OpenVPN server was my number 1. Being able to VPN back into my home from anywhere in the world was amazing. I can’t really remember any other, since it was more than a few years ago.

OH MAN. I worked on an Android tablet that used a rockchip CPU, not the one listed here but an older one (I think RK3026). What a PIECE OF SHIT. I don’t wish that tablet on my worst enemy. Battery life was like sub 2 hours with a 3200 mAh battery. Sometimes it would start running hot, and you could watch the batter percentage go down one percent every 10-20 seconds. The only way to break it out was to reboot it or let it die.

We later upgraded our CPU to the 3288, one gen older than this one, and it was significantly improved, but still very entry level.

Yes, I was shocked at how small it is. I had no experience working with such limited resources going into this project. Our router had 32MB of storage. At one point I was looked into adding a python interpreter, and it was like 11MB. The Lua interpreter is like 250KB. Tiny!

Also, the ternary operator has the best syntax of any language I have ever used.

x = [condition] and [true value] or [false value]

No question marks or colons or anything weird. It’s a logical extension of && and || after commands in bash using keywords since it is a verbose language. I wish every language had this syntax.

For contrast, python is:

x = [true value] if [condition] else [false value]

It just seems weird to me to have the condition in the middle.

The web UI backend stuff is all done in Lua. So receiving and processing forms was all Lua. My main feature that I implemented was a REST API that was called from another product that my company sold. So I had to do all the REST API processing and data validation and whatnot in Lua.

I don’t really have recommendations, because I really only knew our product. If I knew what I get, I probably would have got that instead of the Asus router that I ended up with when I had to return my work materials.

I was the lead engineer on an Openwrt router for 2 years at my old job. Their documentation is complete and utter shit, but their design is extremely intuitive. Whenever I said to myself, “hell, let’s just try this and see if it works,” it had an insanely high success rate.

I didn’t know Lua going into this project, but when I left the company, it made me really wonder why more people don’t use Lua. It’s a really nice language.

I really enjoyed having my own open source router that I could just drop new features into by adding packages and recompiling. I was sad when I had to send all my dev units back.

Gen Xers: am I a joke to you?

I have solar panels and a backup battery. I was actually disappointed when the power didn’t go out when it got cold here in Texas last week.

I have a lock that I can check the status of on my phone, and even lock it from my phone if I forgot. It’s really good for my peace of mind. No more getting up in the middle of the night to check the lock.

You haven’t thought of the smell, you bitch!

Oh, I see. My work only knows I’m done by when I move my tickets to complete on Jira, so I just leave them as in progress until my due date. I work from home, so I just watch TV or play video games while sitting near my work laptop to respond to emails or chat messages in the meantime.

Imagine trying to control how someone says a word.

Just don’t say you’re done with your work.

I already finished all my work for the sprint that ends on Tuesday. It’s Thursday at noon currently.

Well, sure. I type on my laptop that doesn’t have any of these as physical keys. It’s fn+arrow keys for pg up, pg down, home, and end, for example.

You don’t use Home? Home and End are my two most used keys on this list. IDEs move your cursor to the beginning of the line but after the indents. It’s God -tier.

It really depends. For example, the app might not be sending data on what is happening. It might just say “event 1 happened” which triggers it to flash blue or “event 2 happened” which triggers it to flash rainbow. If there are no additional information, then the only way it could be done is by modifying the app.

And that’s not even getting into creating custom firmware for the device. You would either need to get your hands on their source code for that or reverse engineer it.

I’m a firm believer that nothing is impossible, but one this is for sure, it would likely be a ton of work.

I had a roommate who would play games while skipping all the dialog and cutscenes, and then complain about how bad the story was. And when I would call him out on it, he would say, “well, I watched a YouTube video recapping the story.” I asked him to show me a recap video that he watched. It was literally a guy talking over all of the cutscenes and dialogue and saying all the things that he didn’t like about it.

Fwiw, this didn’t get sent into the void!

I actually contributed to this repo! But I was still too spooked to use pictrs, even with this. Also, I’m no lawyer, but I think using that repo might be illegal in my country. I’m not 100% sure, but I saw some people saying that in my country I have an obligation to report CSAM images to the government, and deleting them could get me charged with obstructing justice or destroying evidence.

Though it looks like pictrs now has an option to set the amount of time pictrs holds on to proxied images. I think if I just add the option “PICTRS__MEDIA__RETENTION__PROXY=0m” to the pictrs container in my docker-compose.yml file, it shouldn’t hold on to the images from other instances?

Yep! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!