• 2 Posts
  • 109 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • Litter box math is important. Very simple equation: 1 litter box per cat + 1.

    A litter genie (like the pail you linked) is a great choice for building the habit of cleaning the litter box often. Recommended to keep one near each litter box.

    Also be aware, pine bedding can be an irritant to humans and cats (and many other mammals). It’s usually not recommended— mostly due to the dust. Pine pellets tend to be more safe due to how they’re processed.

    Be wary of canned tuna- it tends to have higher levels of mercury which over time (such as daily feeding) can cause heavy metal poisoning in humans an and small animals. I personally don’t even bother, my cat gets freshly cooked shreds of meat as treats once in a while and special occasions.

    On the topic of training: be patient, don’t use a water bottle or snap / loud shouting. Instead, when they’re doing something they shouldn’t be, calmly pick them up and physically move them to somewhere they can be and provide a toy or activity to replace the thing they were trying to do. Such as a string toy or other floppy toy out in the open if they were caught playing with computer wires under the desk. This goes for scratching too, if they are scratching the door/couch/bed/carpet, etc— place cardboard or rope scratching posts and pads nearby and physically move them from the bad spot to the good spot. Move around the good spots as needed based on what you observe. You will have to do this a lot, generally, but be patient and they will get the message. Positive reinforcement includes those toys and scratcher, you don’t have to provide a treat every time, especially as they grow up and become more independent.




  • I would make the case for proxmox on the machine so you can divvy up the hardware as you see fit— but also setup the hard drives as a zfs1 pool (1 redundancy failure allowed). This way you can make multiple isolated machines or use LXC containers directly for apps, services, etc. while benefiting from ZFS’s excellent performance and reliability. I would say that TrueNAS Scale has been a bit of a letdown for me because it feels bloated, easy to make mistakes with complicated setups, and I have less control over the hardware. I don’t like how updates have fully broken apps. That said it is a reliable ZFS wrapper with more bells and whistles in the UI over what proxmox offers— caveat being that both can do everything if you want to take the time to learn ZFS commands.

    There is also the TrueNAS based alternative HexOS that is more beginner friendly for just getting a nice NAS setup fast while still supporting apps / containers.






  • Just a reminder that as long as you don’t need any kind of platform hosting or complex multi-user setup, git itself works fine on a remote machine as your server, even just on LAN. (As always, just setup an ssh key on the two machines so ssh commands are secure and don’t require passwords all the time)

    > cd /my/repos
    > ssh user@10.x.y.z ‘mkdir /home/user/repos/new_repo.git && cd $_ && git init --bare’
    > git clone user@10.x.y.z:/home/user/repos/new_repo.git
    




  • I will always recommend Ben Eater’s breadboard computer 6502 project for anyone who wants to know how it works. The 8-bit breadboard computer project as the next step too, to really dive into all the pieces. But the 6502 project is a nice entry point into hardware itself as well as the basic components of processor and memory. How and what the 1s and 0s are doing and how to make them do what you want them to do. Getting up to a working character display and serial input for a keyboard to type is such a satisfying process that takes only a few hours if you kinda know what you’re doing and a few days if you know nothing.



  • I love Actual. It’s fantastic and easy to use. I use off-budget accounts and weekly / monthly reconciliation just to keep the general value of these accounts at stable intervals.

    I have a slight bone to pick with the PWA version of the site though. After a couple months of using the PWA front end to keep my budget and transactions accurate manually, I opened the site on my desktop browser and it completely lost all that work due to a sync issue. Apparently the PWA for weeks had not remained in sync and so all manual entries were not making back to the server. But the app works so well I never noticed because it kept just working. Supposedly there’s an alert saying it’s not synced with the server but it’s not prominent enough. So if you use that feature (the PWA) then be sure it’s syncing often.