vampatori

vampatori , 11 months ago

Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it… reminds me of early game ARPG’s on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2’s new tempo.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around… which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Don’t roll your own if you can help it, just use a distribution dedicated for use as a thin client. I was co-incidentally just looking into this last week and came across ThinStation which looks really good. There are other distro’s too, search for “linux thin client”.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.

It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.

vampatori , 11 months ago

How do Linux distro’s deal with this? I feel like however that’s done, I’d like node packages to work in a similar way - “package distro’s”. You could have rolling-release, long-term service w/security patches, an application and verification process for being included in a distro, etc.

It wouldn’t eliminate all problems, of course, but could help with several methods of attack, and also help focus communities and reduce duplication of effort.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I’ve been there. My mum struggled to communicate with me when I was in that period of my life, and so she’d buy me various books that she thought - sometimes through title alone - would get through to me. Almost all didn’t. Almost. One did.

Now, I will recommend the book of course, and more, but that’s not the message I want to give you. We’re all different, we’ve all got into this differently, and we all get out of it differently - what started things rolling for me may well do nothing for you. My message more is that the answer is within you, you just can’t see it - it’s hidden from you through no fault of your own; but with the right nudge, the right spark, and you’ll start to see a way out - so dim at first you scarcely recognise it for what it is, but it’ll nag at you, pique your interest, and slowly, ever-so-slowly, the snowball begins to roll.

Form me, the book was The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

I firmly believe that it’s no co-incidence that this book connected with me, it is astonishingly well crafted, the author is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and several of his books, including The Glass Bead Game, “explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.” Reading it is a journey - it takes it’s time to get hold of you, presumably with different elements appealing to different people, then it starts to lead you down a very carefully crafted but almost invisible path to a self-realisation.

A modern author, Matt Haig, wasn’t on my radar when I suffered from depression, but he is a somewhat unusual author in that he writes self-help books and novels. His most famous book The Midnight Library is particularly good, and it was a page-turning read, though I’ve not yet read any of his other titles.

Finally, we’re getting into books that have nothing to do with self-help directly, but I think are just straight-up amazing and recommend them to everyone, but they’re inspirational too:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle’s, of which there are currently only two out of the three books at this time - so you will be left hanging, as we all have been for years - but it’s so very definitely worth it.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a book that spawned a series referred to as the Ender’s Saga or Enderiverse - it’s brillant on its own, but I highly recommend reading Ender’s Shadow too as it really adds to the first book in an unexpected way.

The author Kazuo Ishiguro is a phenomenal writer and also a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books are very diverse, but from my experience so far (I’m not finished reading them all) they have something in common to Hermann Hesse’s books; they carefully take hold of you and pull you down a very carefully constructed path that you can barely see, but you feel like you’ve found the way rather than been led there as you must have been! The Remains of the Day is a period drama, not my cup of tea at all normally, but is brilliant and is so well written it made me realise I’d been missing out reading so much pulp sci-fi/fantasy! Another pick is Klara and the Sun, a sci-fi book set from the perspective of an android, which is incredibly well written and manages to shift your perspective on the story so much with so few words.

And so onto my final recommendation, of where to buy cheap books, but I’m going to be sneaky and tell the story of how my search for cheap books helped me overcome my depression.

Charity shops, aka thrift stores, are great for cheap second-hand books - most places will sell them for less than you can find them online - you just might have to do some hunting and regular visits to find them. Now, depending on where in the world you are, they may or may not exist. If they don’t, find out what happens to used books in your country and hunt them out there… it could be church fund-raisers, libraries, etc. But the act of actually browsing all the books and hunting for something new to read is a great activity in and of itself, if you set the goal that you’ll come back with something new no matter what!

But it was while looking at used books in a local charity shop that I realised they were looking for volunteers. So I started volunteering. At first I just stayed in the back listing books for sale online. Then I was convinced to help someone on the till, then asked to look after the till, then the shop, then eventually a paid position came up and I applied for it and got it.

I didn’t know it then, but that act of volunteering truly set me on my path to wellness. Initially I thought it was because of the objective good I was doing in the world, which would make sense - but looking back it wasn’t that at all. It was a more immediate sense of purpose, of socialising, of talking to people and listening to their problems, of getting social cues wildly wrong and learning, and so on. I was in full control of the rate of social interaction, but they always pushed me that touch more - with encouragement, kindness, and support.

