiers to keys. Each conversion took a database lookup, which was slow enough to become painful in bulk.

I thought of a neat trick. Take the sha1 of a content identifier, and create a git tree of the files in the special remote, using those sha1s as the content of the files. Of course, that is not the actual content of any file that git knows about. But it doesn't matter, because once git-annex has those trees, it can diff the current tree to the tree from the previous import. And that tells it which files have changed. Then it only has to do database lookups for the changed files.

This turned out to be one of the best results I've ever gotten from a git-annex optimisation. It runs 60x faster or more with more files!

The moral is that git is really good at diffing trees fast, and so it's worth using git diff whenever possible, even if the thing being diffed is not a regular tree of files.

This work was sponsored by Mark Reidenbach and Lawrence Brogan on Patreon

What are these extremely small white particles appearing out of nowhere?

It took me almost a year to figure out some ants were making a home in a section of our styrofoam.

We don’t like toxic chemicals so I just removed the offending styrofoam and will have to replace it with some of the itchy stuff.

The post Styrofoam Ant Tunnels first appeared on WetKnee Books.

I thought ipv6 was supposed to be easy to set up, but on my router I had to swap out dhclient for dhcpcd in order to get prefix delegation working, and also install radvd because I couldn't get dnsmasq to do SLAAC

finished converting my #starlink to DC power.... this reduced my house's base load from 65 watts to 37 watts, of which about 24 watts are starlink #offgrid

I prefer top to bottom. #starlink #offgrid

(Ignoring the kaypro)

#starlink DC power supply.. Outputs right voltage, mustering up courage to try it.

repotted my calamansi tree, which my sister grew from seed... will it produce fruit?

if not, she's going to graft onto it from the parent plant, which does

#citrus

We got a good deal on our current trailer in part because the pipes had been allowed to freeze over the winter. Our first round of plumbing repairs seems to have held up great, but a new leak popped up behind the washing machine recently.

I love small spaces and Mark hates small spaces, but he’s the DIY pro while I’m a rank amateur. So he figured it was worth splurging on two SharkBite connectors to turn the project into child’s play.

This child didn’t push the new pipe into the top of the bottom connector hard enough the first time, so I got a big spray of water in my face. But a little more elbow grease did the job and, in the end, I was very proud of my accomplishment.

The post SharkBite connectors for amateur plumbers first appeared on WetKnee Books.

result of a productive hour ignoring #hackernews conventional thinking and doing my own thing

(there should perhaps be a word for this)

from my power use logs, the cook time was:

20 minutes pressure cooking
25 minutes sauteing

This goes into my recipe list as follows:

4-5 onions, sliced
couple knobs of butter
salt and pepper
pressure cook on high for 5 minutes
manual release
drain (reserving liquid)
saute until brown, stirring occasionally and deglazing with liquid

cook time: Dunno, I was cleaning the bathroom. I deglazed and stirred 3 times. It was rapidly browning at the end so I could have gotten much browner easily.

Instant pot caramalized onions a-la ignoring #hackernews

almost got sucked into reading a 500 post #hackernews thread about how caramalized onion recipes are bad

noped out and am just carmelizing some onions in the instant pot instead #cooking

podcasts switching to podtrac, so they get ads for like Burger King slapped on them, and also all the feed urls change and my client redownlods another copy of all the back catalog is an instant unsubscribe for me

One challenge of our deck growing area is the shade it gets from close by structures.

The new experiment is to see what we can grow in this gutter area that escapes some of the shade.

A 10 foot section of aluminum gutter is about 15 dollars with another 15 on end caps and hardware.

The post Growing in the gutter first appeared on WetKnee Books.

imagine writing xeyes in 1988 as an amusement, and 35 years later it turns out people use it mostly as a diagnostic tool to tell if a program is displaying via xwayland

https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM is feeling pretty great to this xmonad user

tracked it down to this bug in an extension https://github.com/pixel-saver/pixel-saver/issues/235

gnome UI

Clicked on Extensons then Settings.. Nothing happened.

One hour later I found the Settings window for another extension hidden under a window on a different desktop. Thing can only open 1 at a time.

And also...

It's possible to configure gnome so right-click to open the context menu on a title bar opens 2 different context menus. One for the app, and one the window menu. Right click cycles between them.

That's some UI design right there

Only in wayland though, not on X.

But gnome on X is slow. That's why they need wayland..

Tried gnome on wayland today, got it about configured enough to be usable (as a xmonad replacement; tiling hotkeys etc)

Then I rebooted, and it turns out something I tweaked in gnome makes it freeze a few seconds afrer startup

oh well

(Bear in mind that the prompt also says not to emit the prompt so we see how well it works.)

"You must not reply with content that violates copyrights for code and technical questions."

If #Github actually uses that in the copilot prompt, their contention that LLMs can't violate copyright seem even more specious.

https://nitter.net/marvinvonhagen/status/1657060506371346432

finally switched to #alacritty

I knew how slow VTE was, knew about the horrible use of temp files etc, but you can't really tell the mollassus you've been mired in until you run find in two terminals side by side and watch how VTE stutters

every day is #caturday yes?

wrote this line of code like only a #haskell programmer can

a c t

Remember my disappointment in summer-planted hairy vetch? Well, that patch kept growing slowly throughout the fall and winter, then took off like a rocket this spring. I needed some mulch this week and didn’t mind the vetch bed staying in cover crops for another year, so I actually cut when only the first few blooms had appeared. Harvest was extremely simple — a lot of stalks ripped out easily by hand then I used a toothed sickle to cut through the rest.

