Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • 7 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Pika is a GUI for Borg.

    Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.


  • I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. Every system has two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.

    Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus on simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.

    Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two locations, one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.




  • I’m in the USA and like the the Sengled smart plugs. They use Zigbee, can handle up to 1800W, and are ETL listed. Having said that, it looks like they don’t sell the ones I have any more. I don’t have experience with their newer ones.

    Just make sure whichever ones you get are ETL or UL listed. There’s some that are cheap but haven’t had any sort of safety testing done. It’s not worth the small savings.







  • VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn’t care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.

    “AJAX” (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.


  • I’m hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There’s a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.

    Even visual basic for the web would make sense

    This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There’s a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.




  • dan@upvote.autoProgrammer Humor@programming.devMy boss wants us to use AI
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    1 month ago

    My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.

    I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.

    In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.

    I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.