Then one day I realised something strange - I was doing small-talk without thinking. It was almost terrifying, thinking back that I’ve literally just said something I’d not explicitly thought. But then it dawned on me… for the first time in over 20 years, I’d just been myself for a fleeting moment - free from worry and free from over-thinking; no conscious thought process martialling my thoughts and speech. It was in that realisation I knew for sure I’d eventually be OK. It took a long time, many years, and there were some bumps - but my rise to good health was inexorable.

Then the crazy part comes… dealing with emotions again! It had been so long since I last properly felt them, outside of expressing all emotions through negative emotions (i.e. I love my brother so much I would do X if someone did something to him"). I’d say I was actually manic for a while, having really high highs more powerful than the best drugs I’ve ever taken, and really low lows where I thought I was back at the start again. But having since seen my young nephews grow up, I realise now it was just learning how to deal with emotions again. It’s a wild ride, but one to be excited about and look forward to, not fear.

Another element that I really struggled with and slowed my progress was “blame”. Who’s fault was it I was like this? Mine? My parents? This event? That experience? It tore me up for a long time, there’s one thing worse than blaming yourself, and that’s blaming those you love. But over the years I came to see that it was a perfect storm, multiple overlapping waves that in isolation would have been tough but fine, but altogether at just the wrong times, sunk the ship. It was nobody’s fault that all these waves came at just the wrong times, that was chance.

So my advice is to read some of these great books and those others suggest, get involved with your community - there’s so many great causes desperate for your help, and set yourself on the path to find that first glimpse of the dim spark that will inexorably lead to your good health. You might not find it in days, weeks, or even months - but if you keep looking, even after a long break, you will eventually find it.

Good luck!

EDIT: Just to say, the Ender’s Game audiobook is amazing - tons of 80’s sci-fi sound effects!

vampatori , 11 months ago

I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).

vampatori , 11 months ago

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Containers utilise the host’s kernel - which is why there needs to be some hoops to run Linux container on Windows (VM/WSL).

That’s one of the most key differences between VMs and containers. VMs virtualise all the hardware, so you can have a totally different guest and host operating systems; whereas because a container is using the host kernel, it must use the same kind of operating system and accesses the host’s hardware through the kernel.

The big advantage of that approach, over VMs, is that containers are much more lightweight and performant because they don’t have a virtual kernel/hardware/etc. I find its best to think of them as a process wrapper, kind of like chroot for a specific application - you’re just giving the application you’re running a box to run in - but the host OS is still doing the heavy lifting.

vampatori , 11 months ago

If I’m okay with the software (not just trying it out) am I missing out by not using dockers?

No, I think in your use case you’re good. A lot of the key features of containers, such as immutability, reproduceability, scaling, portability, etc. don’t really apply to your use case.

If you reach a point where you find you want a stand-alone linux server, or an auto-reconfiguring reverse proxy to map domains to your services, or something like that - then it starts to have some additional benefit and I’d recommend it.

In fact, using native builds of this software on Windows is probably much more performant.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I hear they have improved performance now though

It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I was recently helping someone working on a mini-project to do a bit of parsing of docker compose files, when I discovered that the docker compose spec is published as JSON Schema here.

I converted that into TypeScript types using JSON Schema to TypeScript. So I can create docker compose config in code and then just export it as yaml - I have a build/deploy script that does this at the end.

But now the great thing is that I can export/import that config, share it between projects, extend configs, mix-in, and so on. I’ve just started doing it and it’s been really nice so far, when I get a chance and it’s stabilised a bit I’m going to tidy it up and share it. But there’s not much I’ve added beyond the above at the moment (just some bits to mix-in arrays, which was what set me off on this whole thing!)

vampatori , 11 months ago

I was using file merging, but one issue I found was that arrays don’t get merged - and since switching to use Traefik (which is great) there are a lot of arrays in the config! And I’ve since started using labels for my own tooling too.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Yes, I love it! Really it’s the MacOS-like “Expose” feature that I find to be essential.

