This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I suspect many don’t write anything down and do this largely by intuition/experience but I want to tease out some ideas.

when it comes to describing and designing a system from a blank piece of paper, what are the parameters you think of?

I’m thinking napkin sketch level of software design.

So things like:
Number of users, are they concurrent users, what load dimensions there are (disk IO, network IO etc.), target platform (everything is a web app these days), how do you design/visualise the data model?

Any decisions or constraints that impact what and how you build a proof of concept / MVP? How do you document this? How do you test it against the finished software?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

As an amateur photographer, I'm looking for recommendations to improve my process for reviewing and selecting the best photos from my albums.

Currently, it goes something like this:

• (after I copy the photos to my PC) I open the folder containing the album
• I open the first photo and start looking at the pictures using the default photo viewing app
• I note mentally, on paper, or in a digital notepad the names of the files that I like the most
• manually select the files that I noted down

My ideal workflow would be something like:

• open the folder, open first photo, look through them all
• each time I see a picture that I like, hit space or some other simple shortcut, which adds the picture to the current selection
• after I am done viewing, I have all the files that I want already selected to do with as I please

I have tried multiple apps over the years but I haven't come across anything that had something similar, or I was too stupid to figure out how to do it. The workflow I described is using windows/linux, on macOS it's even more cumbersome (since one needs to select all photos in a folder before previewing them).

Do you have any recommendations for an app that has functionality like this, or if not, on how I can make my workflow better?

Thanks

Hey! I’ve been trying lately to get rid of big platforms from my life. One part of it is that I usually buy ebooks/audiobooks from apple, Amazon or google, however I’m then also forced to use their reading app, which is a vendor lock-in I’m not comfortable with.

I know there are plenty of ebook readers out there, but I’m trying to find

1. A store where I can buy ebooks that can be opened in a ebook reader of my choice.
2. A way to then sync my progress between phone and laptop. I have nextcloud setup, so if I can make use of that then it’s perfect.

Anyone here got any tips?

So... a friend did this for me a long time ago, but I've replaced my computer since then, and I don't know how to do it for myself.

I know how to find the MAME executable. I don't know whether I need to download the .exe file or the .zip file, but I assume the .exe file is the better option.

I know how to run an executable file, and I'm assuming it installs itself.

I know how to find a copy of the antique video game I want.

However...

The .zip file I download for the game contains a lot of files with names like "a26-13.109" - and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with those, to get them inside the MAME and make the game playable.

I'm running Windows 10 on a 64-bit operating system, if that's relevant.

Is anyone feeling charitable and willing to help someone who's not computer literate to do this?

I used to work in IT but left the field in 2018, so I'm not as up to date as I used to be on things. I'm looking for a new laptop to use for work (primarily word processing and web browsing), ideally something portable with a good sized screen (larger than 13"). I've had a Dell G5 for the last five years because I thought I'd do more gaming on it when I bought it, but it's largely just been a heavy brick in my backpack on travel.

Back in the mid 2010s, I recommended Lenovos to everyone who would listen, but I fell out of love with them toward the end of my IT career when the build quality seemed to be rapidly declining. I haven't really touched them recently, but my dad loves his Lenovo Ideapad Pro.

Honestly, something similar to a Dell Latitude might be what I'm looking for, but I'm open to any recommendations. I need a responsive keyboard and clickable trackpad. Bonus points if there's somehow a laptop out there that has a nub!

ETA: Not looking for a macbook -- will be running Windows!

I've read nice things about Amazon's S3. There are some compatible implementations from other major vendors like Google and Cloudflare. There are projects that automatically back up and replicate a sqlite database using S3. Some people have backed up Google Photos to S3.

But I've never used any of them. What would be a good way to get started? Amazon or another vendor? (And does this make sense at all?)

I'll start by saying that there's nothing wrong with how VirtualHere functions. I have used it for a couple years on my nvidia shield while streaming games from my pc and it's perfect for what I need. The problem I have encountered is that I'm no longer using the shield and have transitioned my entire setup to use a raspberry pi 4 instead because the shields wifi becoming more unstable with every update nvidia pushes.

I would love to continue just using VirtualHere, but I've just learned that the developer does not allow a license transfer for any reason so my $50 license is completely useless now that the shield is gone. Knowing that the license is non-transferable makes me unlikely to ever spend money on it again because I cannot guarantee how long these devices will last and $50 is far too steep for a single device private use license on any software. My primary use case is with a moonlight/sunshine setup which can handle the controller inputs just fine after a little bit of input file tinkering.

The things I absolutely cannot figure out how to make work without VirtualHere is a Dolphin bar that is used for Wii/WiiU games and the gamecube controller to usb adapters. I've seen people mention using usbip, but I haven't been able to find any reasonable explanation or documentation on how to actually use usbip without fully configuring it every time the device reboots.

I'm not against the idea of a more manual setup. I just need something that once it's configured will allow passthrough of any usb device from a raspberry pi to a windows machine and not charge me a fortune every time I need to swap hardware in the future. I'd be willing to pay for similar software if it was a little more reasonably priced for what I'm doing.

Hi everyone — I am trying to get a job in web development after a decade in a mostly unrelated field.

I am looking for ideas and tips to create a portfolio to send with applications. All of the websites I worked on ages ago have been taken offline or redesigned by someone else. I do have a website I created for my music, but it’s just vanilla HTML. I also have a personal website which is really the only thing I have to show.

I know HTML/CSS quite well, but that’s basically it. I’ve worked with WordPress for years but only just recently began learning enough PHP to do anything custom. I don’t really know Javascript much at all.

I have quite a few paid courses through Udemy for all these different areas but even as I have completed them, I don’t feel confident in knowledge of the different languages. These courses nearly always come with projects that the students create with the instructor. Should I use these as part of my portfolio? For some reason I never felt right doing that, since I didn’t build it myself.

So I guess I’m curious (if any of you are web developers) if you have suggestions for how to fill out a portfolio without any previous work examples.

Side note: I wasn’t sure how to word the title or my question particularly well so please edit it more clearly, Those Who Can Edit.

edit: thank you to everyone who took the time to reply to this. it’s all been very helpful and i appreciate everyone’s input immensely!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I recently looked around at VPS pricing on DigitialOcean, Linode and Vultr. Everything seems much higher than I'd expect - way over the inflation rate. It looks like a 2 core 8GB VPS is being priced between $45 and $60 per month. Maybe I don't remember correctly but I recall being able to get 2 core VMs around $20 a few years ago!

I tried to use Gnus to set up some rss feeds about a year ago, and I became more than frustrated: I was actually confused.

So here are a couple questions I don't even understand where to ask or whether they're relevant or being asked in the right way:

Are most newsgroups mirrored? And along those lines, is there one particular newsgroup server that would be sufficient for most users?

Can I post to a newsgroup in the same way I would post to a mailing list: send an email somewhere? Where do I send that?

What even is NNTP? Someone literally sent me the spec for the protocol, but I don't think they actually wanted to be helpful: I felt like they were putting me down and intentionally not answering while giving the appearance of being helpful. Is it actually something I need to understand to use Gnus effectively?

If you're familiar with newsgroups, I would surely appreciate your knowledge.

Howdy Tildes wizards.

I decided to have a looksy at Stable Diffusion on my local computer (Manjaro, AMD 7500x CPU, 32GB) using Easy Diffusion. I've gotten my head around the basics and grabbed MidJourney V4 LLM, and now I'm learning how to prompt.

So far I've generated some cool cyberpunk cyborg things, landscapes, etc. One of the things I wanted to use Stable Diffusion for is generating silhouettes. Sounds weird, I know, but they're great to use with decal and vinyl printing for my wife's business.

Any ideas on ways to do silhouette generation?

Next is, what's good to read to learn about model types and what all of the settings really do?

I'm ordering a GPU (3060) to improve the horrendous render times, so don't worry about the under powered rig, I'm still in toy mode.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I'm curious on how to get started in self hosting. I have computer experience, being an Android Developer, but I hardly have experience in Linux and backend/networking work.

I've been wanting to start up a Plex/Jellyfin server for a while, and I have an old system sitting around with a Ryzen 1700 with a graphics card in there as well that's been begging for attention, and maybe I can throw on a Minecraft server in there as well. Since I travel a bunch, it would be nice too to be able to access my media for when I'm traveling, or to let my parents or friends access some shows if they so desire!

