Any suggestions for cheap row cover material that we can use year after year?

My partner is sewing a row cover out of burlap and it better be effective and last a long time, because damn a lot of engineering is going into this! It's going to be super dope though.

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I think this is it. I don't want to say no to the things I'm doing. I also don't want to say no to a bunch of things that I do turn down.

Perhaps it's time to raise the bar again.

I think when I get done (or to a good stopping point) with a couple of the projects I'm working on I'll use that time to double down on the things that remain.

'96 Legacy with an EJ20T swap. To be fair, it is frequently is towing a trailer for picking up a cubic yard of compost, mulch, lumber, etc. Plus I think there's a small leak in the fuel line somewhere that lets fuel slowly evaporate.

I'm going to put some effort into fixing some of these things now. Hasn't been a priority, but a mate who is good with cars is out of work, so I'm going to hire him to fix it up. The world is brutal. We all gotta support each other. #community

Wow, is 30 mpg the average? 😬 Because I only get 15.

If so, that'd put the average at 111 gallons for 4 months

How much do people normally spend on gasoline?

I have spent $121 on gasoline so far in 2024. That's about 28 gallons. I feel like this is pretty good for an American, but that's just a hunch.

Qubes 4.1 ran fine on my NUC when I had one. If you have ≤ 8GB of RAM, you'll probably want to limit the number of apps open to maximize performance (same as any other O/S).

Qubes will be about 98-99% as fast as any Linux distro. Qubes will run faster than Windows 11. This is because of the VT-x instruction set.

In case anyone is wondering, AMD has AMD-V which is their version of Intel's VT-X so you'll have the same performance with AMD whether using VMs or not. ❤️

It's fun to see M$ Windows copying the concepts of isloation with their integrity levels and usage of Hyper-V under the hood.

Imitation is the truest form of flattery.

I take ityou've never used Qubes?

We have maza harina. Is the recipe basically the same as corn tortillas and tgen you fry them in oil instead of toasting them?

I thought that when I left my job with no intent to get another one, I'd be shedding my responsibilities, have lots of free time, and be able to decide how I spend it. It hasn't panned out quite as well as I had imagined.

When you have indoor plants, a garden, compost that needs flipped, there are some responsibilities or you no longer have these things.

Okay, but that's only a couple hours per day, right? So that means I have like 10 hours a day to do whatever I want. 70 hours a week, right? Lovely.

But I like to eat every day, multiple times even. I can't afford takeout for every meal, so I cook. But that also means checking for food about to go bad, picking out recipies to use said ingredients, figuring out what we already have versus ehat we need and going shopping for that food too. That adds up to about 20 hours a week. Yes, I've counted.

So now I've still got 50 hours/week of leisure, less time for other chores like laundry, cleaning and the like, but that's not much time at all, so we'll sweep that time under the rug.

I do, however, also feel compelled to run my own servers. Email, GitLab, Nextcloud, Mastodon, Jitsi, Matrix, DNS... the list goes on and on. And the maintenance there is actually pretty low. Once things are set up, everything is pretty well automated. Still, it's not zero. When software or hardware nears end-of-life, I need to take steps. Air gapped backups require manual work. And I have other people who depend on the infrastructure I built, so I do feel obligated to ensure we have good uptime. In addition to that, I've also been trying to refactor my automation so I can publish it and make it easier for others to self-host things. I could do this pretty much full time for years, but I severely limit the time I spend here.

Then there's the Signet project. I feel obligated to work on that every week for between 4-16 hours. I have users to support. I want to fix some minor bugs, build more hardware, etc.

There are a couple other projects that I do under other nyms that take about 6 hours a week.

The Artisans Coop takes about 10 hours/week.

I'm helping put together a system to measure rainfall in real time so floods can be accurately predicted. That takes at least 4 hours per week.

I volunteer for Books2Prisoners for a couple hours a week. I also want to help out the local makerspace for at least a couple hours a week. More when they have a cleanup day or interesting event.

