Sometimes I have a bunch of dependencies. Say, UI components that need other UI components to be loaded. I’d really just like to have everything declare dependencies and magically everything is loaded in the right order. It turns out that if use “require” type files this isn’t bad (google “dependency injection”), but for anything other than code loading you’re a bit lost. I did find dependency-graph, but this requires the full list of components to run. I wanted a version would you could add components whenever you wanted–an online framework.
It has no requirements, and is available on npm as dependencies-online.
I want to talk about three different mindsets for time management and what constitutes “success”. In all three, I’ll talk about an example problem, let’s say “writing term papers” for a student who finds this difficult, and see how each might approach the goal. My goal is not to promote one of these as best, but rather to illustrate that all three exist. Each may be favored by one person or another, or by a single person depending on the situation. I hope that by describing them, I can help people understand one another’s motivations, so as to facilitate communication. The first mindset I will call optimization. The optimizer tries to spend their time gaining resources. For example, they might work to get money. They also attempt to increase the rate at which they can gain resources. Some optimizers even try to increase the rate at which they can e.g. network or learn skills. The intuition here is that most goods are somehow fungible, and that you should try to get as many fungible goods as possible. Example of term papers: An optimizer might try to learn to write term papers, or get faster and faster at writing papers. If they got good at writing term papers, they might try to write even more (for example, taking classes heavy on papers) to take advantage of these skills. Heuristics:
Get nowhere faster: Get where you’re going faster, even if you don’t have a specific goal in mind
Level up: It’s always good to learn things and develop skills
Experiment: Never be content with the status quo. (Choose explore/exploit explicitly and dovetail, for principled experimenters)
Accumulate multipliers / Seek good trade routes: Be able to buy all things with money, learning, whatever you have most of. Try to maximize the rate.
Get money: Anywhere you have a resource coming in, increase the income rate, or trade rate you’re getting it for.
Failure modes:
Butterfly: Ends up unfocused and with no immediate or terminal goals.
The second mindset I will call satisficing. The satisficer is goal-oriented, and tries to stay focus on the goal at all times. Traditional goal-based time management like GTD encourages satisficing. Example of term papers: Their specific goal might be “Get an A on all papers until I graduate”. If they can write well enough to get an A, they probably would not learn to write better. If they can’t get an A, their goal might be better served by learning to write to rubrics. The question of learning to write better vs spending more time editing on each paper would be decided by the amount of time each would take for the actual number of term papers the student expected to write for their immediate goal. Heuristics:
Get to the goal as quickly as possible
No lost purposes: One of the strengths of satisficing is to avoid “rabbit holes” which don’t contribute to any end goal
Munchkin: Think about what will actually contribute to the goal, as well as what won’t.
Failure modes:
Tunnel vision / inflexibility: Not contributing to the immediate goal is not the same as being useless. Can lose sight of the big picture (supergoal or unrelated terminal goals) and ways to work toward that other than via the immediate goal.
EA Bot Syndrome / Don’t smell the flowers: Excessive goal focus can lose sight of human involvement, and end up giving the satisficer low life quality.
The last mindset I will call minimization. The minimizer will try to minimize the amount of resources spent on a particular task or problem. They will especially try to avoid any indefinitely-big cost. Example of term papers: The student might try to spend the minimum amount of time possible on the paper to get an A. If they knew they were going to write several papers, they might study how to write papers faster, so as to spend less total time–even if they expected the time learning to write faster would be greater than the time to write the immediate papers (“but what if there are more papers someday”). The eventual state of the minimizer will probably be to have set things up to avoid term papers, or write them very quickly. Heuristics:
Automate / Offload for free: Spend only a finite amount of time on something
Eliminate recurring costs
Asymptotic improvement: Any finite number of mistakes is okay, as long as you end up optimal eventually
Deal with it permanently: If you’re not closing things and returning to them indefinitely, you’re spending infinite time and attention on it
Timebox: Only spend a finite amount of time on something, and then consider it resolved forever
Failure modes:
Bad at goals: Minimization deals with recurring activities, but can fail to offer any positive motivation for one-time end goals
Negative mindset: Heavy focus on mistakes and resource use
Here’s how you make roasted chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans):
Set the oven to 400F.
Drain and empty a can or so of chickpeas into a collander and wash them
Dry the chickpeas (this is the hard step). I use paper towels, but I haven’t figured out a way to not use a billion of them.
Put them in a short pan in the oven and cover them in olive oil. Toss them some with your hands to get them coated.
Cook for 20-30 minutes, shaking the pan so everything turns every 10 minutes. I like them crispy so I do 30 minutes.
Take them out and transfer them to a bowl. Add spices. I like salt, garlic powder, and pepper.
youtube-dl -a past_broadcasts.txt -o "%(upload_date)s.%(title)s.%(id)s.%(ext)s"
Did it. youtube-dl is smart enough to avoid re-downloading videos it already has, so as long as you run this often enough (I do daily), you should avoid losing videos before they’re deleted.
Start a minecraft server with computercraft. You will need to have the http API enabled, which is the default.
Put down a turtle I recommend a turtle with a crafting square and a pickaxe. I also recommend giving it a label. If you’re not trying the turtle replication challenge, either disable fuel or get a fair bit of starting fuel. Write down the computer’s id.
Put down a chunk loader, if you’re in a modpack that has them, or DON’T log out. Computers and turtles can’t operate unless the chunks are loaded. If you’re putting down a chunkloader, I surrounded them with bedrock for foolproofing.
Open the turtle and download the following script, changing “redis.example.com” to your own redis instance: pastebin get 8FjggG9w startup
After you have the script saved as ‘startup’, run it or reboot the computer, and it should start listening for instructions.
redis = "http://redis.example.com"
queue = "sshbot" .. os.getComputerID()
return_queue = queue .. "_return"
print("Remote webdis queues on icyego: " .. queue .. " and " .. return_queue)
print("Receiving remote commands.")
function exec(str)
print("Running: " .. str)
f = fs.open("tmp", "w")
f.write(str)
f.close()
p = loadfile("tmp")
status, err = pcall(function () p = loadfile("tmp"); return p() end)
if status then
status, ret = pcall(function() return textutils.serialize(err) end)
if status then
result = ret
else
result = ""
end
else
result = "Error: " .. err
end
print(result)
return result
end
print("Now receiving remote commands.")
while true do
handle = http.get(redis .. "/BRPOP/" .. queue .. "/5.txt")
if (handle and handle.getResponseCode() == 200) then
str = handle.readAll()
handle.close()
str = string.sub(str, string.len(queue) + 1)
result = exec(str)
if string.find(result, "Error: ") then
result2 = exec("return " .. str)
if string.find(result2, "Error: ") then a=0 else result=result2 end
end
http.post(redis, "LPUSH/" .. return_queue .. "/" .. result)
end
end
On your local machine, save the following, again replacing “redis.example.com”:
#!/bin/bash
function send() {
curl -s -X POST -d "LPUSH/sshbot${1}/${2}" "http://redis.example.com" >/dev/null
}
function get() {
curl -s -X GET "http://redis.example.com/BRPOP/sshbot${1}_return/20.json" | jq .BRPOP[1]
}
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
echo "Usage: rlwrap ./sshbot <COMPUTER_ID>"
exit 1
fi
ID=$1
while read LINE; do
send ${ID} "$LINE"
get ${ID}
done
Run: rlwrap ./sshbot , where is the turtle’s ID. You should be able to send commands to the computer now.
Install packages talk, talkd, inetutils-inetd
Make sure users have set ‘mesg y’
‘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)