What I'm worried about is exposing my network to the internet basically. I used to run a Minecraft server with port forwarding and such on a personal computer but now I'm realizing that that's probably a bit unsafe lol.

Basically, are there any guides that I can look at, or any of your own experiences that could potentially help me or anyone who's interested?

I'm looking at starting to do a PC build and I'm a bit lost on which way to go CPU wise.

Proposed use case: linux, some gaming (usually older games), possibly trying to learn home lab/self hosting types of things probably in a VM but nothing really heavy. I do want to run Starfield when it comes out and maybe be able to try VR some time in the future.

I'd like to have a bit of a future proof system while getting value for my money, as in I'd like to spend less but I will spend more if it matters. This is where I'm sort of getting lost.

I tend to lean towards Intel because VM's and multitasking should work better (I think) but people seem to believe that AMD is better bang for the buck?

I feel like I'm likely not going to swap CPU's, but RAM, GPU, and storage are easy to swap so I'm not to worried.

I know medium has an RSS feed that can be accessed by adding /feed/ before the username/publication name but it's truncated if the publication has a paywall. I've been looking for a way to get the full-text feed but could not find a solution, it looks like it adds a parameter to the link in the rss feed, similar to ?source=rss-d00bc5bb7954------2 but I can't figure out how to remove it. any ideas ?

I have a server running Unraid at home. I have ~20 docker containers running at the moment with almost all of them only available within my local network. I just stood up an instance of Seafile on the server to act as a google drive replacement. Still in the early test phase before I commit to throwing important stuff on there. I have my domain proxied through Cloudflare so none of my local ports are exposed to the internet. Seafille has complicated passwords set for admin and user accounts (generated with Bitwarden, hot damn I love that app). I also enabled 2FA on each account. I know that I can further clamp it down using some of Cloudflare's extra access controls but in my admittedly limited experience, those all cause issues getting an app to authenticate with the service. Web apps don't have this issue of course.

So am I ok with this setup? I can encrypt the data before uploading easily as it's a built in feature of Seafile. Or would it be better to just run with local only and run a VPN to access when I'm outside?

I figure just about any effort along these lines I trust more than Google with my data. But I may be overconfident in that perhaps. I'm still learning the ropes with Linux and self-hosting in general.

I mean this in the sense of "I find a file on a website that I want to have download directly to my laptop without having to download to my phone and then transfer from my phone to my laptop?"

Something I can use in the case "ope that's an interesting file that I'll forget about before I'm at my laptop"

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

So I have an old MacBook Pro (mid-2014) Core i5 which I've just installed Ubuntu 22.04.2 on. Most things are working fine but the screen randomly flickers and then goes black and then after varying lengths of time will pop back on again. I've been googling around and found lots of instances of similar graphics glitches but can't quite find a solution.

Any suggestions?

As a not quite "old man" I was wondering how many former BBS sysops are here?

In the early-mid 90s, I used to run a single line PCBoard powered hobby BBS and dabble in making PPEs (PCBoards programming language for plug ins/mods). I also help friends set up SpitFire, Searchlight, Synchronet, WWIV and Aftershock (total PITAs from what I remember)--basically anything free, crackable or unlimited trial.

Since I was the only sysop that ran PCBoard I was invited to become an officer in our local User Group to run their whopping 3 line BBS and give classes (that was quite the technological achievement back then). That is something I truly do miss. I was, by far, the youngest member of the User Group (your average member probably had grandkids my age) but it was a meritocracy.

People seemed eager to learn and share information as they found it. Before computers, 3d cards and the internet was ubiquitous, you were automatically accepted into a knowing crowd if you put in the effort/time to join a BBS, forum or (early) MMO. Exclusion brought inclusion, if that makes sense. If you torched your reputation by acting like a jackass it was difficult to move on like a locust to another area.

So many stories. So many high jinks that would be deemed illegal today, lol.

Everything that is old, is new again.

I'm getting a lot of BBS vibes in the aftermath of Rexxit. The slower pace of Tildes reminds me so much of the BBS forums (while I know Tildes isn't new, it is growing in popularity in the aftermath.) Even the Fediverse harkens back to the days of early BBS synch nets.

