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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 14th, 2023

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  • As a dev with roughly 10 years (or more depending on how you count) of experience, I would have done the same. Beyond maintaining self respect, I feel like we have a duty to each other to ensure companies that treat candidates like this have the hardest time possible finding someone willing to put up with it. I don’t even entertain companies that won’t let me use my choice of distro - especially considering I’m web UI focused.


  • If you tried BlueStacks and androidstudio and those don’t work, and you don’t have access to an old android device, then you could try something like BrowserStack - I’ve occasionally used them to test websites in specific combinations of OS and browser version on supposedly real devices. They have an option to test android apps, and you may be able to transfer your apk or paste in a share link to try it out there.

    I think they give you 30 minutes free, but I haven’t tried the app testing (since I’m a web dev) so idk if it would be excluded from the sign up bonus. The price for a single freelancer is $19 month to month.





  • I mean you’re not wrong it’s true to a degree, but especially in my parents case, they hardly store anything on the computer so the disk usage hardly registers on the pros and cons. If it provides convenience then it’s whatever. They’re still on an obsolete elementaryos but flatpak is still keeping them up to date until I can get around to visiting them again. If I understand how it works on debianland once a major version goes EOL, they’d be using backports which might not have the latest version right?


  • I did this for my parents, context: borderline elderly, late 60s, use their laptops for checking email, reading articles, and watching youtube. I visit every year or so and usually end up doing a little maintenance.

    Probably my main tips are:

    • Don’t pick elementary like I did years ago, I learned there’s no upgrade path between major versions and that’s been a pain
    • I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
    • Set up some form of remote access, I’ve used teamviewer but in hindsight it would be nice to have WG to SSH in
    • If I were doing it again today, I would probably use a universal blue spin for the atomic updates
    • With my parents’ level of computer experience, as long as there’s a firefox icon in the dock then they’re right at home

    Honestly there isn’t much to it, especially if they’re not tech savvy and aren’t doing anything complex. All you have to do is make sure familiar app icons are where they expect and that they know how to use the window decorations / DE. My only pain has been having to do a bunch of updates when I visit, so next time I’ll swap them to fedora and set up automatic atomic updates. Besides that, everything keeps chugging along because they’re not making any changes to the system when I’m not there.









  • My homelab has been mostly on autopilot for a while. Synology 6 bay running most lighter weight docker stuff (arrstack, immich, etc) and an Intel nuc running heavy stuff (quicksync transcodes for Plex+jf, ollama). Both connected to digitalocean via WG for reverse proxy due to CGNAT.

    I had my router SSD either die or get corrupted this past week, haven’t looked much at the old SSD besides trying to extract the config off of it. I ended up just fresh installing opnsense because I didnt have any recent backups (my Synology and nuc back up to rsync.net, but I haven’t gotten around to automated backups for my router since it’s basically a plain config, and my cloud reverse proxy which is just a basic docker compose + small haproxy config). Luckily my homelab reaching out to the cloud reverse proxy means there’s basically no important config on my router anymore, they just need DHCP and a connection.

    Besides that the arrstack just chugs along on its own.

    I recently figured out I can load jellyfin playback URLs into vrchat video players, either direct stream or through the transcoding pipeline as an m3u8 that live transcodes based on the url parameters you set. This is great because the way watch parties in VRChat works is that everyone in an instance loads the same URL pasted into media players and syncs the playback. That means you need to have a publicly accessible url (preferably with a token of some sort) that can be loaded by an arbitrary number of unique IP addresses simultaneously, which I don’t think is doable with Plex.

    I’m now working on a little web app to let me log into Jellyfin, search/browse media, and generate the links with arbitrary or pre-set transcode settings for easy copy/pasting into VRChat. The reason it’s needed is that Jellyfin only provides the original file without transcoding when you use the “copy stream” option, so I believe the only way to get a transcoded stream url currently is to set the web interface to specific settings and grab the URL from the network. But that doesn’t let you set arbitrary stuff like codecs and subtitle burn in and overriding what it thinks you support. So a simple app to construct the URL will make VRChat watch parties a lot easier.