‘talk user@localhost’. Despite documentation, ‘talk user’ will not work.
So have you ever used a web printer and it was great?
…
Yeah, me neither. It’s probably possible on windows, but try to add more than one OS to the network and it’s horrible. And actually printing is a major pain in Linux anyway. Theoretically ‘lp’ and the like have no problem with remote printers, but I wanted something I understood. So today I’m going to post my setup I use instead.
I have a computer physically connected to the printer. Let’s call it ‘printserver’. On that server there is a folder, /printme, which is constantly monitored by inode. Any file added to that directory is printed.
Suppose I downloaded cutecats.pdf and I want to print it. Then I run:
scp cutecats.pdf printserver:/printme
And voila, the cute cats get printed.
Here’s the setup for the server:
Get the printer to work. This is the hard step.
Make a directory /printme. Add any missing users, add a new group called ‘print’ and add everyone who needs to print to that, etc.
Set up /printme to be a tmpfs with the sticky bit set. (So we don’t fill up the hard drive)
Our house has seven people, so today I made some mail holders to put on our doors.
I basically had some long cardboard boxes, and cut them in half. Then I added new ends and separators in the middle.
I’m not sure if they’ll actually get used. Mail on the floor looks bad, but these aren’t that hot either. If you make some and want to improve the look, you can cover everything in paper or cardstock.
I decided I wanted to show (restricted) data views on the web in table form. Specifically, ‘stylish.db’ is a database provided by a chrome plugin. Here’s an example script, stylish.view, which displays the contents of that. It contains a comment saying which database it’s a query on, together with the query.
-- stylish.db
SELECT style, code, GROUP_CONCAT(section_meta.value) as 'website(s)' FROM
(SELECT styles.name AS style,
sections.code AS code,sections.id AS sections_id
FROM styles INNER JOIN sections ON sections.style_id = styles.id)
LEFT JOIN section_meta
ON section_meta.section_id = sections_id
GROUP BY style;
The cool part here is that none of this was specific to stylish. I can quickly throw together a .view file for any database and put it on the web.
I add put any databases in cgi-bin/db, and add view.cgi to cgi-bin:
CFAR usually designs their techniques to help people Get Stuff Done. I have a failure mode of Getting The Wrong Stuff Done, so this time through their workshop, I focused on improving techniques to explicitly have steps around pursuing the correct terminal goals (which I’ll here call “terminal goal techniques”).
Original technique: Goal-factor
New terminal goal technique:
Find an instrumental goal toward another instrumental goal.
Embark on that goal provisionally, while also making a plan to acquire more information about whether it’s a good idea and better plans are available.
Periodically re-evaluate to make sure it’s the best goal and you’re gathering information.
Use pre-hindsight to ask “How did this go wrong?”.
Fix that. Go to 2 until fixed.
Revised terminal goal technique: Murphy-jitsu with terminal goal check
Come up with a plan.
Use pre-hindsight to ask “How was I disappointed when this went as planned?”
Fix that. Go to 2 until fixed.
Use pre-hindsight to ask “How did this go wrong?”.
Fix that. Go to 2 until fixed.
Another technique: Positive murphyjitsu (“Why didn’t this go even better?”)
Another technique: Aversion murphyjitsu (“Imagine none of the positive listed factors happened. Why was it still possible?”) for cases when I can’t think about how to overcome a aversion directly.
Instrumental failure TAP:
Notice executive planning fails -> Look for lack of motivation or motivation propagation
Notice motivation / motivation propogation fails -> Look to see if the goal you’re pursuing is what you want (or exactly what you want)
Technique: Exactboxing
Find a thing to do
Set a 15-minute timer
Do the thing
If you finish early, keep doing the thing anyway. (For example, figure out how to do it better in the future or for the problem to never happen again.
If you don’t finish in time, stop anyway. It’s done. If you don’t know how it’s done, that’s a failure mode–you should have at most one task which takes an unbounded amount of time in your life. (I find this makes my brain accept ‘line of retreat’)
Technique: Do the Obvious Thing
Ask a question, for example how to pursue a goal you want achieved (I recommend a Hamming Question)
Figure out the most obvious solution.
Acknowledge that it is the most obvious solution.
Decide whether or not to do it.
If you don’t want to, contradiction. Debug steps 1,2,3,4 and see where you went wrong until they’re in accord.
Theory on how to avoid lost purposes (mostly from Eliezer): Use Litany of Tarski a lot until you get the magic effect where you don’t start rationalizing to begin with (and generally don’t flinch away from learning about things/mistakes). Then, develop an aversion to lost purposes. The naive failure mode is to avoid noticing lost purposes if you have an aversion. (The simpler technique is Alien in a Body)
I added an IRC server to my growing list of services. You can access it at:
