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Wait But Why blog has a blog post [1] related to this that gives more food for thought about how we spend our everyday.

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/10/100-blocks-day.html


The cheering sound is probably from Audience Response Duplicator (or: Laff Box). There's a good episode [1] about it on 99% invisible.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-laff-box/


I don't care about speed. I like how convenient is it to organize and move windows around compared to floating window managers. Especially when using multiple monitors.

My hand gets tired if I use mouse too much especially with dragging operations. Using TWM and modal text editor helps a lot.

I really miss it on macos when I have lots of stuff open and have to switch between multiple windows. I haven't yet tried any tiling apps on mac because configuring is always a deep rabbit hole. I use Rectangle but having more than 1 window on a 13" screen isn't that useful and still requires manual arranging. A better control over workspaces is what I miss.


Use Yabai with SKHD. Configure if by telling ChatGPT to convert your i3 config to Yabai.


We used to manage 500+ servers with Ansible for almost 10 years. It was a nightmare.

With so many servers Ansible script would ocassionally fail on some servers (weird bugs, network issues, ...). Since the operations weren't always atomic we couldn't just re-run the script. it required fixing things manually.

Thanks to this and emergency patches/fixes on individual servers, we ended up with slightly different setup on the servers. This made debugging and upgrading a nightmare. Can this bug happen on all the server or just this one because it has a different minor version of package 'x'?

We switched to NixOS. It had a steep learning curve for us, with lots of doubts if this was the right decision. Converting all the servers to NixOS was a huge 2-year task.

Having all the servers running same configuration that is commited to GitHub, fully reproducable and tested in CI, on top of automatic updates of the servers done with GitHub action, was worth all the troubles we had with learning NixOS.

This entire blog post could be a NixOS config.


I realize Ansible is kinda slow and can be flaky, and wouldn't use it for 500 servers. However, for one beginner VPS I think it's fine.

The fact that it's not hermetic and perfectly reproducible is a major problem for a fleet, but for single user it's a benefit. It offers a graceful migration path from a snowflake server to a managed server, and still works even if you can't manage to do 100% of the config automatically.



I see that I'm not the only one inspired by this blog post [1]. I did a similar visualization with blocks to display my working hours [2].

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/10/100-blocks-day.html [2] https://github.com/am-on/work-timer


Reminded me of https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html from the same website. One of the few things on the Internet that changed my entire outlook on life.


I did the same thing when my grandfather died: A grid with each square representing a week of his life, and each row representing one year. Then, we mapped as many events from his life as possible.


I am doing an excel sheet, 52 boxes per row, one row per year. Inspired by waitbutwhy article.


Do you find some years need 53 boxes?

If you're born April 1, 52 weeks after your birth would be March 31, and after 52 more weeks it would be March 30 (before considering leap years).

I guess it can stay 52 boxes, and the last box has a day extra (or two, on leap years).


Oh no, I don't go in that details, simply, every month, the weeks start on 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd.

Only Jan, Jun, July, Dec gets another week, 5th one, on 27th.

So all months have 4 columns, labeled 1,8,15,22. Jan, Jun, Jul, Dec have 5 columns.

Whole sheet is a fillable grid of 52 columns and 90 rows.

A pre column list the year like 2002, 2003, 2004 etc. Next pre column list my age like 0,1,2,3 till 90. Then above explained grid. Then again, first two pre columns copied.

Each cell has light grey border. Border darkens to black between months columns. Border also darkens at every decade row.

If an event (like travel) happens on certain date (like 13th), it simply fills the whole week.

I assume that in overall big picture of life, a rounding off of week will not matter much.


Looks pretty neat!


Inkplate[1] might be a good option for around 100€. Compared to Joan it's less polished. You can get 3d printed case and it requires some coding (it doesn't support rendering HTML).

I'm working on a personal dashboard for the screen. I'll create a website in React and then use rendertron[2] to get the screenshot on the Inkplate.

[1] https://inkplate.io/ [2] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron


Have you found a battery for this that might make it fit well in a 3d printed case?


Thanks for the tip, I will check it out. :)


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