Now if only I could find a modern remake of Tradwars 2002.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Where do you find volunteers to help with open source projects? Such as:

• https://www.codeshelter.co
• https://hacktoberfest.com
• https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

For example, with KeenWrite, I'm looking for help help with a specific feature that could be applicable to a wide audience (i.e., academia and technical writers). The lion's share of the effort for cross-references would be an extension or change to the flexmark-java library: parsing a de facto standard cross-reference syntax, rather than direct changes to my text editor.

Hey y’all. Recently picked up a Cyberpower prebuilt. Looking to install a Linux distro on it for gaming. Currently have Ubuntu on my laptop, so I’m not a total noob, but my experience is still low. Not a big fan of having to use the terminal. Any distros y’all would recommend? Am leaning toward Pop_OS or SteamOS.

I'm starting grad school in neuroscience/biomedical engineering soon, and one of my most dreaded parts of it is inevitably having to develop Matlab code. I understand why people use it -- it's arguably best in class at a lot of engineering tasks, and the matrix-first approach of the language makes it very fast to prototype things if you think like a mathematician/engineer.

However, the language also seems to actively discourage good software practices, and many frequently used scientific projects have atrocious code. Think python dependency management is bad? How about NO DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT? Yes, that's right, the way you share code in matlab is by importing collections of loose files from github/matlab file exchange. The Matlab neuroimaging code that I have worked has also frequently abused the workspace to share state implicitly between scripts, which makes the code virtually incomprehensible. Instead of using packages to create namespaces, common practice is give function names a prefix and import them into the global namespace.

I know there's multiple large companies that rely on Matlab for their products, so it must be doable; I just haven't seen it for myself yet.

Do you guys have any experience developing in Matlab, and if so, are there any good resources to learn how to build robust software in it? What are some open source projects that have good Matlab code?

I cannot push nor pull to/from my local repo to/from my remote. I get the message "Your branch and 'origin/main' have diverged", etc.

I will be able to fix it, I'm already in the process of refreshing my memory on how to rebase this cleanly.

But ... I am the only person working on this. I have only one local and one central/remote repository. And I never made a branch.

It's just me, working on one computer, right here ... make a few commits locally, then push 'em ... make a few commits locally, then push 'em. That is my entire workflow.

How in the hell did I end up with "my branch" (???) and the origin/main branch being in conflict with each other?

Any Git gurus care to take a stab at this?

Thanks in advance.

Edit, more info:

I am guessing here, but for awhile I was working in a VM on my local machine ... but Android SDK is too much of a resource hog, so I committed and pushed everything on the VM, shut it down, and then pulled latest down to my actual machine ... or at least, that's how I remember it.

My working theory is that, somehow, I screwed up that "switching between machines" process, although, so far, no clue as to how/why I did.

Theory #2 is that Android SDK did something sneaky/stupid behind the scenes -- my last several commits have been done through the Android Studio IDE, not directly in the terminal.

Last Edit:

D'oh!

Found it. I made a couple of "quick changes" to the project's README.md file directly in the remote forge, and that's what screwed me up.

The history of the web is littered with with many a dead image/video hosting service. Echos of their existence plague older forums in the form of broken links and images. It seems like they all follow the same path, starting up as the new "simple" service that just hosts images, no fuss. But then as interest grows, so do costs, and the service owners have to scramble to monetize. Generally this is done by stuffing the place full of ads until everyone leaves. Alternatively the owners are stubborn and stick to their guns, until they inevitably have to shut down due to drowning in costs. When they do shut down, millions of assets are lost and the graveyard of broken images across the web grows some more.

https://gfycat.com/ is the latest notable victim of this.

With all the recent social media turmoil, there as been lots of exploration of alternative sites, and all of them have to overcome the problem of hosting media in one way or another.

Tildes obviously does this by avoiding it entirely which, while a very effective solution, is just handballing the problem elsewhere. Users will still want to post images and videos but they will just have to find alternative hosts. Over time those hosts will die and Tildes posts will be filled with dead links.

Mastodon has similar problems,the biggest cost of hosting a mastodon instance is the storage and bandwidth required to facilitate media posts. And there's a real danger of an instance incurring high costs if a particular post becomes popular and is hotlinked on a big centralised social media site.

It seems like a really tricky problem to solve, something peer-to-peer could sort of solve the costs created by traffic peaks but has problems when there is many small files viewed by few individuals each.

