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Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is my podcatcher, castget(1).

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  • Today's entry is my podcatcher, castget(1). I've used several CLI podcatchers over the years, changing mostly because hpodder (my then-favorite) became deprecated and dropped out of repos, so I had to find a replacement.

    Configuration is a simple INI-style file, it allows me to post-process files (certain ones I cut off the 7-minutes of advertising at the beginning, customize ID3/ID3v2 tags), and give them a naming-convention that works for how I listen.

    It runs nightly from cron(8) downloading to my queue directory-tree, emailing me the resulting output, and saves its state in files that can be fairly easily tracked in version-control (annoyingly it doesn't sort them, so every run mangles them, but a little processing with vim makes quick work of them, meaning the resulting diff output is just the new podcasts and a top-level timestamp change, not a complete remunging of the file). About every 3–4GB of queued-up files, I've usually reached the ones on my player/phone, delete those, and replace them with the fresh queue. It does mean that news podcasts are largely worthless because there could be a 3–4wk lag between when the episode releases and I eventually catch it in my player.

    It's simple, it works, and it plays well with the rest of my ecosystem. I like it.

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr also, note that weather app has all the things I probably wouldn't have bothered doing on a small throwaway project because they're tedious: Good test coverage, every static analysis option possible, nice packaging and automatic deployment to the server when tagging a release via Github actions. All that would have taken me days to write by hand, even though that's exactly the kind of stuff I do every day at work, versus a few minutes of prompting and occasionally correcting.

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  • @aeva ahh I see, makes more sense knowing about swipe. I never did figure that out myself, heh.

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr I could have built the weather app in...maybe 3x-4x the time it took? But, I probably wouldn't have, because I didn't want it three or four times more than that amount of effort.

    I've got two other much larger projects that haven't really launched yet, that have also taken remarkably less time than I would have required doing it myself.

    I hate being "rah rah AI", but I'm not going to lie on the internet about it when I know it's gotten really good at writing code.

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  • @johnlogic I’d remove the AA and the “just classes” from education. If you’re concerned about gaps, you already call it “career impact” so it doesn’t have to be complete.

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  • @GhostOnTheHalfShell

    By posting on here, tapping into my social network is exactly what I'm trying to do.

    I've heard that weak ties can be the most powerful, especially when job seeking.

    I also have a pretty extensive professional network, as I volunteer for the world's largest technical professional organization, IEEE.

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr I was dragged into it by my employer, as I like having health insurance, but it works. Over the holidays I built a bunch of stuff (an absurd amount of stuff), more working code than I've ever written in such a short time in my life. I wanted a weather app without ads, so I built one in a couple of hours. https://wthr.lol/ (And, if you're curious about code quality, it's here: https://github.com/swelljoe/wthr.lol )

    I've used it to find bugs in huge projects and build from scratch.

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  • @aeva *it turns out, sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr yeah, I read all the studies and felt quite smug about AI, as well. And, then I actually built some stuff and found some bugs with current gen frontier models, and my priors were upended.

    I'm not saying I like it, as it's going to cause a tremendous amount of disruption, and not in a good way, given who holds every leadership position in government and industry right now. But, I simply can't pretend it doesn't work, anymore, because I've seen it with my own eyes.

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    Going a bit off the beaten path for #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today I get to appreciate HaikuOS¹. While it has some issues (mostly keyboard-mapping) that prevent me from using it as the main OS on my writerdeck netbook, it is AMAZING in how well it uses resources. That little underpowered Atom processor with its 2G of RAM just flies. It boots in a fraction of the time of anything else (other than DOS) that I've installed on the hardware. The GUI and all the applications are delightfully snappy.So please join me in sending a little praise toward the @haiku project for all the wonderful work they do!⸻¹ https://www.haiku-os.org/
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    Today's follow-up #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is vi/vim.Which I use depends on the situation. Classic vi/nvi tends to be lighter weight and start faster, while vim offers extra features that I find particularly useful). I usually just type `vi` which gets me `vi` on OpenBSD, `nvi` on FreeBSD, and `vim` (or `vim-tiny`) on most flavors of Linux. If I specifically want vim features, I'll invoke it as such directly.I could go on for ages about favorite features, but a select few:• the ability to keep my hands on the home row and not use a mouse is helpful for preventing RSI symptoms• it's a language¹ of editing, involving counts, verbs/commands, and objects/motions, so I can express my editing *intent* and then use the period command to re-issue that same editing *intent*• the :global or :substitute commands can make massive-yet-precise edits across huge files• the :*do commands extend that power across multiple files, allowing me to precisely edit millions of lines across thousands of files with targeted precision• it's ubiquitous—even as some Linux distros have started removing ed(1) from the base installs , relegating it to packages, I can always type `vi` on any Unix-like/POSIX system and be editing with a powerful editor. And with builds for Windows and my phone, I can use it everywhere. No need to install anything• they work just fine over a SSH connection without a GUI, and use minimal resources so they work even on that old hardware from the 90s.⸻¹ https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878
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    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/
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    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry: ledger(1) & hledger(1)I primarily use ledger use for my #plaintextaccounting purposes¹ but try to mostly keep my data-files in a form that hledger can process them too.Getting started involved a crash-course in accounting terms, but the use of positive/negative numbers (rather than "debits" and "credits" which always bugged me; though both have ways of specifying that output should be in credit/debit format) eased the transition.While it started a little tedious, a few helper-scripts and shell-functions simplified adding new common entries and gave me lazy access to common reports.I still struggle a little bit with closing the books (I though I'd figured it out, and documented it², but had some hiccups so I'll need to revisit my documentation in January)But it's been incredibly helpful to see and track our household net worth, spot trends, keep tabs on gift-card balances that would otherwise get forgotten, track invoices sent to clients, and it simplifies balancing the checkbook monthly.⸻¹ http://plaintextaccounting.org/² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/closing-out-the-books-in-ledger/