raboof @raboof@merveilles.town

Hi there!

I've been on the fediverse since 2018, but recently moved into @merveilles.town, so I guess it's time for a new #introduction!

I'm a #software developer from #Deventer, the #Netherlands. I love #opensource, #NixOS, @reproducible_builds, maintain a #tiling #x11 #windowmanager @notion and help organize @mch2021. I'm part of @hack42 and work on #akka for Lightbend.

Looking forward to meeting all you creative people! Feel free to get in touch, both public and private.

Software is like recipes.

Facebook etc is like McDonalds: the recipes are designed to be cheap to produce and addictive so you keep coming back, but not good for YOU.

Commercial software is like restaurants: it varies wildly, and your favourite popular restaurant may disappear unexpectedly.

Open source is like home-cooked meals: you can know exactly what's in there and share the recipes freely. Some recipes are hard to pull off, but some are actually more convenient than going out to eat.

Pretty cool set of illustrations, free to use (with attribution - but be careful: unlike CC BY-SA, not free to re-distribute)

https://storyset.com/

The English 'Plumber' and the Dutch 'Loodgieter' may not seem related at first glance, but in fact 'lood' means 'lead' and 'Plumber' is derived from 'Plumbum', Latin for lead.

Extra funny since nowadays they will seldomly use lead anymore.

One of the #NixOS superpowers is that you can take a package, point the 'src' field to another (possibly local) fork of the project, and build that version - for 'direct' use, but also using it in 'downstream' projects.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for packages created from 'secondary' sources like hackage, npmjs.com or pypi.

It's good to have options, and undoubtedly those packages were much easier to create, but I hope we'll still try to make 'building from the actual source' the norm.

I've started importing my banking data using https://github.com/cantino/reckon which seems nice enough.

I can already quickly browse the result with hledger-web (https://hledger.org/hledger-web.html), though I'm still on the market for a nice visualisation that supports interactively adapting the reporting period, breaking out my expenses in their respective sub-accounts (treemap?) and budgeting.

I'd like to have a nice overview of my finances, but was never blown away by any of the open-source tools in this space: there are many, but I never felt too comfortable committing to any particular one.

Happy to see many (larger and smaller) tools now seem to be converging on a shared 'ledger' format under the banner of #plaintextaccounting (https://plaintextaccounting.org/).

The "Branch, (Propose, Review)+, Merge" model is the bread and butter of collaboration on source code.

I think this would be super powerful for collaboration among non-geeks as well, for example on text content.

Anyone aware of good tools to make this model pleasant to use for people with a copywriting background rather than a coding one?

Used the #fish shell for a while. The 'live suggestions' feature is neat but not all that useful in practice IMO. The non-bash-compatible syntax is a bummer, as is the lack of incremental history search.

It did strike me how much faster it starts up compared to #zsh (with oh-my-zsh) - perhaps immaterial but 'feels nice'.

In search of the 'best of both worlds', I'm now using zsh without oh-my-zsh, but with the agnoster theme (which needed a small tweak as described at https://github.com/agnoster/agnoster-zsh-theme/issues/144).

apparently it was a failure in Transylvania that rippled through

https://www.rfi.ro/social-129284-pana-de-curent-aproape-toata-transilvania-transelectrica-au-fost-probleme-si-alte-tari

So... apparently we had a #netsplit in the #europe #power network? Almost causing a large-scale #blackout ?

I'm a total n00b when it comes to these kinds of things, but it sounds fascinating!

https://www.netzfrequenz.info/