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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Your battery drains more the more you activity use the device. Shocking…

    If it is your phone just uninstall those apps, then you cannot use them. If the devices main point is those apps like gaming on the switch what do you expect? I think the only real problem here is the switch’s lack of customizability so you have no trade off between game quality and battery life like you can on something like the steam deck.



  • So, if you just use the system API, then this means logging with syslog(3). Learn how to use it.

    This is old advice. These days just log to stdout, no need for your process to understand syslog, systemd, containers and modern systems just capture stdout and forward that where it needs to do. Then all applications can be simple and it us up to the system to handle them in a consistent way.

    NOTICE level: this will certainly be the level at which the program will run when in production

    I have never see anyone use this log level ever. Most use or default to Info or Warn. Even the author later says

    I run my server code at level INFO usually, but my desktop programs run at level DEBUG.

    If your message uses a special charset or even UTF-8, it might not render correctly at the end, but worst it could be corrupted in transit and become unreadable.

    I don’t know if this is true anymore. UTF-8 is ubiquitous these days and I would be surprised if any logging system could not handle it, or at least any modern one. I am very tempted to start adding some emoji to my logs to find out though.

    User 54543 successfully registered e-mail [email protected]

    Now that is a big no no. Never ever log PII data if you don’t want a world of hurt later on.

    2013-01-12 17:49:37,656 [T1] INFO c.d.g.UserRequest User plays {‘user’:1334563, ‘card’:‘4 of spade’, ‘game’:23425656}

    I do not like that at all. The message should not contain json. Most logging libraries let you add context in a consistent way and can output the whole log line in Json. Having escaped json in json because you decided to add json manually is a pain, just use the tools you are given properly.

    Add timestamps either in UTC or local time plus offset

    Never log in local time. DST fucks shit up when you do that. Use UTC for everything and convert when displayed if needed, but always store dates in UTC.

    Think of Your Audience

    Very much this. I have seen far too many error message that give fuck all context to the problem and require diving through source code to figure out the hell went wrong. Think about how logs will be read without the context of the source code at hand.







  • They do mention it on that page:

    However, if presented with a valid order from a Swiss court involving a case of criminal activity that is against Swiss law, Proton Mail can be compelled to share account metadata (but not message contents or attachments) with law enforcement.

    The only ever claim to encrypt message contents and attachments. And explicitly call out account meta data here as something they can hand over if requested by law enforcement. They also mention they are not good vs targeted and governmental level attacks:

    There are, however, some risks for users facing a strong adversary, such as a government focusing all its resources on a very specific target.

    And explicitly mention they might be compelled to log and give up information like ip adresses:

    if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.




  • If they can make it such that you can have a placeholder Sony account that can’t access all PSN features, for the sole purpose to play this and other Sony games on Steam, that anyone in the world can access, that would be an acceptable compromise to me.

    If they did that then what is the point in requiring a login at all… just remove the damned feature that is not required and very few want. We know it is not required as the game has been working fine for months without it. There is zero need for you to need a login for this game. Except that sony wants more user information they can sell to others.


  • subvolumes are integral to btrfs. You cannot have a layer like luks between them. You can encrypt the whole partition with luks before btrfs or you can encrypt specific directories after btrfs with something like encfs or truecrypt, though doing so loses some of the benefits of btrfs as it can no longer see your individual files.

    If you wanted just /home encrypted with luks it would need to be a separate partition (which you could then have btrfs inside with subvolumns on that). Though IMO that gets a bit complicated - I would just opt for encrypting everything (except boot) on the root partition and have one btrfs fs on that partition with as many subvolumes inside that as you like.


  • The Linux directory system is a single tree from the root /. You can mount any filesystem to any directory inside it to extend it and have all writes to that location be handled by that FS. This is all irrespective of what filesystem the is present at that location in the tree. It does not matter if it is BTRFS, ext4 or anything else mounting a filesystem into the directory structure is handled by the kernel separately from the FS implementation. So, yes, you can mount any partition that contains a filesystem to /home/user no matter what you have done with / or even /home.

    But, any writes to that location will be handled by the filesystem driver for that partition. So any subvolumes or anything else the main filesystem/partition has wont be available inside that directory. You can have a BTRFS filesystem mounted there from a separate partition if you want. Though a big benefit of BTRFS is the ability to use subvolumes instead of full partitions so you are not segregating the space on the disk (ie, any subvolume can use what space it requires and you wont have one running out of space because you didn’t make it large enough). So if you are going for BTRFS subvolumes I would just have one main partition and use subvolumes to split up the space if you wish. Though really the only benefit to that is you can snapshot them separately and I think you can set different quotas and settings on each one.


  • Whatever language you chose you might want to also look at the htmx JS library. It lets you write in your html snippets better interactivity without actually needing to write JS. It basically lets you do things like when you click on an element, it can make a request to your server and replace some other element with the contents your server responds with - all with attributes on HTML tags instead of writing JS. This lets you keep all the state on the backend and lets you write more backend logic without only relying on full page refreshes to update small sections of the page.

    For a backend language I would use rust as that is what I am most familiar with now and enjoy using the most. Most languages are adequate at serving backend code though so it is hard to go wrong with anything that you enjoy using. Though with rust I tend to find I have fewer issues when I deploy something as appose to other languages which can cause all sorts of runtime errors as they let you ignore the error paths by default.


  • Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!

    Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.

    There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.



  • Yup, this is part of what’s lead me to advocate for SRP (the single responsibility principle).

    Even that gets overused and abused. My big problem with it is what is a single responsibility. It is poorly defined and leads to people thinking that the smallest possible thing is one responsibility. But when people think like that they create thousands of one to three line functions which just ends up losing the what the program is trying to do. Following logic through deeply nested function calls IMO is just as bad if not worst than having everything in a single function.

    There is a nice middle ground where SRP makes sense but like all patterns they never talk about where that line is. Overuse of any pattern, methodology or principle is a bad thing and it is very easy to do if you don’t think about what it is trying to achieve and when applying it no longer fits that goal.

    Basically, everything in moderation and never lean on a single thing.


  • Refactoring should not be a separate task that a boss can deny. You need to do feature X, feature X benefits from reworking some abstraction a bit, then you rework that abstraction before starting on feature X. And then maybe refactor a bit more after feature X now you know what it looks like. None of that should take substantially longer, and saves vast amounts of time later on if you don’t include it as part of the feature work.

    You can occasionally squeeze in a feature without reworking things first if time for something is tight, but you will run into problems if you do this too often and start thinking refactoring is a separate task to feature work.


  • “Best practices” might help you to avoid writing worse code.

    TBH I am not sure about this. I have seen many “Best practices” make code worst not better. Not because the rules themselves are bad but people take them as religious gospel and apply them to every situation in hopes of making their code better without actually looking at if it is making their code better.

    For instance I see this a lot in DRY code. While the rules themselves are useful to know and apply they are too easily over applied removing any benefit they originally gave and result in overly abstract code. The number of times I have added duplication back into code to remove a layer of abstraction that was not working only to maybe reapply it in a different way, often keeping some duplication.

    Suddenly requirements change and now it’s bad code.

    This only leads to bad code when people get to afraid to refactor things in light of the new requirements.Which sadly happens far to often. People seem to like to keep what was there already and follow existing patterns even well after they are no longer suitable. I have made quite a lot of bad code better by just ripping out the old patterns and putting back something that better fits the current requirements - quite often in code I have written before and others have added to over time.