hallettj

joined 6 months ago
[–] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Probably not very similar, but Git Butler is very interesting. It adds its own layer of management so that you can have multiple branches "applied" to your working tree simultaneously. It's helpful when you have multiple changes that should go into different branches, and some that shouldn't be committed - it has a system of lanes that help keep track of all that. Or you can test how changes from two branches interact.

Last time I used it, maybe 6 months ago, it was rough around the edges so I didn't stick with it. But they've done lots of work since then so I'm thinking of giving it another go. It is (last I checked) an all-in tool. When you're using Butler on a project you probably won't be able to use other git tools.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 22 points 1 week ago

Yes; he said that the real clothes itched, and Garak said that's the wool, you'll get used to it.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 5 points 2 weeks ago

NixOS and Home Manager config both ways to get rid of the same thing

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 14 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

I use metric temperature when I talk to my kids. Now they give me a hard time when I give them a Fahrenheit value! Keeps me honest I guess. I've also got my oldest using a 24 hour clock.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 41 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Stardate, 2024-08-30T06:34:17.993Z

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 3 points 3 weeks ago

Aw, thanks! That's high praise!

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

I used to organize a meetup for Javascript programmers. It was more about sharing information than about debate, but I think there might be overlap with what you want. The format was a regular meeting schedule once a month where 2-3 people would give presentations to show off what they've been working on, teach how to use a new framework, or whatever they were interested in. So in a way it has handing out information from on high, but I think because we had different people each meeting sharing their perspective there was a good element of exchange of ideas between peers.

Now it turns out that people need lots of leadership energy to create room for exchange of ideas. At the beginning I'd get about 6 people at each meeting, few of whom volunteered to step up in front of the group. So what I did was to show up every month, and talked about whatever topic I could come up with. At most of the meetings it was just me talking. When I did get other people to present it was through prodding and hassling. But people were interested enough in the material, and found enough value in just being in the same room with other people with similar interests that people kept coming back. It stayed small like that, growing slowly for maybe 2 years. But then we hit a critical point where there were enough people coming, and people were inspired enough that suddenly we were getting 30-50 people each month, and I had no problem finding volunteers to present. And it wasn't the same volunteers either - we had a good rotation of different people interested in sharing their ideas. That continued for another 6 years before I moved and passed organizer responsibility over to the next generation.

My point is that a club like this needs a lot of energy and attention. It's going to grow slowly. But it will grow if you keep at it, and put in the work. We reached that point where the group became sort of self sufficient in that I didn't need to be the one making presentations anymore, and I didn't need to actively seek out volunteers to present. But I still had to put in the work to make sure we had the meeting space available every month, show up to let people in, work out the meeting schedule, get food. Anything like this will die if there isn't someone holding it together through force of will. But it's worth it! It was a great experience!

I know you said you want your club to self-manage. But people need structure. If you ask people to show up and have stimulating discussion they're going stand around awkwardly not knowing what to talk about. Something like a presentation followed by discussion gives structure that helps people to open up, and explore their own thoughts. Or since you want multiple perspectives maybe a debate or a panel format would work better for you. Get 2 or more volunteers to talk about a specific topic. I highly recommend lining up panelists ahead of time - you'll have a rough time getting volunteers on the spot. If you prep your debaters ahead of time by asking them to present different views they might be less likely to simply agree with each other. Once your scheduled panelists get ideas flowing it will be easier to encourage attendees to step up to speak. You might have a debate or panel followed by open discussion, or rotating panel seats that people can step up to and leave as they feel inspired. But again, based on my experience I suggest being ready to be the one person standing up and debating yourself for maybe many meetings before the club finds a self-organizing energy.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 3 points 1 month ago

It seems like only one side of the ancient rivalry is represented in the comments here. No worries, I'm right there with you.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What does "under pressure" mean? Does it mean shifting while stopped? I'm told some non-electronic belt drives can do that.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I read that electronic shifting can automatically downshift when you come to a stop which I find a little tempting. But not tempting enough at the price I've seen. There's a spot on my regular route where my habit is to downshift 6 times as I come to a stop sign at the bottom of a hill. I do wonder what it would be like not to have to think about that so much.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah the performance differences don't matter in most cases. Rust makes it tempting to optimize everything because the language is explicit about runtime representations. But that doesn't mean that optimizing is the best use of your time.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

To expand on why generics are preferred, just in case you haven't seen these points yet: the performance downsides of Box<dyn MyTrait> are,

  • methods use dynamic dispatch in this case
  • requires heap allocation

There is also a possible type theory objection which is that normally there is a distinction between types and traits. Traits are not types themselves, but instead define sets of types with shared behavior. (That's why the same feature in Haskell is called a "type class", because it defines a class of types that have something in common.) But dyn turns a trait into a type which undermines the type/trait distinction. It's useful enough to justify being in the language, but a little unsettling from a certain perspective.