I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I’d really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it’s great.

My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it’s really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
4. Communication - signal, discord, what’s app (ugh), etc.

The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it’s all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

It’s replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they’ve made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

The things I’d really love added to it are:

• Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It’s a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
• Super then Search, I’d like it to filter the windows it’s showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
• Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
• Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
  • Super
  • Sp… (auto-populates Spotify)
  • Tab
  • P… (auto-populates Play/Pause)
  • Return
• Session restoration - it just doesn’t work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don’t. Some go to their correct position/size, some don’t.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I did start with it and use it on a laptop, honestly I think that’s where it shines the most - but I guess the more windows you open the less useful it becomes. I think if there was a way to do the expose-like “view all things at once” (Super key) that worked across all workspaces, I’d be all over them. But as there’s no easy way to live view everything on all workspaces, I just don’t use them.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I just have a static page that I randomly change - you can see mine here. In this case I was testing the idea of having text within an SVG for better scaling from mobile to desktop, and also I’m loving orange and purple at the moment for some reason! Oh, and I was testing automated deployments from CI/CD, so I always use my own base domain with those first tests!

vampatori , 11 months ago

Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)

A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).

But it’s amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn’t really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it’s not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!

In some ways I think Linux has lost that “wow factor” that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I don’t think consolidation, compromise, and coming together in one common direction are the hallmarks of open source at all!

Filesystems, service management/startup, audio output, desktop environment, package formats/management/distribution, programming languages, shell, and so on, and so on - all have many, many options.

Open source is, if nothing else, fractured… it’s about choice, flexibility, and re-inventing the wheel not because it really needs to be re-invented, but because it’s fun to do so and useful to have something that perfectly fits your requirements.

We’ve made room for many package formats for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come I’m sure.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Containerised everything is the future of computing and I think we’ll look back on how we do things currently with horror!

But yes, I am slowly starting to use more contained desktop applications. Server-wise, everything I deploy is now in containers.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I chose Ubuntu for my desktop/laptop because I chose Ubuntu for our servers. While we now have the servers setup such that we hardly touch them directly, I’ve found it to be incredibly valuable to be using the same technologies, tools, and processes daily on desktop as I need on our servers.

It boggles my mind how many organisations I’ve worked for that almost exclusively develop for Linux deployment use Windows as their primary desktop environment. It causes nothing but trouble. We’ve got Windows if we need it, I’m a big proponent of the best tool for the job - and what the company paying wants! - but Linux is our primary desktop environment.

vampatori , 11 months ago

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire”

vampatori , 11 months ago

We’ve got some Brother laser printers at work and they’ve been great. We get third-party toner from a local company for peanuts too, as well as sending them the old cartridges to reuse/recycle. If I ever need a printer at home, this is the route I’ll go!

EDIT: Also, checkout company closing auctions (there’s a few around again!) and you can pick-up some decent office stuff including printers for cheap!

vampatori , 11 months ago

I did not know about the shopt command! Very interesting, thank you.

However, while your description refers to a GitHub Gist, there doesn’t seem to be a link to it.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Ahh! I didn’t see that! Thanks.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I used it for about a year and it was good - I had some issues with some bits of my laptop hardware working out of the box, and I sometimes got into an error when doing an update due to mirror synchronization. If you use see an error similar to this, just give it a while before updating again:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Downloaded data exceeded the expected filesize
</span>

In the end I moved away to match my server environment. Initially to Fedora (CentOS server) but then to Ubuntu (I was mid upgrading from C7 to C8 when Red Hat cut the C8 SLA and discontinued it, so I jumped ship). Both Fedora and Ubuntu are really solid and support absolutely every feature of all my hardware out of the box - I’ve come to really appreciate their stability now.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I think all the flexibility and distributed nature of open source is simultaneously it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to do so much, to tailor it to our specific needs, to remix and share, and to grow communities around common goals. But at the same time, those communities so rarely come together to agree on standards, we reinvent the wheel over and over, and so we can flounder vs big corporations with more clearly defined leadership. Flexibility and options seems to lead to an inability to compromise.