There are house projects like moving and then fixing the rain barrel stand, re-routing the gutters, reattaching the gutters, spray foaming holes in the house, getting rid of the ants, installing a huge floating shelf, mudding/texturing/painting, making molding for the windows and all these odds and ends that sound like they're no big deal. In isolation they're not, but when the gutter falls off the roof and there's going to be water in the basement, and that will quickly lead to mold, they absolutely demand my time. If not now, a whole lot more time later.

In the end, I guess this is just me rambling on about how even though I have more freedom to decide how I spend my time than I ever have in my entire life, I still feel pressured into doing things in a timeframe I don't control. I do not feel like I am free to just go work on the things I want to do. I feel obligated to do these things above.

Sure, I could walk away from several of these projects and leave people hanging, but that's really hard for me to do. I'm going to scale back nonetheless, because I want more control over my time. Hopefully I will get things to good stopping points and making sure someone else can pick up where I left off before I burn out and just walk away.

I suppose if I have a point here, it's that if you have a full time job, and constantly feel like you don't have any free time, don't expect that to change if you weren't spending 40 hours a week at work. Change has to come from within, and that's something I'm slowly learning and doing my best to internalize. So really, this is a message of hope. In a world where there is so much you don't control, there's also a lot you can control if you are mindful about it

If anyone actually reads this far, feel free to give me a follow and let me know what you think. Am I just a fool for volunteering to help all these people? Should I just stop and let them fend for themselves?

I have spent so many hours and implemented SO MANY #accessibility #interfaces, any yet, no audible difference in my QTreeView with the #ScreenReader. 😫

Making #software accessible is hard. I don't want it to be, but it is.

I thought that between QAccessibleInterface and QAccessibleTableInterface for the tree, I'd get it to read the title of each entry, but nope. Nothing

I put some debug prints in some of the accessibility methods and they never get called. That's my only clue. 🫤 #signet #GrowNostr

#Signet #Saturday rolls into #Signet #Sunday once again. I really want to nail this accessibiltity thing. It's already drug on too long.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qaccessibleinterface.html#interfaces says "trees should implement QAccessibleTableInterface".

So I made it implement that interface, painstakingly implementing all the pure virtual functions. After doing so, it still did not read the entries. 🤷

Gotta keep on trying to figure this out. 🧐

Now I'm doing #accessibility work for the #Signet client. Mainly I'm doing it for #compatibilty with #ScreenReaders, which are used by sighted, #LowVision and #blind users.

The update I just made enabled more keyboard navigation in the tree view of password goups/entries. Arrow keys worked, and now pg up/down, home/end, and left/right all work as well.

Today's focus is something boring to nearly everyone: #documentation.

?ref_type=heads&inline=false

Why am I working on the boring stuff first?

It enables users to do two main things:

1. Contribute to the code base

2. Understand the internals to have more confidence in the device

The first one is mainly for developers, but could also be used for non-developers to submit amazing bug reports.

The second one is mainly for security analysts who can look at a state diagram and find security holes.

For everyone who is neither a developer nor security analyst, it's probably not helpful, but maybe it'll still be fun to look at nonetheless. 😛

#Signet Saturday starts now! 😁

These #regulations make me want to get involved with the #tiledverse folks over at https://tildeverse.org/

Not because I want to secretly train an AI (could you even imagine trying that stunt on there? 🤣), but because it seems like I have a lot in common with them. Free access to #computers and #networks to #play & #learn. Simple systems. No nonsense. No big #corporations.

It just seems like a lot more #fun way to do #computing

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#Kennedy is hitting back hard against claims that he might spoil the presidential race.

The polling data with the largest sample size shows the outcome of a 2 way race between #Biden and #Trump goes to Trump. A three way race hurts Trump, but still goes to Trump.

If either Biden or Trump were to step down, Kennedy easily wins.

Kennedy is also willing to pledge to step down if he is going to be a #spoiler if Biden will do the same.

https://www.kennedy24.com/spoiler

#USPOL #politics

Happy May day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day

#MayDay #union #workers #organize #GrowNostr