I was reading this thread thinking, “this isn’t the time to recommend NixOS that’s not what OP asked about.” But if you’re using Ansible this way NixOS might be a good fit for you. It’s got the advantages of the other immutable distros with the added feature of managing everything through a declarative configuration.

This is a good thread to have today. This is some encouraging news!

4k for me since my primary use case is programming, and I want to be able to get a lot of sharply-rendered text on the screen at once. I managed to get a 2160 ultrawide that does 72 Hz at least. But I do miss 120 Hz.

Nice! Thanks!

I’d rather listen to Raditude than Pinkerton…

I lived in Grenada for a couple of years. It’s a chill, safe place. I had my family there and we always felt safe, as long as we kept an eye out for speeding buses when crossing the street. It certainly checks the boxes you specified. Night life is limited. I’m planning to go back for a vacation in February.

As I recall there is a time of year that gets very windy. I think that’s in winter, but my memory is fuzzy. The internet says February is the windiest, and that matches some of my memories. In any case it’s always warm. I wouldn’t worry about rain. That’s tapered off by December. If it does rain it’s a warm rain, and it’s likely to come in short showers so I don’t think you’d be stuck inside all day.

If you want to be in walking distance to amenities I’d recommend staying near Grand Anse. You can also get public buses there. (They are actually vans.) There are resorts close to the airport, but in those places you’d be dependent on taxis to get away from the resort - which might be fine if you want to be somewhere quieter.

It looks like there is a playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-cwa6ZvflaDvviwm8JqO6hZ9W-fhG48c&si=SLCAv2EqJ_jRC9fj

When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.

What I’m hearing is shepherds’ pie, but spherical

I made a rendering of a lighthouse on the Dark Ocean in 3D Studio Max. Or I guess it would be better called a darkhouse. Unfortunately that image is lost to time.

I enjoyed Digimon as a teenager. I never got any cards. However I did make a liiiittle fan art.

Probably not very similar, but Git Butler is very interesting. It adds its own layer of management so that you can have multiple branches “applied” to your working tree simultaneously. It’s helpful when you have multiple changes that should go into different branches, and some that shouldn’t be committed - it has a system of lanes that help keep track of all that. Or you can test how changes from two branches interact.

Last time I used it, maybe 6 months ago, it was rough around the edges so I didn’t stick with it. But they’ve done lots of work since then so I’m thinking of giving it another go. It is (last I checked) an all-in tool. When you’re using Butler on a project you probably won’t be able to use other git tools.

I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.

Yes, there’s a good example. Ansible would make more sense if its configuration language was Nix…

Oh, thanks for calling that out. I think I may have mixed up some of the frustrations I experienced at an old job.

I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like Terraform and Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I’d like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.

There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say true and false, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.

The equation for force of gravity is F = GMm / r² where

• G is the gravitational constant
• M is the mass of the planet
• m is the mass of the object being weighed
• r is the radius of the planet / distance between the centers of mass of two objects

The equation shows that gravity scales linearly with mass, and scales inversely with the square of distance. The article says K2-18 b is 8.6 times Earth’s mass, and 2.6 times Earth’s radius. So the weight of a 100 kg mass would be:

F = 100 × 8.6 / (2.6)²

which works out to a weight of about 127 kg, or 1.27 times heavier.

NixOS and Home Manager config both ways to get rid of the same thing

I use metric temperature when I talk to my kids. Now they give me a hard time when I give them a Fahrenheit value! Keeps me honest I guess. I’ve also got my oldest using a 24 hour clock.

Stardate, 2024-08-30T06:34:17.993Z