For the first bed that was entirely vetch, I rolled my cut cover crops up into a big snowball of greenery and pushed them down the hill to the broccoli, who have been treated with worm castings but still need more nitrogen (plus mulch). The vetch covered up an area about three times as large as the original spot it had been harvested from, although we’ll see how much the greenery melts down as the stems die and dry.

Co-planting rye and vetch

Next up was taking a look at a rye-and-vetch co-planting. Like the other vetch bed, this patch of garden soil needs serious improvement (thus the focus on a nitrogen-fixer like vetch). Unlike that other bed, I planted in fall instead of summer.

In this area, I wanted to determine which did better — rye planted solo or rye interplanted with vetch. So I divided the bed up into stripes, the first one vetch and rye, the next one rye only, etc. The idea is to make sure any difference I saw between plantings wasn’t due to the part of bed they were planted in.

Conclusions? First of all, it’s clear that rye does much better in excellent soil than it does in poor soil. When we’d planted it in Virginia, our rye used to grow to my shoulder. These beds barely make it to my waist.

The vetch, in contrast, did quite well here (although only about 60% as well as the summer-planted vetch-only bed). The bands with vetch produced about twice as much total biomass as the rye-only bands did. Would a vetch-only band have produced yet more? Hard to say since my vetch-only bed was planted earlier in the season than the rye-and-vetch bands. Sounds like we’re due for another experiment this fall.

Moving hand-harvested mulch around

As a side note, the firewood tote carrier we no longer use turns out to be awesome for moving cover crop mulch around. If you’re hand harvesting, you can lay clumps into the carrier as you cut them, then the tote bundles them up nicely as you wander across the garden.

And here’s about a third of the area I mulched with handcut cover crops over the course of a bit over an hour. Yes, I did yank up blooming arugula and cut some comfrey leaves also to round things out. I’m now tuckered out but very pleased with my free mulch.

The post Harvesting the first hairy vetch for mulch first appeared on WetKnee Books.

this and a POE injector will let me delete the starlink wifi router/power supply and go DC-DC. I anticipate it will cut the power use in half.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYJTHX4P/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

(non-affiliate link)

#starlink has a ridiculous proprietary connector on its cable that is designed to a) look cool (if you like cybertrucks) and b) not fit through reasonably sized holes in walls or conduit and c) make cables cost $$

Someone finally cloned it and produced this converter to a standard ethernet jack.

Buffet bought 79800 solar panels at $15037 a panel. That's about 2x the cost of a whole pallet of panels.

I can't believe that this grift was not apparent to a majority of the businesses involved.

https://archive.is/MkRBx

was refreshing my #sourdough starter and scaping down the edges of the mason jar when it broke in my hands

aaaargh... I've taken out a spoonful of starter, diluted it, passed it through a fine sieve

homeoepathic broken glass anyone?

Also there was a web form with what I assume were generic questions the board asks everyone. So technically they asked me more, but the only specific question was about the petition.

Edited to correct a link, the board asked me about the letter itself, not specifically the appendix of it, which I had accidentially linked to.

cat integration milestone after 2.5 years

#caturday

also Pia Andrews has done some good work in this area https://lwn.net/Articles/926059/

Probably this package got me thinking along these lines https://hackage.haskell.org/package/canadian-income-tax

This points out an interesting opportunity. Got me pondering what libre tax software would be best for the IRS to provide.

I'm thinking that a machine readable decription of the forms, and of the necessary invariants (from the tax law), in the form of a library would be most useful.

The IRS could run a website on top of that sure, but that data is the hard part of building anything in this area, and if it were available as free software there could be a lot of innovation in the space.

I'm curious what if anything other countries provide in this area.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/call-on-the-irs-to-provide-libre-tax-filing-software

people I've blocked this morning

- a royalist who thinks organized protesters should be arrested
- someone who thinks I have no morals due to signing a petition against rms

deth star vadar theme song playing in my head as I read the news this morning

https://smallwondersmag.com/ SFF flash fiction with a mastodon subscribe link? yes!

@SmallWondersSFF

telnet does not work over #starlink

haven't debugged, but it just hangs. interesting

I'd file a support ticket but lol

This is mostly a relief, to be honest.

There are some good people on the list, and some people I don't know.

I hope they do find some people who can get them out of their troubles.

I was one of the candidates nominated to expand the FSF's board.

I didn't make it past the first round.

The only thing the board asked me about related to my signing of https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

Here are the candidates who made it to the next stage. I note that none of them signed the letter.

https://www.fsf.org/news/announcing-the-fsfs-board-candidates

The last water hose splitter we tried was plastic and it only lasted 3 years.

What I like about this all brass splitter is the mounting holes that allow you to secure it to a wall.

Having the water hose hub at eye level is a lot easier on the back.

The post Easy water hose hub first appeared on WetKnee Books.