Are there any other solutions out there? Web3, IPFS? Or is it just not that much of a problem, do we accept that media on the web is ephemeral and will be lost after a while?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Self-hosting has been a rabbit hole of wonder that I've explored and delved into over these past few months. I'm curious to hear what others use it for, what apps they love, and their rationale for doing so?

I'll go first.

First, in terms of rationale, this is a wonderful article that I think is worth checking out that encapsulates much my of ethos about pursuing self-hosting.

https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting

The TL;DR is that we no longer have control over the things that we 'own' digitally for these massive cloud companies. For instance the songs / artists you listen to on Spotify may suddenly and unexpectedly become unavailable, certain things (most recently podcasts) may be forced upon you in unpleasant ways. Having complete control of your digital data is a very liberating feeling.

In terms of apps:

Hyperbackup - I use a synology NAS, so hyperbackup has been wonderful and use both external HD's and a cloud interface to create encrypted backups of everything which gives me peace of mind.

Plex - One of my most used apps, being able to stream anything remotely has been a dream. Plexamp has given me back control of my music library in a way I never thought I would have.

Tautulli - Great for more informatics on my plex usage

Calibre / Calibreweb - Phenomenal for keeping track of my book collections

PiHole - Ads be gone!

*Arr apps - Specifically Sonarr/Prowlarr/Radarr, really like Overseerr for an interface tying everything together

Daily Notes - A clean interface for keeping regular notes

Some things that I'm not currently self-hosting but would love to hear if others are using alternatives...

Instapaper - I know there are a few similar FOSS apps out there but haven't found one as convenient and well laid out

TickTick - To do app, but similarly haven't found a FOSS alternative that was as robust and nice to use

OneNote

So, I'm using Arch i3wm. I have multiple copies of my /home/username (I am the sole user), and I have a "Spare" drive with media, games, and other goodies, some of which are also stored on partitions on the m.2 in question, but they have backups.

And the reason I ask this question is because while I've had my m.2 fail at the end of '21 (I didn't even know that was a thing, but it barely lasted a year, and things are acting shoddy now... though the original failed without a warning), I just bought a second m.2 for my games. I guess I could swap most of the whole thing over, but I know the boot partition is easier just rebuilt from scratch... which I had to do last week.

Ultimately, what's making me suspicious is when I upgraded to the new drive and unplugged all my non-m.2 satas, I also added some memory and a new power supply. But then after the upgrade (Monday of last week, so the 5th), the system wouldn't boot up. I used a usb to troubleshoot and my /boot partition was apparently no gouda. I redid that, and everything was fine... until this week. Then my new Games partition (basically the new drive) failed fsck and it got stuck in a boot loop on Tuesday. I could boot emergency to root, but not skip the fsck and keep the Games disk auto mounted (I know I changed something to randomize fsck on bootup, but that's something I'm still kinda looking into how I managed...), so I just removed it from my fstab and it booted fine. For two times. I just manually mounted the drive, all was great, then my SO sent me a screenshot today while I was at work stating that my / partition (on the older m.2) apparently rebooted because it bypassed my screen lock, and was stating EXT4-fs error, reading directory lblock:0 and whatnot.

So, that's my history on what's going on, and if anyone can offer any advice [mostly] on the backup stuff, though as I said, /home and the important tangible stuff is saved, but if you also have any input on something more than I suspect the drive is failing (since the /boot partition and now the / partition are crapping out), please feel free to share.

(Also, thanks for letting me in. This is what I'd typically post on reddit and probably have to repost 10 times depending on the sub to get the right keywords and tags and yes, I already searched the internet but my search will not match yours... sigh)

How does Mullvad removing port forwarding affect an Unraid setup using deluge-vpn container?

I don’t access my server from outside my network and just use a basic binhex deluge-vpn docker setup. Any issues I’ll have here?

Currently out of town and won’t be back until after this change happens tomorrow. Curious what to expect when I'm back home.

Hi
Android Mozilla browsers with access to about:config.
Examples are...
Firefox Beta
and
Firefox Nightly

Back in the day there were lots of config tweaks for PC Firefox.
But there's not much config information about Android Firefox.

