I use a combination of stow and make to manage my dotfiles. I added a makefile well after using stow for a decade. The makefile is more for new system setup than day to day management. I might try out replacing stow with make based on this blog, more for fun than anything. I'm a bit reluctant to replace what has been working so well for a decade, but I'm very intrigued by this. Make has always interested me. It seems like it could be incredibly powerful in the right hands.

I'm shocked it is most of your software. I think I have under a dozen AUR packages. It has been that way for about a decade. I added a couple for gaming recently (mostly because Lutris just crashes for me), but nearly all of my software comes from the official repos.

Same for me. I learned about AUR before installing Arch, but went months before installing my first package from there.

There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.

Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel teams starting in elementary school, because everyone else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.

They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.

This is why I hate the trend towards these massive high schools that's been happening for a few decades.

I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part of something and were even halfway decent one could have some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000 the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.

Ah, but here's the kicker - we are a small school. My graduating class had 140, and it's shrunk since then. I believe the grades are now about 110-120 each or so. However, we have some very successful sports programs. The girl's basketball team has won state countless times, for instance. Either way, there are only so many spots on a team and if almost everyone is doing travel teams you don't have much of a chance if you don't.

The quality of coaching is also a factor. My daughter played indoor volleyball for several years on both travel club and public school varsity teams. The high school coach lacked experience and tried to teach her inferior techniques that contradicted what she had learned from the last club coach, so she got frustrated and quit the team.

The sad thing is that kids who can't afford to play in travel clubs will usually never have a chance to develop the skills they need to make the high school varsity team. And even the club teams are sort of an escalating arms race: if you want to make the "A" team then you'll have to pay for extra private lessons and position clinics.

Having two teenage daughters who are athletes, much of this will play out for them depending on how much they really love the sport and whether they are able to play it at the highest levels. If you listen and observe your kids, you'll get a good sense of what THEY want out of the sport. Support them in THEIR journey.

And remember at the end of the day, the most important aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on the field. It's everything else - learning to be committed to a team, forming life-long friendships, building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle, etc.

Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing large. I do fondly remember those times, for the friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still use today, not really about winning competitions.

It depends.

My dad pushed me to play a sport I despised. Hated it from when I was young all the way to my last games.

But thank god he did. Changed my life completely. As a mediocre student, I could pick any school I wanted.

Love my dad, and he knew what was best. Even if I hated playing, it was all worth it.

Parents should set their kids up for success, and parents do know best - even if that means upsetting your child.

There’s a difference between what someone wants and what’s best for someone - and during my teens, I had that mixed up.

Have you ever considered where you would be if all the hours you channeled into the sport you hated had been channeled into something you loved? Maybe you could have had the best of both worlds? Who knows...

But I totally understand what you're saying, I can't say I ever (EVER!) enjoyed going to practice, but I stuck it out and ended up making it to the Big Ten level as a walk-on. I'm very proud of that accomplishment.

It sounds like you had innate talent or aptitude that could be honed and take you places. Not all kids have that though, and can probably take it easy with sports and focus on growing other strengths.

It was less about having talent and more about developing in a great program - and that was just dumb luck.

I grew up in a midwest farm town that just happened to have a couple incredible coaches that ran exceptional sports programs. I also had older brothers who were better than me that I learned from.

I was less good and more tough in that I was pretty much the slowest guy on the team in college, but I could absolutely hold my own in practice. Unfortunately, due to the recent NCAA roster limits, there doesn't seem to be a place for athletes like me in college anymore.

What door/window sensors did you use?

I almost went for the Ikea ones, but in the end I went with Aqara. More expensive, but very small/reliable, and the battery holds up very well.

I put Zwave window sensors on all windows at work (40 of them). These devices have two AAA cells. One of the gent's window sensors used to "die" far quicker than any of the others and eventually stopped working. I should explain: "gent's" := men's toilet.

The sensors are quite large and simple and the gent's windows tend to be left open more often than the other windows. One of the two gent's sit down toilets is generally preferred to the other for very minor reasons but it is preferred.

So, the battery terminals were getting slightly corroded on that window sensor because it was open more often to the outside environment.

I've rubbed a bit of silicone sealant into the crack between the two parts of the sensor and expect that it will survive better now.

