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Joined 22 days ago
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Cake day: May 1st, 2025

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  • I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn’t have the “dodgy” stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.

    Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.

    I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…

    However, due to how it’s evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.


  • I assume you basically want protection against disasters, but not high uptime.

    (E.g. you likely can live with a week of unavailability if after a week you can recover the data.)

    The key is about proper backups. For example, my Nextcloud server is running in a datacenter. Every night I replicate the data to a computer running at home. Every week I run a backup to a USB drive that I keep in a third location. Every month I run a backup to a USB drive on the computer I mentioned at home.

    So I could lose two locations and still have my data.

    There is much written about backup strategies, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_backup_rule … Just start with your configuration, think what can go wrong and what would happen, and add redundancy until you are OK with the risks.





  • I dunno, I still have a soft spot for Proxmox. I want ZFS, so it’s about the only game in town with support.

    (TrueNAS Scale looks good, but it would increase too much my Hetzner costs, because of their requirement of having a dedicated root pool. And I don’t want an LTS distro that supports root-on-ZFS “oficially”. That narrows the field quite a bit.)

    (For work and for my workstations, I’m very pleased with Incus on top of Debian… but that’s because I don’t need ZFS on those.)




  • I discovered Open Food Facts very recently. I was supersurprised because the mobile app is very neat, and I didn’t expect there would be so many products (edit: in Spain). I’ve sent two contributions so far.

    Also, you can download their database. If I had some time, I’d try to run some queries on it. (I’m on a low sodium diet and sometimes you find the most unexpected products with little salt, but it’s time consuming.)

    edit: also, I forgot, the app is on F-Droid, another nice touch.





  • I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

    Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

    Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

    (You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)



  • Huh, what?

    I see in your link that that image has support for KasmVNC, which is great and you could use to make Emacs work…

    But the whole point of VS Code is that it can run in a browser and not use a remote desktop solution- which is always going to be a worse experience than a locally-rendered UI.

    I kinda expect someone to package Emacs with a JS terminal, or with a browser-friendly frontend, but I’m always very surprised that this does not exist. (It would be pretty cool to have a Git forge that can spawn an Emacs with my configuration on a browser to edit a repository.)





  • I was going to mention ZFS, but I suspect Raspberries are too weak for ZFS?

    If you can use ZFS in both sides, send/receive is the bomb. (I use it for my backups.) However, I’m not sure how well encryption would work for your purpose. IIRC, last time I looked at it, if you wanted an encrypted replica, the source dataset should be encrypted, which did not make me happy.

    I’d love to work on making NASes “great” for non-technical people. I feel it’s key. Sending encrypted backups through peers is one of my personal obsessions. It should be possible for people to buy two NAS, then set up encrypted backups over the Internet with a simple procedure. I wish TrueNAS Scale enabled that- right now it’s the closest thing that exists, I think.