I found these two posts on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/11shvus/fixing_performance_problems_in_firefox_on_android/

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1278zp5/improving_performance_in_firefox_android_part_ii/

Does anybody here have other about:config suggestions?

Been lurking for a week on tildes now and I am really glad this place exists. The crow here is exactly what I have been missing on Reddit for a while now.

Having said that, the whole Reddit situation has some-what motivated me to get the balls rolling on an idea that I have had for a while and I am looking for advice on the same.

I have often heard this phrase "Learn programming by building" but whenever I dive in to the resources, I fall flat due to the information overload and the general abstractness that the field has (I appreciate abstractness but here it demotivates me) and I have never found a proper resource that I could follow to actually build something instead of just blindly following tutorials and playing with them.

So, my question is how do I translate "learn by building a project" into a practical framework.

I know of 100 days of swift and I really like that approach however I don't think I want to start with swift or build an iOS app right now.

For most of my life, I've been a hobbyist programmer. From Qbasic to Python and JavaScript. I've always wanted to create an Android app, really just for me, just to do it. It's a bucket list thing.

Can you give me a book or a website guide that is up to date and complete but not 100,000 pages long that could help me get it done? A book would be preferred! I just want to cross this off my list!

I have to preface this question with a disclaimer that I am an eager learner of Linux and servers in general, but I'm still a beginner and often run into roadblocks.

Current setup:

• Raspberry Pi 3 with Adguard Home acting as primary DNS
• unRAID server with Adguard Home acting as secondary DNS
• About a dozen other containers running on same server
• DHCP is handled by my router

Goal:

• provide local DNS names for the containers running in unRAID so I don't have to enter IP:Port (e.g, calibre.local) which also has the side benefit saving the various username/password combos into Bitwarden with an actual domain attached to it instead of 14 occurrences of 192.168.x.x

Additional info:

I had PiHole running on the Pi before as the primary and only DNS previously. And I seem to recall you could put IP:Port as a custom DNS and have it resolve. AGH does have a feature for DNS Rewrites but it does not allow for port numbers, IPs only. I switched to AGH because it seems to be more effective at blocking ads, which is likely more a function of the provided DNS blocklists out of the box as opposed to what I was doing in Pihole. I would prefer to stick with AGH for adblocking/DNS if possible.

I looked into just modifying host files on the main computers I touch these apps from, but again, can't include port. What is a good solution for this? Preferably something approachable for a newb like me.

You could use any SQL database to create a few tables, insert some data, and do queries, while ignoring anything vendor-specific. But Postgres has a lot of other features and many extensions. What do you recommend checking out beyond the basics?

I've used a lot of databases, but it's been many years, so I assume things have changed quite a bit. I skimmed a few PostgreSQL release notes and learned that there's now a MERGE statement that looks pretty handy. (It's standard SQL.) And from Neon's list of supported extensions, the plv8 extension caught my eye. It would let me write stored procedures in JavaScript. Does anyone use that? Do you use stored procedures at all?

I wonder what Tildes uses?

(To keep discussion organized, please write about one feature per top-level comment.)

Hey folks, looking for recommendations. What's your go to word processor on Ubuntu? (EDIT: For regular writing, not a text editor for coding.) I haven't been the biggest fan of Libre office tbh (please don't hate me...) There were just several bugs in Writer that made it unusable for me. I'm curious about alternatives. I read that WPS office is on ubuntu, but I've always found it to run kind of slow (however, my experience was on Windows.).

I don't need a lot of fancy utilities, but would enjoy something a little more beautiful than notepad++ :) My biggest concern is just that it's a stable software. I'm OK with glitches or UI bugs, just nothing that's going to crash and burn and corrupt my work. (I mention this because there are several newer word processors made by single developers, and I'm a little weary to use them because I don't genuinely know how stable the software is.) I'm also not a fan of software that saves in some special format where you rely on that software to open it (or have to go through hoops to convert it.)

Any recommends?

EDIT: I'm new to Ubuntu, in case it makes a difference.

Pretty much, the title.

I have been coding professionally for over 2 decades, been using Git for almost as long ... and to this day, it still feels alien and uncomfortable to use. I keep feeling like I am relearning it all over again. I would really like to find some kind of different resource that helps me to make Git "stick" in my brain, and become more intuitive. Maybe that's just not possible, but I keep hoping.