I wrote something similar in another comment. This is where I have seen curse words bite teams too. It is always the needless "joke" when debugging that surfaces. Just go boring. No one gets offended by "check 001."

Well, I do get offended by "check 001" - please just put some words there about what was checked. The worst offender of course is "unexpected error occurred" - my PTSD is so triggered by that one. Just freaking give me some error details!

I can swear a lot while talking. I have never written a curse word in my code, especially professionally. Just seems odd and not useful? I wouldn't be offended if I came across one, but it seems weird to use in a professional setting? A lot of the times I have seen inappropriate words used were not in any context and were used as a "joke" when logging/debugging. So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."

The contextless swearing seems so unnecessary and adds nothing to the code, whereas a comment with a curse word in it reads way more human.

> So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."

Agreed.

Context matters a lot. People say "shitty code" all the time. I don't see that as unprofessional. But "dicks01" I would probably change if I came across it in code. Not because I would find it offensive, but because it serves no purpose other than to be juvenile... and that can easily be counter-productive if the goal is easy to read and maintain code.

With respects to "shitty code", I'm not even sure that I would personally even consider the word "shit" to be a swear word in 2025. I'm reminded of the TV show on Showtime called Bullshit (by Penn & Teller). They wanted to name the show "Humbug", which was considered profane in the early 20th century when Houdini was alive and famous. But Showtime didn't like it because they figured it wouldn't land with a modern audience. "Bullshit" it was.

That said, the article even includes the word "crap" (though perhaps they are making the point that it is replacing other, "more profane" words). That one strikes me as odd. If that is considered rude and offensive, then surely "humbug" ought to be as well. Probably very culture-specific.

When I was a child in the 80s (US east coast), my parents considered "crap" to be a bad word, and my sister and I got in trouble if we used it.

It's funny to think of that today; I can't imagine any of my peers who are parents forbidding their child from saying "crap" (though I wouldn't be surprised if that was still a thing in some places).

But yes, time and culture matter. "Crap" has fallen off the list just has "humbug" has (and "humbug" has fallen out of use nearly entirely; I imagine the only reason people are familiar with it at all today is because of the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge), and new words have been added as "bad" that weren't a problem in my childhood, or back when "humbug" was a big deal.

I have a very clear memory of offending someone with the use of the word “crap” years ago.

As a kid I worked in a restaurant that sold Cincinnati-style chili - noodles with sweet chili and cheese on top. We were encouraged to offer customers who ordered a plain bowl of chili this noodle concoction instead.

Late one night, I had a customer order a bowl of plain chili. I gave her the spiel I was supposed to, suggesting that she try the noodle dish. She said, “so you won’t sell me a bowl of chili?”. I replied, “sorry for the confusion ma’am, I am happy to sell you chili. We are asked to say this crap because management is worried customers don’t know what they want”. She replied, “I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to use the word ‘crap’ with me”. I apologized again, gave her her order, then was removed from my position 3 days later when she emailed management to complain. I had “refused to sell her chili”, and “used vulgar language”.

That sounds more like someone who was looking to be offended, not necessarily someone who finds "crap" offensive specifically.

I try to be silly rather than explicitly vulgar for my own sanity. Having a comment about a hack that "stinks worse than expired chicken nuggets" or seems to have been "composed by a series of dartboard throws at random character sheets" is way more fun to me.

That said, I don't take issue with cursing in code that remains private to the development staff. As others have said more eloquently than I can, the issue is when it is exposed to customers who might take issue and churn. Not a good look, so for better or worse, there are professions where professionalism cozies up to sterile language.

> I can swear a lot while talking. I have never written a curse word in my code, especially professionally.

I can swear a lot while talking. I have, once or twice, written curses in my code, sometimes including curse words, especially professionally. "Within this function lie buried the bones of those intrepid explorers who came before you. It is hallowed ground, and cursed be thy soul if you re-order anything without a +2 from a priest. You have been warned."

I'm trying nix instead of Homebrew on my mac. It worked great until I decided to give rust a shot. I think my solution is to just do rust development on my Arch machine and stick with nix. That said, if I run into additional issues, I will probably just go back to Homebrew.

