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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It doesn’t fit the bill perfectly but I’ve been using Obsidian with the Tasks and Day Planner plugins. Obsidian is no longer open source but I still like it because you have great control over your own data.

    I use Syncthing to sync the notes between my phone and laptop (and select shared notes to the devices of my spouse).

    The Day Planner plugins allows tasks to be time blocked / scheduled on a timeline of the day. There is also a week view and you can easily move from day to day.

    You can sync your calendars so your calendar events automatically show on the timeline. Though I prefer to just check my calendar and enter the events manually.

    The Tasks plugin lets you give tasks future or recurring due dates with some pretty flexible logic.

    Aside from the day planning what I like the most is that I can also use this for journaling, to make project pages / dashboards, meeting minutes, and as a wiki. Take can live right with the appropriate information / context saving me from moving between multiple applications. I can save relevant attachments like emails in line with my notes and tasks just by dragging in the file (or directly dragging from an application like Outlook desktop).

    In my opinion the sky is the limit with Obsidian. What I’ve described can feel a little rough around the edges but it works and the ability to build out your own process is unmatched. There are Kanban board plugins, drawing plugins (Excalidraw is amazing), and as for a mind map you can draw them or you can use built in view to see how all your notes link together.

    I suggest watching some demo videos on Obsidian Day Planner plugin and Obsidian Tasks plugin, and Obsidian itself, and see what you think. You might be able to build out a system that works for you.


  • This post and article just looks like rage / click bait. Can we stop spreading crap like this?

    If I do the math of what a six day international trip to multiple locations on the other side of the planet would cost me, then account for the fact that there were 53 people on the plane (many who staff to be paid), RCMP security was required, yes the Prime Minister and officials probably stay in better accommodations and eat better food than I do, and this trip was completed for an official purpose, then this doesn’t really look like an outrageous expense at all.

    The article is ridiculous. It complains about $2,500 in official gifts, and quotes someone from a “Canadian taxpayers federation” about how inflation in Canada is so high the PM flies to Singapore for food. Boom, got’em. Sick burn. So is the article about official trip expenses or about inflation?

    It pisses me off because this type of rhetoric does nothing to address real problems. It dishonestly manufactures rage and distrust without proposing real solutions or progress.

    Big thumbs down.



  • I second the recommendation of using Jellyfin.

    Additionally you can use something like the Unified Remote app to make your phone control your computer instead of a mouse. Want to turn up the volume just use the volume rocker on your phone. You can also turn your phone screen into a large trackpad. Very convenient for watching media. I think there is an open source version called KDE Connect but I haven’t used it yet myself.


  • No idea. I’ve been slowly setting myself up to move abroad as the things that are important to me either don’t exist in Canada or are disappearing year after year.

    This comment isn’t meant to be flippant. I personally believe walkable cities, decent public transit, and decent public services are an important part of preventing social decay. Canada generally doesn’t have much of this left. Seeing public healthcare slip away (not just increasing privatization but even just degradation in quality of public care) feels like the last straw for me.

    I’m excited to explore new places later this year. Nowhere is perfect but certainly there are places with a better balance of positives, or so I suspect.


  • Background:

    I use Obsidian for journaling and knowledge management. Each page is saved as an individual .txt file rather than in some database which ensures continuity of my data even if I switch applications one day.

    I sync the files between my devices using Syncthing. Some of my notes are collaborative with others: by sorting my notes into specific folders and syncing select folders to select devices I have a notes library with a mix of personal and shared notes.

    Syncthing is good at managing file conflicts. It surfaces the conflict and lets you select which file should remain. It also has options for very good versioning control.

    Answer:

    So, to your question, I would love to contribute to Syncthing to provide an optional capability to merge content from two conflicting .txt files rather than selecting one or the other. This would greatly improve the collaborative experience when using Syncthing to manage notes in Obsidian or similar applications.

    I think there are a not-insignificant number of people who could get value from this. Syncthing is written in GO, and I’ve never contributed to an open source project before. I’m looking forward to giving it a shot but if someone else starts first that’s just fine with me. :)



  • I see betterment as a progression toward being satisfied or content more of the time. Now being content means different thing for different people, but I specifically feel it is not the same as chasing “happiness”.

    I can feel sad but content, or know that I’ve messed up but be content in my self evaluation and steps taken to do better. To me it’s all about crafting a better journey, the processes behind what I do, and good outcomes are just pleasant results of a better journey. For example being healthy might make me more confident in the interactions with people, or give me more energy to do more comfortably, but in practice the betterment tied to that might be finding a way to exercise in a way that I enjoy, and I can measure, and that I can improve upon over time.

    As for individualism vs. collectivism I think it’s a balance. I think hurting yourself because someone expects it is never good, but if you have extra capacity to help others that is very positive. I don’t think any person needs to feel like they are expected to move mountains, but as long as we all are careful to have only neutral or small positive impacts (not negative) then collectively we’ll be moving forward.

    As for society’s unhealthy priorities (consumerism is a big one): over the last several years I’ve been learning to try to think back to “first principals” with respect to what I want in my life and attempt to remove other people’s expectations and especially society’s expectations from the equation entirely. I choose to do things because I want to, or because it contributes to the rule of not being negative above. If I do choose to do anything only because society expects it, it’s only to better situate myself to further ignore society’s expectations in the future.




  • I think to many, these terms have lost their meaning already. I personally never really used them, nor do most of the people I know. People are just people. The only place I see this distinction so strongly made is in media, and only certain kinds of media. I’m sure though that this doesn’t represent everyone’s experience, or every location, I just wanted to share that I think in some places this is already fairly well accepted.

