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Just upgraded straight from nixos 19.11 to 23.11. Flawless!

Power on my dell laptop is getting wonky so I'm pulling the thinkpad x201 out of retirement. Hadn't booted it since 2019! For some reason the wifi wasn't working so connected it to wired ethernet.

Updated the channel to 23.11 and did nixos-rebuild switch. Had to fix a few things where packages no longer exist or options have changed. Rebooted and wifi is working now!

What other OS could you upgrade like that?

1
Stable, consistent workstation recommendations?
  • nixos is great - as long as the software you need is in nixpkgs, and it usually is. reinstallation is almost never necessary. You can switch your system to the unstable channel, and if you get tired of that, back to stable again, no problem. Experiment with software and remove it without a trace left in your system. If you mess up your config, you can roll back to the previous config in the bootup menu. Your system config is in a text file which you can put into source control if you wish, which allows you to replicate your config onto another machine, or revert to what you had 6 months ago, etc.

  • Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?
  • Just like mercedes 'full self driving' this sounds like its on limited routes where there's been extensive testing. I don't expect truck driving to go full auto on arbitrary roads in the next few years. The tech is not there yet.

  • A colleague sent a video of a murder at work today and I'm still seething. What rights do I have? (UK)
  • The consequences are 100% on him and 0% on you.

    He chose to be a douche and is presuming on others to keep this under wraps so he can continue being abusive. Playing along with his secrecy game only helps the abuser. You have absolutely no obligation to keep this private, and moreover you have digital evidence in the form of a text message.

  • What laptop do you use/recommend?
  • I've had a dell precision 5520 for several years now. Its been solid from a software support standpoint. Downside is the stock batteries swell up; I've settled for lower-capacity aftermarket batteries instead. On my second keyboard, second charge port and second power supply. Unfortunately a screw fell out and then the hinge broke as a result, and charging has gotten wonky, maybe since the charge port's attachment point broke too. If you put the charge cable in just the right place it'll charge, but sometimes I can't find that position.

    Pluses:

    • 32g ram
    • nvidia graphic accel
    • replaceable keyboard, battery, memory
    • touchscreen, webcam, etc all work.
    • high dpi screen
    • good linux support.
    • daily driver for 5+ years

    Minuses:

    • USB3 dock doesn't charge enough, still needs power supply.
    • front edge of the laptop is a bit sharp
    • swelling stock batteries, keyboard and mouse gradually stop working.
    • should have used locktite on screws, some fell out and now hinge, power wonky.

    I also have a thinkpad w520. Super solid, but gets hot when the gpu is enabled. Probably needs a thermal paste refresh. Still on the original keyboard. On second power supply, first one's cable is getting sparky. Slow compared to the dell, short battery life, very heavy, still working though!

  • Remember back in the day in Windows when your mouse would just slide to the left for no reason?
    • noisy mouse sensor
    • threshold setting.
      • above threshold: must be a mouse movement.
      • below threshold: its noise, ignore.

    You'd usually want the threshold to be low to get more mouse sensitivity. But too low and it starts doing stuff like moving to the left with no input.

  • play store is a nightmare
  • Ah, the "play store". Happy playground of spending! Starting off on the wrong foot with just the name. Of course its a trashed up ad spew bucket and dark pattern shitehole.

  • Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash
  • I blame the politicians like Richard Shelby actively preventing any other technology from being used or even considered. The lack of zeal was from the people in charge of the money, who clearly had no interest in space beyond its ability to get them and their pals larger McMansions on a golf course somewhere. Myopic, stupid and corrupt assholes.

  • Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash
  • The biggest downside I see to the shuttle is how it blocked anything better. Spaceflight got stuck in a local maximum for 30 years, possibly solely to enrich certain congressional districts and well connected contractors. True reuse is needed to make manned space travel possible to more than a few elite astronauts, and the shuttle never had that.

  • foss audio slowdowner?
  • Autohotkeys is cool but its a windows prog, so won't work for me on linux.

    When you speed up/slow down the recording, it has to process the whole file. That takes a while. You can't just slide a slider to different pitches to see what's right. Then you have to save the file someplace, think of a file name, put it somewhere reasonable etc. Or remember the pitch and do everything over again next time.

  • What movie trailer ruined the movie with how much it revealed?
  • I saw Get Out without knowing anything about it. Very effective movie if you were expecting a romantic comedy like Meet the Parents, lol. If I'd seen a trailer I wouldn't have been nearly as blindsided by the horror turn of events.

  • foss audio slowdowner?

    I'm looking for an audio app for learning tunes by ear. Ideally would have:

    1- slow playback, without adjusting pitch. 2- loop selection - to play a segment of the audio over and over 3- pitch adjustment (some old recordings are out of tune)

    Anyone have one they like? For android the closest I've found is Fossify music player, which offers feature 1.

    For PC, audacity has all these features, but its pretty clunky to use.

    19
    OSS calendar servers/clients that don't suck?

    Just missed a meeting today because I accepted an event on Thunderbird this morning, that should have synced to Nextcloud, and then to my phone running a calendar app from 'simplemobiletools'. Never made it. After I missed the meeting I didn't see the event on nextcloud, then went to look at the event on thunderbird, and now lo and behold its on nextcloud, two hours after it was over. Cool. Still not on the phone.

    Anyone have a solid calendar stack they like? I'd like to reliably get from emailed invite to alert on my phone.

    27
    Recommend me an audio app for android?

    I've just been using the audio player on ES File Explorer. It tends to forget all its state and has various other UI problems.

    I'm interested in an audio player that will keep playlists for me, and remembers its state so I can resume playback. My main use case is to cue up podcasts for driving, so I want it to save my place when I don't finish listening to a whole episode during my drive. Saving my place in multiple playlists would be great too, like an audiobook and a series of podcast episodes would both have saved state so I could switch between them.

