Shinji_Ikari [he/him]

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  • 25 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • Yes, vim is a command line program.

    If you look up “Cli file manager”, there’s a bunch that you can check out and try.

    Tree, grep, and find are usually my three go-tos. Tree to get a general view of a ton of nested files/folders, then if I know a name I’ll use find . -name "filename", if I know a bit of contents, i’ll use `grep -re “content string” to find files containing that.

    I recommend reading the man pages because you can often chain together these in fairly powerful ways.



  • I watched a lot of youtube before I dove in. There’s a LOT more content on watch repair now after covid so it should be easy. Pay specific attention to how the seasoned watchmakers use their tools. You should never have to force anything in a watch. Go as slow as possible and really savor each movement.

    If you don’t have a camera with good macro abilities, grab some of those cheap clip on macro lenses for your phone.

    Take a pictures at every step until you don’t need them anymore. I specifically was interested in 2-3 movements but you start to see the commonality between them if you’re just working on a simple hour/minute/second/calendar watch without extra complications.

    I really suggest buying one of those little plastic trays with a clear dome on top that have dividers. With that, I divide the parts and screws by the aspect of the movement. ie I’ll use one compartment for the automatic winder components, a compartment for the stem and winding mechanism, one for the main drive, and another for the date complication. I repair a lot of misc things so I have a decent memory for where parts/screws go. If you dont, take pictures of the screw next to the hole you took it from so you can compare scale. Screws inside watches are usually at most 2-3 sizes, if not all the same but its good practice to ensure you put the right screw in the right hole.

    Also check out the forum watchrepairtalk. Its an international group of old men who love to help out. It has a completely different atmosphere to watchuseek and is an endless fountain of knowledge.



  • I struggle with frontend too, it was a super basic jinja templates with html and a plotly js applet that I just fed data to. Its ugly but functional.

    I Started to re-write the server in Go, I have like 90% feature parity with postgres instead of mongo, but I need to figure out vue when I have a chance to make something a little nicer. I have an old obsolete ipad with a bunch of touch deadzones I’d like to load up in kiosk mode for a nicer data display.

    I really liked the ESP32 ecosystem. I figured out the ESP-idf and really liked the build system and freeRTOS. The examples given are really exhaustive and super useful. I basically did format strings into static HTML headers to send the data to the server since it only has like 3-4 readings.

    Interfacing with any common hobbyist sensor is mostly a matter of finding a basic C driver and adapting it for the ESP build system.










  • Computers are more or less the sum of their parts.

    For the longest time, and even now I think, the “Linux laptop” companies mostly sold re-branded quasi-generic laptops from Chinese manufacturers and focused on the software aspect to ensure compatibility. This meant that a lot of aspects were cheapened out on. The chassis, trackpad, keyboard, display, fit and finish in general were second class. Sure it was a machine that ran Linux, but most computers do that pretty well.

    Laptop shopping is already fraught with pain and hazards. How do you know you’re getting something that wont break down? Add the “vote with your wallet” premium price on these boutique Linux laptops, and they don’t seem that appealing.

    Thinkpads on the other hand have a huge community of nerds documenting compatibility. They have enterprise customers dumping pallets of used machines into the used market every year, and have far better parts accessibility than the quasi-generic machine.

    Then there’s the trackpoint, you never need to leave the home row. You’re not victim to subpar trackpads(Every non-mac trackpad is subpar, sorry, I don’t make the rules, they suck absolutely.)

    I’ve had my X1 Carbon 4th gen since new in 2016. Even if I can’t upgrade it, 7 years on its still nearly perfect. I got an Dell XPS 15 from work ~5 years ago and I’ve gone through two batteries, finishes are wearing off, the hinge is wonky, and IT HAS NO TRACK POINT.




  • Anytime I need to install something in windows, it just feels, uncivilized? Like every step of the way is disrespectful to the user. Windows is political, it has business priorities that effect how it’s used. Linux feels like a rock, like yeah you can get mad at it when you drop it on your foot but the rock isn’t interacting back the same way that windows is constantly changing and questioning your judgement.