 

I installed StarCraft: Mass Recall which is an impressive project that recreates the original StarCraft and Brood War campaigns in StarCraft 2. Everything works except that the cinematics and some of the game assets are flat, blank red. For example some of the video portraits in the briefing rooms display correctly, but Mengsk is a solid red square. In the first mission Raynor's vulture is flat red while everything else looks correct. Sound works correctly including in cinematics.

The game assets aren't a huge deal, but the cinematics are a big part of the reason for playing these campaigns IMO.

I've tried everything I can think of. I tried some different Wine runners. I tried disabling DXVK. I installed a number of dependencies that look like they provide video codecs:

  • amstream
  • devenum
  • quartz
  • xvid
  • ffdshow

Does anyone have ideas about what else I might try?

What I did figure out is a working command to run the mod, which took me a while. I used Bottles, installed Battle.net through the Bottles program installer, installed StarCraft 2 via Battle.net, and finally installed Mass Recall by unzipping and copying its files to the StarCraft Maps/ and Mods/ directories. Then I was able to run Mass Recall with this command:

$ bottles-cli shell -b "<bottle name>" -i '"C:\Program Files (x86)\StarCraft II\Support64\SC2Switcher_x64.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\StarCraft II\Maps\Starcraft Mass Recall\SCMR Campaign Launcher.SC2Map"'
45
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by hallettj@leminal.space to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 

Passkeys seem like a great idea, and we are at a point where, although things are still very much in flux, software passkeys managed by password managers are starting to be usable. I thought I'd share the workflow that's working for me on Linux with some sites, and ask the community for more tips & tricks.

A passkey is a client certificate - which is an old idea, but now there are some new standards in place*. When you log into a website, instead of sending a password you send a message signed using the private key on your hardware security device, or stored in your password manager. If you use a password manager the flow is about the same as with passwords: your password manager pops up and asks if you want to log in to the given website. But instead of sending a password to the browser, message signing takes place in the password manager. Unlike passwords those signed messages can't be replayed. Arguably you can skip sending MFA codes and get about the same (or maybe better) security with passkeys than you were getting with passwords + MFA.

Complications come up because support for passkey APIs is still patchy. On Linux I think there is system-level support for hardware keys, but not for passkey managers (password managers that can do passkey signing). But you can close that gap using browser extensions! I'm using Enpass with it's Firefox extension. Signing into websites in Firefox using passkeys works quite well in some of the sites I've tried. (I've also tested with Bitwarden's browser extension, and it works just as well.**) Although creating passkeys doesn't work on all of those sites.

  • I was able to create a passkey on Github, and sign in with it.
  • I was able to create a passkey for the demo at https://www.passkeys.io/, and sign in with it.
  • I couldn't create passkeys for Google, but I could log in with passkeys created on another device, and synced by Enpass to my Linux machine.
  • I can use a passkey for MFA on Discord, but they don't seem to be using them for logins yet.
  • I'm not getting options to use my passkeys on Amazon or Paypal, but I was able to create passkeys for these sites on Android.

Without using a browser extension Chrome on Linux does have a feature to sign in with passkeys on mobile devices. I don't think this works with third-party passskey managers. On some sites Chrome gave me the option to log in using the automatically-generated, Google-managed passkey on my phone. It didn't actually worked for me - my phone showed a message saying "connecting to device" but never actually connected.

That brings me to the Android side. Since some sites will let me log in with passkeys but not create them it's helpful to have another option for creating passkeys. Android is further along in implementing system level passkey support (only in Android 14 or later). But it's not perfect yet. Firefox for Android is not working with passkey managers yet, but there is a ticket to track this. Third-party passkey managers work in Chrome for Android, but only if you enable an experimental flag:

  • open chrome://flags/
  • find the setting "Android Credential Management for passkeys"
  • set the value to "Enabled for Google Password Manager and 3rd party passkeys"

* "Passkey" seems to be an umbrella term for WebAuthn or FIDO U2F. It looks like WebAuthn is a part of FIDO2.

** From a cursory look at the two I feel more comfortable with Enpass' browser extension than with Bitwarden's. I'm not positive, but it looks like Bitwarden loads credentials in the extension itself which puts all of your secrets in the browser process. OTOH the Enpass extension uses IPC to send requests to the Enpass desktop app. But as many will point out, Bitwarden's clients are open-source and audited while Enpass' software is closed-source.

 

It took me some time to work out how to get my ssh agent set up in Niri so I though I would share what I did. I'm using NixOS and Home Manager. I put this in my Home Manager config:

services.gnome-keyring = {
  enable = true;
  components = [ "pkcs11" "secrets" "ssh" ];
};
home.sessionVariables.SSH_AUTH_SOCK = "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/keyring/ssh";

I'm using GDM according to NixOS' default configuration which I think runs gnome-keyring (I thought I saw it in the process list before I set up the user unit), and I think that configuration is automatically unlocking gnome-keyring when I log in via PAM integration. But apparently I need to run gnome-keyring again in my window manager session. Home Manager's services.gnome-keyring adds a systemd user unit that does that.

view more: next ›