    Ideally it would also activate playback whenever the phone connects to a particular bluetooth device - my car audio. The use case is I hop in the car, turn on my bluetooth receiver, and audio resumes without me needing to take the phone out of my pocket. Turn off bluetooth, playback stops.

    16
    getting into harmony lines lately

    Me and a buddy have worked up some southwestern tunes lately, that are usually played with twin fiddles doing harmony. I'm playing the second fiddle parts on guitar, and now I've started working on harmony for other fiddle tunes. I record the tune melody and then loop it while I try various harmony approaches.

    In bluegrass sometimes its hard to keep the chords in mind when I'm taking a break - especially if I just learned the tune. But it feels like this harmony thing is helping with chord awareness and unlocking some interesting sounds even in my solo break playing.

    Anyone else have this experience in harmony playing? Or have other ways of keeping the changes in mind during breaks.

    1
    A term for lack of perspective on your own contextual knowledge?

    Is there a term for that phenomenon where someone gets so far into a topic that they become unaware of how much contextual knowledge they have about it?

    Then they write some inscrutable technical docs, use unexplained acronyms, or tell a story about “he”, "she’ and/or “they” where you have no idea who they’re talking about.

    12
    Borrow checker woes - lifetime of borrowed var vs closure.

    Ed: solved with the help of the async_stream crate.

    I'm struggling with the borrow checker!

    My problem: I'm using actix-web and rusqlite. I want to return an unlimited number of records from an rusqlite query, and actix provides a Stream trait for that kind of thing. You just impl the trait and return your records from a poll_next() fn.

    On the rusqlite side, there's this query_map that returns an iterator of records from a query. All I have to do is smush these two features together.

    So the plan is to put the iterator returned by query_map into a struct that impls Stream. Problem is the lifetime of a var used by query_map. How to make the var have the same lifetime as the iterator??

    So here's the code:

    ``` pub struct ZkNoteStream<'a, T> { rec_iter: Box<dyn Iterator<Item = T> + 'a>, }

    // impl of Stream just calls next() on the iterator. This compiles fine. impl<'a> Stream for ZkNoteStream<'a, serde_json::Value> { type Item = serde_json::Value;

    fn poll_next(mut self: Pin<&mut Self>, cx: &mut Context<'_>) -> Poll<Option<Self::Item>> { Poll::Ready(self.rec_iter.next()) } }

    // init function to set up the ZkNoteStream. impl<'a> ZkNoteStream<'a, Result<ZkListNote, rusqlite::Error>> { pub fn init( conn: &'a Connection, user: i64, search: &ZkNoteSearch, ) -> Result<Self, Box<dyn Error>> { let (sql, args) = build_sql(&conn, user, search.clone())?;

    let sysid = user_id(&conn, "system")?; let mut pstmt = conn.prepare(sql.as_str())?;

    // Here's the problem! Borrowing pstmt. let rec_iter = pstmt.query_map(rusqlite::params_from_iter(args.iter()), move |row| { let id = row.get(0)?; let sysids = get_sysids(&conn, sysid, id)?; Ok(ZkListNote { id: id, title: row.get(1)?, is_file: { let wat: Option<i64> = row.get(2)?; wat.is_some() }, user: row.get(3)?, createdate: row.get(4)?, changeddate: row.get(5)?, sysids: sysids, }) })?;

    Ok(ZkNoteStream::<Result<ZkListNote, rusqlite::Error>> { rec_iter: Box::new(rec_iter), }) } }

    ```

    And here's the error:

    error[E0515]: cannot return value referencing local variable `pstmt` --> server-lib/src/search.rs:170:5 | 153 | let rec_iter = pstmt.query_map(rusqlite::params_from_iter(args.iter()), move |row| { | ----- `pstmt` is borrowed here ... 170 | / Ok(ZkNoteStream::<Result<ZkListNote, rusqlite::Error>> { 171 | | rec_iter: Box::new(rec_iter), 172 | | }) | |______^ returns a value referencing data owned by the current function

    So basically it boils down to pstmt getting borrowed in the query_map call. It needs to have the same lifetime as the closure. How do I ensure that?

    16
    Anyone remember RPAN from reddit? Does the fediverse offer anything similar?

    I miss RPAN! I could connect with my phone and stream any time, and there would be viewers, if only a few at times. Sometimes a lot though. It was great practice playing for an audience. Lots of great feedback and interactions, helped get me through the pandemic.

    What's out there in the fediverse that's similar, if anything?

    19
    is there such a thing as too many pickups?

    Does having too many pickups affect guitar tone, or sustain? Let's suppose a guitar has eight pickups while another one has just one of the same type. Would there be a tone difference, if the mega-pickup one was only using one of its pickups in a similar position to the single pickup guitar? Or would the effect of the extra pickups be too small to notice?

    7
    Lemmy Support @lemmy.ml pr06lefs @lemmy.ml
    Can't find a lemmy community from another server?

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2365391

    > I'm on lemmy.ml, and I want to subscribe to https://lemmy.world/c/songaweek. There it says to put !songaweek@lemmy.world into search on my instance to subscribe, but it doesn't turn up anything. Anyone know why this might be, and/or how to work around it?

    7
    Can't find a lemmy community from another server?

    I'm on lemmy.ml, and I want to subscribe to https://lemmy.world/c/songaweek. There it says to put !songaweek@lemmy.world into search on my instance to subscribe, but it doesn't turn up anything. Anyone know why this might be, and/or how to work around it?

    13
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PR
    pr06lefs @lemmy.ml
    Posts 11
    Comments 161