Meanwhile, my roommate is just starting her journey into programming, and her class just started teaching Git ... and I'm eavesdropping a bit, and they're teaching it okay, but I'm sure there are better tutorials out there for a newcomer.

I am aware of -- and currently reading my way through -- both this recent tildes post and the various tutorials mentioned in it. But I am looking for other recommendations, as well ... and I bet I'm not the only one.

Thanx in advance.

I'm currently using Navidrome to self-host my music collection, while using DSub to listen on-the-go.

This works very well for most genres, except for the bulk of my music which is classical music. This presents its own host of problems pertaining to cataloguing and using metadata, since there are often multiple recordings of the same musical composition, recorded by multiple conductors with different orchestras and/or soloists. There may also be different instrumental arrangements of the same musical piece. Merely sorting by "Artist" is therefore quite unsatisfactory in this scenario.

Some streaming services have come up with quite satisfying solutions in my experience (notably Apple Music Classical and Idagio), but I am not sure how to go about listening to my own self-hosted classical music.

Is anybody here on Tildes familiar with this organizational problem? I would be very eager to hear how you have tackled this. Is there any self-hosted software more suitable to cataloguing musical collections with extensive metadata?

I use Github and Netlify to run some simple websites for free. It works well. However, I've been thinking of experimenting with a database-backed website for fun and Netlify doesn't have any persistence.

What's a good way to do this that scales to zero when nobody's using it? I want to be able to forget about it entirely for months or years at a time. When someone visits, it should start up and run on demand without costing me $20 a month on standby.

Back in the day, I used Google App Engine for this. I learned a lot of datastore tricks to get around its poor latency, but I'm lazy and don't want to do that anymore. I'm pretty sure I want a SQL database and full text search. Either sqlite or Postgres would do, but I doubt there's a cheap enough way to run Postgres.

Litestream looks interesting and so does LiteFS, except that it's pre-1.0 and I don't know what changes fly.io will make that I have to keep up with. If I used Litestream, I'd have to figure out how to run it and where to store the replication logs.

Edit: one nice-to-have is being able to easily dump the database and run it locally or on another cloud provider. (I don't anticipate it getting so big that it's impractical.)

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

The original IBM 360 had a 24-bit address space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360

Microprocessors of the golden age of home computing (Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore 64, CP/M machines based on the 8080 and Z80) usually had a 16-bit address space, the 8086/8088 was a bit of an exception because it had a segmentation scheme to access 1 MB. (People thought it was awkward but I liked programming it in assembly language and Turbo Pascal) I remember the PDP-11 minicomputer having a 16-bit address space for user programs as well, the machine as a whole could be a lot bigger but an individual logged into it had access to a virtual "home computer" that ran BASIC and all.

24-bit was a natural evolution and by the late 1980s you started to see 24-bit chips like the 80286 (PC AT) the 65C816 (Apple IIgs, Ninteno SNES), the eZ80 and such. Even the bigger AVR8 processors (I love AVR8 assembly) can have more than 64kb of program memory (flash, read-only in operation) so they use 24-bit addresses for program memory.

In my mind we never saw a product of this generation that really took advantage of the address space, the 80286 in particular was called "brain damaged" by Bill Gates and operating systems struggled to exploit it. My take is that most of the chips of that generation were flawed in one way or another and were pretty quickly washed away by 32-bit machines when they became affordable in the early 1990s.

For an example of the difficulties, there is this project to make a retrocomputer that is a bit better than anything we had in the 1980s,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oYcu43N-lw

they are using the 65C816 but not taking advantage of the 24-bit nature. Instead there is a simple bank switching scheme which I think they thought would be easier to program and probably faster. The 65C816 just doesn't have enough registers and addressing modes for it to be really easy to work with far pointers.

So my question is, if I am a hobbyist who wants to revive the 24-bit generation and I want to have easy access to a 16MB address space, is there some CPU better that doesn't suck? I'd be happy with a CPU that doesn't have virtual memory or other facilities for an advanced operating system (write everything in "real mode") but something that supports an OS would be interesting too. Any ideas?

We are small company and have utilized COM+ on the server for the last 20 years. Strictly Windows and all LAN based communication. We are rewriting in c#. What are some alternatives that I can look in to that may be better in terms of speed or management for COM+?