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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • xdg-open is very nifty, especially due to its ubiquitousness on a variety of distributions. You can even have a look inside to see that it is actually a shell script yet again invoking other ‘opening’ scripts in the background!

    I wrote a little bit about it and an alternative to it called mimeo not too long ago. That one can even open things by advanced filters such as regexes. So you could e.g. open https://eff.org in Firefox and http://localhost:3000 in a different application or other advanced shenanigans - though I’ve never used such advanced features much.



  • That is a little of how I use it too - I have all podcasts set to download automatically globally (set it up to 25 episodes at the same time) and put them in my queue so I always have exactly 25 episodes to listen to in any order there each day.

    Then there are 2 daily podcasts that I do not let automatically download (but automatically refresh, and I love that the app delineates between the two), however one regularly produces longer episodes including a lot of the shorter ones that I do let it automatically download. Huh, I never realized how advanced the setup actually is. Though I do remember the actual ‘setting up’ being relatively painless after getting to grips with the global/per-podcast difference.

    Also, fwiw I have the synchronization set up using one of the self-hosted options instead of the default gpodder service - which is often down intermittently - and it works well enough, even if a bit slow every now and again.





  • Mutt (and neomutt) has very nice search capabilities, supporting regex search within specific mailboxes. However, it is a relatively slow search - unbearably slow for full text search in large mailboxes.

    Here, notmuch is usually used to complement mutt. It’s a very fast (full-text) mail indexer, which can be directly integrated in mutt and allows much faster searching (among other things such as advanced mail tagging, virtual mailboxes and more).

    It is generally a royal pain to set up with so many moving parts but once you do it is a very fast, comfortable mail environment if you’re comfy with the terminal.



  • Absolutely agreed.

    The underlying map is great, the interfaces are great (especially on OrganicMaps), the way it can give me offline access to everything is great but in that crucial moment getting off a train/bus/whatever and thinking - hang on, which direction did I need to go? - the search just undoes everything else because often you literally can not find the location you need. Then it’s hand-scrolling to roughly where you think it is, putting down a general pin and then eye-balling the actual location.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun in a sort of 90s-unfolding the city-map kind of way but not if you actually have an appointment somewhere.


  • Fully agreed with the usefulness of topgrade.

    Topgrade is not just for archlinux but will happily upgrade Debian-/RedHat-Derivatives, Gentoo, Void, some BSDs and I think even Mac and Windows, though I’m not sure how those work.

    The link you provided also goes to the unmaintained original version, while there is a community fork here: https://github.com/topgrade-rs/topgrade which sees more development (but is also looking for maintainers!)

    I’m also using topgrade and it is wonderful to upgrade the system dependencies but even the content of unrelated package managers such as pipx, vim, zsh plugin-managers, cargo programs, R packages, npm/yarn packages, and importantly for this thread flatpaks and snaps with one command. It really is lovely.