John Oliver take on it https://youtu.be/gYwqpx6lp_s

I really think that’s the secret end game behind all the AI stuff in both Windows and MacOS. MS account required to use it. (anyone know if you need to be signed in to apple ID for apple ai?) “on device” inference that sometimes will reach out to the cloud. when it feels like it. maybe sometimes the cloud will reach out to you and ask your cpu to help out with training.

that, and better local content analysis. “no we aren’t sending everything the microphone picks up to our servers, of course not. just the transcript that your local stt model made of it, you won’t even notice the bandwidth!)”

Are you using PersistentVolumes? If your storage class supports it, looks like there’s a volume snapshot concept you can use, have you looked into that?

Not sure what you’re doing, but if we’re talking about a bog standard service backed by a db, I don’t think having automated reverts of that data is the best idea. you might lose something! That said, triggering a snapshot of your db as a step before deployment is a pretty reasonable idea.

Reverting a service back to a previous version should be straightforward enough, and any dedicated ci/cd tool should have an API to get you information from the last successful deploy, whether that is the actual artifact you’re deploying, or a reference to a registry.

As you’re probably entirely unsurprised by, there are a ton of ways to skin this cat. you might consider investing in preventative measures, testing your data migration in a lower environment, splitting out db change commits from service logic commits, doing some sort of blue/green or canary deployment.

I get fairly nerd-sniped when it comes to build pipelines so happy to talk more concretely if you’d like to provide some more details!

just to give you the term to search for, these types of applications are called snippet managers. for example, https://snibox.github.io/

there’s a ton of them around. I don’t have a particular one that I recommend, since it’s not something I use in my workflow.

yep. they’re still here. they got smaller, and we call them “tracking pixels” now.

it’s just an image, which, server side, you can count the number of times it got loaded. easy to embed and no js required.

That’s interesting, okay. Is svn doing compression of those binaries for you?

Not to say “you’re holding it wrong”, but I’m curious about your workflow here. You clone these binaries every time you come back to a project?

I don’t get it, who in their right mind hosts development stuff on a Windows clunker?

Same question, but Subversion. Switch to git. Import your repos with git-svn.

Hey, thanks for that, I appreciate you sharing your list.

One option you can consider with fairmail and gmail is to use an “app password” to authenticate to IMAP, instead of oauth. That might work better when backing up with neo backup?

That’s an interesting suggestion, thanks! I might wind up trying that for android auto + google voice 🤔

Hmm, thanks for the suggestion… this looks like it might be mainly for only pixel devices? Or devices that have a LineageOS build? I might be frustrated enough with the problem to learn Nix, but I don’t want to be limited to particular hardware.

I don’t have a particular guide at the tip of my fingers, but I can share some recommendations based on my experience:

• prefer a phone with USB-c if you plan on connecting USB things to it. the otg adapters for micro-b are kinda hit and miss when it comes to keeping the phone connected to power as well.
• look out for clearances of those carrier locked prepaid phones from physical stores, you can get nice devices for nearly nothing
• whatever you’re running on the phone, make sure it starts at startup, so you don’t need to go launching everything if you reboot for some reason
• if the phone is"mission critical" e.g. random restart while in the middle of a print is unacceptable, turn off all the automatic updates and such.
• a VNC server has been helpful, to remotely poke at the phone if I’m too lazy to go do it physically
• get something that’ll keep the screen off the phone on. I’ve encountered reduced performance regardless of what battery optimizations I’ve turned off without doing that but YMMV depending on ROM.

I fully expect the screen thing and the batteries bring in there constantly charging to kill the phones I’m using eventually, but it’s something I expect and accept. my octoprint phones have been fine so far, for a bit over a year 🤷‍♂️

The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You’ve probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!

Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.

Why do you need to back up that server data? The great thing about joplin, is that the full content of your notes (and history) is distributed, like a git repo. As long as you have one device left with your notes, everything else can be bootstrapped from there. If your sync server burns down, start a new one and sync your notes to it again.

I use Firefox on all my devices and couldn’t be happier with it. I especially love how sync works: there’s options to both pull tabs from other devices, and push to them. Quite frequently I’d be just browsing on my phone and send a tab over to my laptop to deal with/read/act on when I’m sitting down at a bigger screen.

You can disable chrome in it’s app settings!

I’ve been very happy with roku tvs at home and a roku stick “to-go”. Very simple interface with minimal ads that you can block.

My point is, having PRs desn’t result in perfect code either. They might help sometimes, maybe 10% of the time if I’m being generous, but the rest of the time they are a hindrance. The problems people tend to try and solve with them, validation and indoctrination are better solved with a good CD pipeline, and pairing sessions.

If your team consists of people you don’t trust, that’s the problem to fix first.

The solution to that is pairing - spending a few hours collaborating with, and teaching this person will get them up to speed much faster than asynchronously nitpicking their code.

Mandatory pull requests + approvals within a team are a waste of everyone’s time.

firefox sync has worked pretty great for me, across all devices. I don’t self host it, but seems like once again, they’ve gotten it to the point where you can.

I agree. What I’m proposing is, if you go with that option, that you use a branch as a “single instance label”, pointing at commits within your main branch. Don’t use them as actual branches for additional environment-specific commits.

I would recommend you avoid relying on features of GitHub, and only use features of git. You never know when you might decide to switch repo hosting providers!

With that said, you’ve got a number of options: you can use tags or branches as “labels” to choose what’s applied to what environment, or depending on the flavor of IaC you’re using, have an entry point for each environment in your code which includes and parameterizes a common “environment” module.

Not only do we have password managers now, we also have OIDC. I can see a situation where a service pops up with no offering other than identity management/verification, and forum-like software can accept log-ins from that service.