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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The cheapest options I’ve found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.

    Over the years I’ve picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of them.

    I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it’s not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.

    On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)

    I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.






  • If you go into KDE’s settings > Sound section, what devices does it show, and what type of output (like “Digital Stereo” or “Pro Audio”) are they set to?

    Once in a blue moon, my audio output will get mysteriously changed to a format that does nothing, or the audio controller will go *poof* and I need to manually re-enable it. It’s rare, and I’ve never been able to pin down the exact cause, but it seems more likely after I’ve been connecting and disconnecting alternative audio devices, like my PS4 game controller (which also reads as an audio device due to its headset port), USB microphone (same deal), or USB headphone amp.

    After all these years it’s still a pain point.



  • Technically, Rebirth (part 2) ends at the same place in the story as disc 1 of the original. Disc 3 of the original was mostly the same as disc 2, since you could do a lot of side content early or late. They just needed another disc to fit all the FMV scenes.

    So the general flow of the remake trilogy is:

    Remake: Midgar. In the original, this was the first 5-8 hours for a typical player, and included roughly 1/3 of the whole game’s dialogue, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds at first, even though you can speed through Midgar in like two hours if you rush.

    Rebirth: Open world up to the “big event” that ended disc 1.

    Revelation: Everything after the “big event”, so discs 2 and 3. (Possibly also adapting some aspects of Advent Children and/or Dirge of Cerberus, but we’ll just have to wait and see.)

    There are a couple things that were moved around. For example, we didn’t go to Rocket Town in Rebirth, while that was much earlier in the original. Cid appeared in Rebirth but was not a playable party member, so they’ve reorganized it a bit to focus on Cid’s whole story in Revelation.



  • vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

    I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

    I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.