    I’ve had some great role models as a kid who were both biologically female and male, but the things they taught had nothing to do with gender. We have “they”, but I wish we had a better singular gender neutral pronoun in English. “They” can be confused with plural and “it” can sound very rude. I guess distinguishing between singular and plural isn’t critical… I just wish we had the ability to invent a new useful word and have it be widely accepted. So much of our society runs on precident and momentum sadly.


  • You’re describing a fancoil supplied with cool, regularly replaced, municipal water (normally this water would be a fully closed loop cooled with an air source or ground source heat pump). Your energy needs will just be a circulation pump. You’ll probably notice a little cooling but it depends on how cold the water is, the surface area of the radiator, and the flow rate of the water. It has the advantage of being low maintenance so give it a shot and perhaps build it in a way you can access the components and improve / experiment over time.

    Look into an approach / methodology called Passive House. Passive House focuses on making buildings that have near zero heating and cooling load. If you get the math right / design from scratch with this in mind you can make a Passive House in nearly any climate. Common modern single-family-home building techniques are generally not at all closely aligned with building a Passive House.

    When trying to keep a house cool, here are the things I would focus on (in order of priority):

    1. Reduce solar heating impacts: either place shade trees or awnings to block direct sun on the entire structure (or the windows at a minimum).

    2. Build a highly-insulating enclosure (~R30 walls and ~R50 roof at a minimum, but you could push that further). If you are set on building with lumber you still can, you could building an offset double-stud wall filled with insulation, and of course an appropriate amount of exterior insulation a well. The goal in addition to insulation quantity is to reduce thermal bridging. Consider a “simple” house layout. Avoid too many corners / details / flourishes that add construction complexity.

    3. Utilize free-cooling first: as your first stage of cooling, open large windows close to the ground and open clearstory windows in the roof / top of a stairwell or similar, it really depends on the layout of the home (and ideally the layout is design around this concept). This allows the heat to be drawn out naturally via convection. Include ceiling fans for comfort. This approach will work until outdoor air temperatures get quite high. Once free-cooling will not longer work

    Once free-cooling will not longer be effective you can transition to mechanical cooling. Close all windows and cool your space either a high-efficiency air-source heat pump (and / or your free-cooling municipal water fan coil).

    1. Similar to the design methodology to encourage natural air / heat flow out clearstory windows or “solar chimneys”, also consider just having higher ceilings where heat can pool but you won’t feel it. Your exhaust should pull from these areas.

    2. Dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS): don’t design your mechanical ventilation system to cool using air (aside from the free-cooling described earlier). It’s inefficient. Hydronic heating and cooling (moving heat with water) is much more efficient. That means heat pumps for heating as well as cooling. Mechanical ventilation rates should be the bare minimum, just enough for fresh air but not for temperature control. Perhaps look at flow rates included in ASHRAE 62.1 or a standard more focused on residential homes. Also, your supply air can be separately ducted to each room (not a shared trunk), each being much smaller than what you see in a “normal” house, this gives more control for every single room.

    3. ERV: of course you’ll want to install an energy recovery ventilator to capture what heat / “cold” you’ve worked to produce before instead of throwing it away along with your exhaust air.

    4. For heating your domestic water, get a heat pump hot water heater (with tank). Instead of making heat it takes heat from the surrounding room and puts it into your domestic water tank. That means it “outputs cold” into the surrounding room, the opposite of a gas or electric resistance water heater.

    5. Earth tubes: to naturally pre-condition your supply air by running it through the ground first. Another form of free-cooling but useful when the house is “buttoned up” because outdoor air temperatures are too high. This is when you’re only supplying minimum ventilation air.

    6. Limit the things in the house that make heat. Efficient refrigerators / freezers (see energy star website), computers that are no more powerful than what you need, etc. Place these things in areas where the heat won’t bug you as much.

    Hope this helps.






  • TL;DR: You’re correct, in my professional opinion.

    The catalyst in most hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive and have a limited life. Hydrogen will mostly be sourced as a waste product from oil and gas extraction (though it could be done with clean electricity and electrolysis), that’s why oil and gas companies are becoming so interested in pushing hydrogen (see the successful “clean” natural gas campaigns, but depending on how you measure it natural gas can result in more emissions than coal and is just a bunch of greenwashing. Same would happen with hydrogen in my opinion). Additionally, we’d have to build out an entire hydrogen delivery infrastructure that serves only that purpose. We’ll just end up with commercial fuel stations like we have now. Fuel cells (for many fuels) can make sense in very remote applications, or industrial applications where specific waste gasses can be turned into supplemental electricity right on site.

    Battery-electric on the other hand is much more flexible and fits into our existing infrastructure better. It’s not just power dense batteries for cars; it’s (maybe gravity) batteries for communities, safe and long-lived (maybe salt) batteries for homes, better batteries for our electronics. Research in one area can support improvement of the others. They all connect to the same electricity grid so the energy can be shared among applications. Batteries play a role in decentralizing and democratizing energy (today you can put PV on your house, charge your car or home battery, use your car to power your house in a power outage, etc). As mentioned we can use greener and cleaner batteries (even completely non-chemical) in some applications, and one day we can hopefully get to the point of using ultra- or super-capacitors in place of high-density chemical batteries. In the mean time we have batteries that work and are getting quite affordable, we can transition to this solution now without waiting for a miracle breakthrough, then continue to iterate the technology over time.