But is the software written by developers with access to the outside and daylight? Even if they prefer to shun it and choose blackout curtains.

I just had Find My Device say it can’t find my Pixel Buds, while they were connected to the phone!

I was hoping that the new trackers would be a better replacement for Tile, but I guess not.

I like that I can interface with it in ways that I already understand (eg rclone, sync, sshfs).

Being able to run some commands on the server meant that I could use rclone to copy my AWS and OneDrive backups directly cloud-to-cloud.

Before even getting to documentation, I see so many projects that don’t have a short summary of what they do (and maybe what to not expect them to do).

As an example, Home Assistant. I can tell that it involves home automation, so can I replace Google Home with it? It seems like it doesn’t do voice recognition without add-ons and it can work with Google Assistant. Do I still need accounts with the providers of smart appliances, or can it control my bulbs directly?

None of that is very clear from the website.

I’ve seen plenty of other projects where it’s assumed there’s no need to explain it’s overall purpose.

I govenment site I visited recenly made a point of how it accepts emojis in passwords!

True, poor choice of phrase.

But I was thnking of something like

#define my_macro does not fit\
on one line

Unix or dos format?

Anyway, you probably need to put a backslash before it to indicate line continuation.

But wouldn’t it be better to use something more traditional, such as <br>?

And Open Camera is a free alternative app, too, without a '5 photos per day" limit, if you don’t want to bother with RAW.

That’s, like, halfway down the list of things to try!

https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim

Okay, maybe that was a typo, but I’ve read cooking instructions based on a “cup” of chicken strips.

I had emails from CVS (American pharmacy store) about vaccination records recently and noticed this

Administration date 2024-10-25

First time I’ve seen dates used like that in a public-facing context. The birth dates were in that form, too.

The US uses metric measures in many places, too. Usually medical, but even things such as phone thickness are announced in ml.

I’m trying the fork now, thanks. So far, it’s behaving. Thanks for the pointer to the logs, I’ll take a look if it happens again.

Thanks. I’m giving that a try!

Good to know. If I can get it working reliably, it will be worth sticking with. Someone suggested it might just not be auto-starting on reboots. I’m trying the fork of the UI on f-droid to see if it helps.

I have the phones connected, but the app just decides to disconnect and stay that way until I check it. I’ll give that fork a try, thanks!

I could live with a few minutes, but it’s showig as offline for days. Maybe it is failing after a reboot. At least that would be a known situation to watch for.

The only setting I see is “allow background usage”, which is on (I’m using it on a Pixel 7 and 8).

Well, it’s not versioning I need (I have an rsync backup that makes incremental copies). I need a 2-way sync that happens when files changes and doesn’t randomly stop working: I want to edit a note on my phone - it copies to the server. Edit on the server, it updates to the phone. Without having to manually run any separate syncs first. I only mention sync conflicts because right now, syncthing hadn’t updated with my phone for over 2 days, plenty of time for me to update a note elsewhere and then edit the same note on the phone.

Resilio does it, but it looks like it’s draining the battery. Syncthing doesn’t drain the battery much, but that’s because it has become inactive on two different phones for long periods of time repeatedly.

Cloud provider apps usually work instantly with little drain, they must trigger from OS notifications, but the apps that sync to local servers just don’t seem to work that way!

Git is a great solution just for versioning. After I messed up a big note file I had, I set up emacs to hook git into the save function. I just created a repo in that directory, then backed up the whole directory including .git, so the versioning was there with the backup. No need to even use a separate repo, git just gave me a version history for the local files.

Thanks, but I really need a seamless automatic sync. I think that’s a manually-triggered file send?

Do you use it on a phone too? I did find it tricky to set up (more options than I really need, and the phone app settings don’t really work unless you select “Web UI”, which is really strange), but I didn’t mind the setup if I could then leave it alone and it works. Ideally I want to set this up on other family phones, so I can update notes and they appear everywhere.