Where were your pain points?

from the top of my head: various hacks to make apps available to spotlight, packages/apps behind their equivalents in brew to the point where I use nix to orchestrate brew for too many things, starting envs and build switch is too slow for my taste despite caching etc, nix the language is unfriendly and hard to debug, the stack traces are useless, etc

Professionally? Sure. Personally, I don't want to learn and maintain ansible for something I do once every 5-7 years. I basically diffed the defaults and got the settings I need to change in my script. I then add or remove them as I tweak things (infrequently). The rest of my shell script is a Makefile I use cross platform for making directories and stow-ing dotfiles.

Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.

I use a text file in my phone for notes.

I don't have roommates, but if I did we'd probably use a whiteboard for tracking errands and schedules.

> I date food we put in the fridge/freezer

What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.

I batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.

When I batch cook meals, I then eat them over the next few days until either it's done or it's been too long for that meal. Then I batch cook something else. I usually don't have multiple batches on the go.

So you just eat the same meal over and over again until you run out?

Pretty much. I'll have the same meal 2-3 days then cook the next.

Unopened, a jar of pasta sauce is good basically indefinitely, but as soon as you actually open the jar the clock starts ticking. We don't make enough pasta at a time to use a full jar, (and in fact will usually use a small fraction of the jar) so I write the date that I opened the jar on the lid to plan its use a little better. "Hey, better find a use for this sauce, it's going to go bad eventually."

When freezing something you made or something unfrozen you won't be able to finish before its expiration date, it's good to write the date on it as well as what it is when it's not immediately obvious (for example... frozen duck fat and coconut oil look pretty much the same, and they don't smell anything when frozen).

Food that's not prepackaged. e.g., I recently threw out a container of eggs that had been in my freezer for about two years because my hens were laying so much faster than we could consume, that we had dozens of extras.

I also label things like the date I install a new HVAC filter, or how much to cut off on a piece of lumber, etc.

I was unaware that it was safe to freeze eggs.

Why would you think it wasn't?

This is handy if you're doing things like separating a package into portions for your fridge for near term use and freezer for long term storage. Such as the large packages from Costco/Sam's Club.

When I open milk, I write the date on the cap to help keep track of how long it'll remain good.

My method is that I assume it's gone bad when it tastes sour.

I throw away bread when the green fuzzy stuff on it no longer tastes good.

I can taste the mold in bread before it's grown big enough to become visible.

For most foods evolution has graced us with the ability to see, smell or taste any issues well before they actually become a problem. There are some things you have to look out for like botulism or salmonella, but for simple foods like bread and milk there isn't much point in taking precautions

Yeah, no need to write anything down when you already have a detector built-in in your body called "nose+tongue" (well, at least for milk).

Much easier to just drink enough so there is no chance of that happening.

But then I am in UK where milk is easily obtained in 2 pint or less packages and is all long term - over a week. It is harder to gat 4 int or gallon containers which I think are more common in the US.

In the US, the way milk is sold, is that larger amounts cost less. In other words, the 1/2-gallon container, buy two of those, and it costs significantly more than a single 1-gallon container. It gets even worse for quarts. But I seldom buy in the 1-gallon container as it will generally spoil before I've used it all, so there isn't any savings there for me.

>In other words, the 1/2-gallon container, buy two of those, and it costs significantly more than a single 1-gallon container.

Except sometimes the 1/2 gallons will be randomly on sale where you can get like 3 of them for the price of a gallon. Milk economics makes no sense to me. But yeah, it's usually cheaper to buy more than you need and just throw it out if you don't use it, as is the American way.

Inversely, I've also seen promotions where the gallon is heavily featured in the ads, and they're selling the half gallon for full price. Neat, you're paying extra to get less milk!

It also usually sours I think? You can still use that for pancakes or something... not sure because I’m too lazy and throw it away myself.

I wouldn't bank on a job in COBOL. I took several COBOL courses at an IBM affiliated university and enjoyed the language. I wanted to work in COBOL. I sent out dozens of applications and heard nothing back. I'm not saying "don't learn COBOL." That said, COBOL isn't a particularly difficult language, but at your age, I'd learn something more modern, and if in 5-6 years you are still interested in COBOL, learn it then.