@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social
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mrchrisadams

@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social

Science & justice. Also: coffee, cities, UX & code. Aghast at all the typos in my tweets. I'm an organiser at climateAction.tech, and I work at the greenwebfoundation.org. He/Him.
mrchrisadams on most of the social networks

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mrchrisadams, to random
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Dear Internet friends who use Linux. I use Mac OS X, and I expect to for a while yet, but it's sensible to look for a plan B, and the alternatives are getting better over time.

What is the closest thing to https://www.alfredapp.com with similar attention to detail with regards to stellar UX and the like?

I value my time, and don't mind paying for stuff - I'd totally buy into something like https://setapp.com for Linux apps if it existed. I haven't found anything similar yet though.

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Motorised rotary clothes dryer feels a bit Chindogu, and I’m a little skeptical of “recouping your costs in one year”, but if nothing else this looks pretty entertainingm and if it really saves 99% percent of the energy vs a tumble dryer, I can see the appeal. It'd still be many times more efficient than a heat pump tumble dryer if you have one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsQ1HXJrTv0&t=4s

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@janl yeah, I should have shared the link to the site I found this on. There's a bit more context - it's from a Dutch inventor, Ans Clements, and its a tiny dutch company. It's fun story tho

https://www.trendwatching.com/innovations/shrinking-laundrys-co2-footprint-a-motorized-rotary-clothesline-for-indoor-use

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Wow, I was wondering why DDG was playing up this morning. If you come across a good write up, would you share a link when it's live?

This is a good example of how much consolidation has happened over the last ten years, when most of the significant search alternatives to Google went down because of being reliant on Bing.

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/112490675514726805

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@frabcus it turns out there are loads! This post is an extensive overview of the main ones

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Perfect, perfect response to the UK election date announcement https://mastodon.world/@CountBinface/112485661600596055

Floppy, to selfhosted
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Looking for advice: Thinking of binning my home-made Ansible setup of various docker containers in favour of something more off the shelf.

Any recommendations for user-friendly orchestration systems that work well across multiple nodes so that I can cluster my various raspberries pi?

I think Portainer can do it, are there others?

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@Floppy we’ve been using nomad at work and I’m a fan in general, if you want something more dynamic than ansible but simpler than k8s.

This post is a few years old, but gives some useful background, and the documentation for Nomad is stellar

https://mrkaran.dev/posts/home-server-nomad/

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Internet friends who use MongoDB: While I've used MongoDB on various projects, many of my opinions are based on using it in the mid-to-late 2010’s, and given it’s the 2020's and MongoDB is a larger, and presumably more mature company, I figure it would publish software with more sane defaults now.

If you've seen a good piece that basically says “we're grown up now, and these are the things people used to complain about that we've fixed”, would you share a link?

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Dear internet nerds who use environment variables and Docker more than I do:

have you come across any linting tool explicitly for .env files, to catch the gotchas that await when you them across different platforms?

I learned the hard way last week how Docker takes a dim view of connection strings wrapped in quotes for example, when trying to dockerize and debug a django project, and I’d really like future me to avoid that footgun again in future if possible.

mrchrisadams, to berlin
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Hi folks. I've been with Vodafone since 2017, and after two weeks of a fibre connection being own and being fobbed off three times with support staff saying a technician will call me back to arrange a visit (they didn’t), I'm looking to move find another provider for broadband and mobile.

I've settled for easybell at home.

I have a query about eSim based, no new phone, rolling one-month mobile providers tho. Who do you use?

Fraenk didn't work out for me.

https://fraenk.de/

/1

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Here's what I'm looking for:

  • eSim support (I have an iphone SE from 2020)
  • good tethering support
  • rolling 1 month contract (no 2yr BS)
  • decent coverage and roaming (probably re-using an existing network, like Voda or Telekom etc)
  • keen pricing
  • 10-20GB data / mo
  • the option to purchase more data if need be

It would nice to not to have to deal with some ridiculous useless TOBI-style chatbot, and easily reach humans too.

I can only think of LIDL. Anyone else?

/2

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@janl my wife tried it last week, as a stopgap so she had connectivity (her usual contract doesn't have much data)

I have a vodafone contract, and Fraenk was slower, as well as tethering support being patchy.

I had multiple problems connecting to it from my macbook, as did she. This isn't an eSim only problem - as we I was in Thailand recently for my brother's wedding thing, and tethering via a second eSim worked fine there, but not here.

No guidance in their support site either.

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@janl actually, blau.de on the monthly contract thing looked promising. I'll read up a bit on them. Thanks!

mrchrisadams,
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for anyone following along, I wrote this into a post. I'll update with who I ended up going with. TBH, Blau is looking pretty good right now - the main thing stopping me trying them out with an e-SIM Ifor a month is the 30 EUR connection fee.

https://rtl.chrisadams.me.uk/2024/05/what-i-want-from-a-mobile-provider-in-2024/

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@hynek Yeah, that's what turned me on to e-sims in the first place! I used Airalo in Thailand when i went there for my brother's wedding, and it totally changed how I think about phone contracts. It makes switching so much easier, and I can see why incumbent providers were so slow to adopt it.