But also I think open source and standards have become a battleground for Big Tech, with different mega-corps looking to capitalise on their ideas and hinder those of their competitors. Microsoft trying to push TypeScript into the ECMCA Script standard, Google trying to force AMP down our throats, Apple saying fuck-off to web standards/applications, the whole Snaps/Flatpak/Appimage thing, WebAssembley not having access to the DOM, etc.

I think one of the great things that open source does is that it effectively puts the code in people’s hands and it’s up to them to get value out of that however they can. But so often now it’s these mega-corps that can garner the most value out of them - they can best market their offers, collect the most data to drive the software, bring to bare the most compute power, buy up and kill any threats to their business, and ultimately tip the balance very firmly in their favour.

Open source software needs contributors, without them it’s nothing - sure you can fork the codebase, but can you fork the team?

Most people do the work because they love it - it’s not even because they particularly want to use the software they create, it’s the act of creating it that is fun and engaging for them. But I wonder if perhaps we’re starting to cross a threshold where more restrictive licenses could start to gain more popularity - to bring back some semblance of balance between the relationship of community contributors and mega-corps.

vampatori , 11 months ago

I think the most interesting thing out of the Red Hat/CentOS/downstream thing was that Red Hat used the absolute classic argument against FOSS - “they’re getting value out of this without contributing back”. The argument that Red Hat themselves spent so long fighting against and building their company around proving that argument wrong.

I think it shows a shift in mind-set, perhaps born from the IBM purchase, perhaps as they start to feel the squeeze, and that they no longer fully believe in FOSS.

But it’s early days, only time will tell - certainly there seems to be a fair few shifts going on at the moment though!

vampatori , 11 months ago

Assume nothing! Test every little assumption and you’ll find the problem. Some things to get you started:

• Does the “app” domain resolve to the app container’s IP from within the nginx container?
• Can you proxy_pass to the host:port directly rather than using an upstream definition? If not, what about IP:port?
• Is the http(s) connection to the server (demo.example.com) actually going to your nginx instance? Shut it down and see if it changes.
• If it works locally on 80, can you get it to work on the VPS on 80?
• Are you using the exact same docker-compose.yaml file for this as locally? If not, what’s different?
• Are you building the image? If so, are you incrementing the version number of the build so it gets updated?
• Is there a firewall running on the host OS? If so, is it somehow interfering? Disable it and see.

While not a direct solution to your problem, I no longer manually configure my reverse proxies at all now and use auto-configuring ones instead. The nginx-proxy image is great, along with it’s ACME companion image for automatic SSL cert generation with certbot - you’ll be up and running in under 30 mins. I used that for a long time and it was great.

I’ve since moved to using Traefik as it’s more flexible and offers more features, but it’s a bit more involved to configure (simple, but the additional flexibility means everything requires more config).

That way you just bring up your container and the reverse proxy pulls meta-data from it (e.g. host to map/certbot email) and off it goes.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Glad you sorted it though! It’s a nightmare when you get such an opaque error and there’s so many moving parts that could be responsible!

vampatori , 11 months ago

In the original XCOM my brother and I didn’t realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother’s mind!

vampatori , 11 months ago

I think after Dawn of War III, caution is the key! But yes, this is certainly one to watch!

vampatori , 11 months ago

It does feel like there’s been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there’s been a real move to have their cake and eat it.

Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they’re now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don’t want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I’ve done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.

Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it’s amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.

But I think it’s time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.

vampatori , 11 months ago

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Somewhat randomly I read The Remains of the Day a little while back and loved it, even though it’s entirely unlike the stories I usually read.

I’m really enjoying Klara and the Sun too - in-particular I’m enjoying how the story has these quite sharp shifts in where you think the story is going, but they’re just dropped casually, almost as a throw-away line, and you’re left thinking about the huge implications of so few words.

I also just love Ishiguro’s writing style and creativity - it’s like he’s painting a picture with black on white, and that picture is great - but the white space forms a picture too, and with that he adds so much more.

With each story he’s setting out to take you on a specific emotional journey, but he’s not holding your hand and showing you so much as guiding you with as little effort as possible such that when you get there, you feel like you got there on your own, and so it hits so much harder as a result - even though he very carefully led you. It’s hard to describe! But it’s amazing, I’d be surprised if I’ve not read everything of his soon!