I'll bear the ref link in mind in future though, danke.

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

This is an industrial designed exercise bike from Lithuania that can store 2KWh of electricity generated by your own exercise.

The electricity can then be used for loads of stuff - it has a bunch of DC outputs, like USB-C (up to 60W) and USB-A, and AC outputs (can output up to 2KW - enough for an oven!)

It can also be fed from a solar panel, or the mains.

It’s about 3K EUR, so not much more than a high end Peloton , but obvs serving a very different market…

https://www.tukasev.com/en/

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

This piece about how uncompetitive US and European EVs are compared to what’s being made in China is a real wake up call to anyone not familiar with the standard of cars “over there”.

It’s like the 1970s all over again where incumbents just thought they could get away with focusing on high price, high margin big cars, ignoring what customers wanted, and ended up losing market share to better made, more affordable Japanese cars.
https://mastodon.energy/@jgkoomey/112412602767549978

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

hi @akshatrathi, I'm not sure if you or any of your team is following this story. It's about Microsoft employees going public about their work to use GenAI to accelerate oil and gas extraction after years of working internally to bring about change. Seemed up your street.

Would make a fascinating Zero episode:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7193896100448071680/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A7193896100448071680%2C7193978648696090624)&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7193978648696090624%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7193896100448071680

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

What are good options for configuring something somewhere to make an HTTP request to a specified URL on a schedule?

I've used cron on a VPS, GitHub scheduled actions, Val Town and Google Cloud Scheduler in the past

I'm looking for more options like that - specifically interested in cheap, reliable, easy to use and likely to stick around for a long time

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@simon I've been looking at https://www.windmill.dev for this. It's a free hosted service, and if your needs grow there's support, but it's also not too complicated to run self-hosted if need be.

Here's the link to the doc about scheduling, and it addresses a number of painpoints from using a VPS directly

https://www.windmill.dev/docs/core_concepts/scheduling

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Tip for my future self, and anyone listening. No matter how late you feel you are behind on sending one, always schedule an email newsletter to go out in at least 30 mins time if you can, rather than to be sent right away.

You'll almost always see a typo you missed when checking, or remember something you forgot to add, and the time buffer is a lifesaver.

jgkoomey, to random
@jgkoomey@mastodon.energy avatar

Speaking of utilities overestimating load growth, @catalystcoop @chrisnelder : https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/microsoft-says-georgia-may-be-overestimating-data-center-load-growth

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@jgkoomey I don't know the US context so well. Are there any modelling groups modelling these demand scenarios in the open to make some of the assumptions easier to see?

There's some some discussion about the use of open models for making funding decisions about hydrogen projects (see below), and more open, or at least modelling that is more open to challenge seems like the thing most PUCs would benefit from.

https://groups.google.com/g/openmod-initiative/c/p-BqrV28MZQ?pli=1

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Dear Fediverse: Anyone here switched from NordVPN to Mullvad and have any experiences worth sharing?

FWIW, I mainly use Apple devices (Macbook, iPhone, iPad), but some linux boxent to, although the constant upselling is a bit annoying.

I’m considering a move to Mullvad because they seem a bit more transparent and trustworthy, even if on a two year plan NordVPN is a tad cheaper.

FWIW, I mainly use Apple devices (Macbook, iPhone, iPad), but some linux boxen at work and for hobby projects.

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent Thanks Terence - on an annual sub, Mozilla’s VPN is basically the same price as from Mullvad, and offers the same features with a slightly tighter integration into Firefox.

I'll have a look, and given I'm using Firefox anyway, I might go that route instead.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/features

Wow, a useful, on-topic reply in the Fediverse - happy days! 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

Aww Yiss! My workshop submission for was accepted - “Greening Digital: how to set up your django app with green coding metrics in CI”.

You can see my outline below if you're considering attending.

https://pretalx.evolutio.pt/djangocon-europe-2024/talk/review/W3RUZKC7LT9EKPKYECNZR8H7EN3CHK8M

Now I gotta figure out how the best way to get from Berlin to Vigo in Spain - maybe one day we'll have a Django train, the way the k8s folks do with https://kubetrain.io

andrew, to random
@andrew@aeracode.org avatar

Since it's in Django News this week I should probably mention I put up a library for writing single-file ("Flask style") Django applications: https://github.com/andrewgodwin/django-singlefile

It's not a lot of code, but it lets me quickly go use Django's templates, forms and generic views easily for things that don't need a backing database. You can see the app I'm developing with it here: https://github.com/andrewgodwin/emf-equipment/

mrchrisadams,
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

@andrew this so cool! It looks like you’re using grist instead of Airtable / Google docs in your sample app. How have you found it? I’ve been meaning to try it out for a while.

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