What's been your rabbit hole of the week?

I am seriously learning how to plumb gas lines to save like $600. So if you don't hear from me, it will be because I killed myself and probably injured several neighbors.
- I taught myself plumbing once so I could still fuck up and cause $2k in direct damage, plus grow who knows how much mold in the ceiling.
- Water heater repair?
  Just make sure the gas if off before you touch it, and maybe don't light a match right away.

International Humanitarian Law which defines war crimes and such.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1
As it turns out most people who cry about war crimes on the internet don’t know the first thing about them.

The flu. The flu has been my rabbit hole for the week 😭
- get well soon!
- Wait until you see the pounds just melt away on the flu diet. /s

Linux
- I've been trying to figure out a way to get my two LUKS encrypted drives to unlock by using a yubikey on boot.
- I’m also realising this rabbit hole with every second I spend on Lemmy. Hell I was reading up on arch at 2 am last night when I couldn’t get to sleep….
  
  Honestly I would skip Arch and just use something like Fedora or Debian. Arch is way over rated. You can build a Arch like system out of anything.
  
  CachyOS or EndeavourOS are good arch spins if you choose to be insane.
  
  Start with something like mint and works your way to other distros.
  You should be able to live boot mint to see how it runs before committing to installing.

Ham radio. Still at the discovery stage of whats what, thinking about what I want to get into, which means lots of fun learning about everything, as usual in a totally random manor. Trying to avoid getting sidetracked by the VHF/UHF stuff as it would just rapidly spiral out of control.
Just need to knuckle down and study for the foundation exam so I can actually get started transmitting. I think I have the QRP setup I want more or less nailed down that would tide me over till I can move up to intermediate later on. Would give me a nice QRP setup for travel and allow me to treat myself for passing my intermediate with a proper shack radio with a bit more power.
- I'm more interested in its lesser known cousin, Rum Ham Radio.

Rain World Modding
I already know C# so I thought it wouldn't be that difficult, but I was very wrong. Rain World is a game made with Unity, but the only part they use Unity for is rendering. And the game also doesn't ship with debug symbols. Doesn't help that the modding wiki is outdated at places and incomplete. Took a lot of guess work and looking at other mods to figure out what to do, but I got there at the end and learned a lot.

New Zealand birds
- Oh cool! Which bird from New Zealand has impressed you the most and how so?
  
  From my memories from growing up in NZ long ago there are lots of funny/rock-n-roll stories about the Kea (very cheeky and charismatic parrot-like bird). I remember finding a funny CCTV video from about a year ago in NZ, showing some Keas screwing around with construction workers working on a road. Every time the workers were out of line of sight they moved the orange traffic cones to change the traffic.
  
  I’m fascinated with them all. New Zealand has been seperated from other contintents for a long time, and until mankind arrived here (only around 1000 years ago), there were no large mammals on the islands, and for the land birds at least, the only predators were other birds. So the birds here have adapted to fill niches normally filled by mammals, and they also tend to be large, long lived and flightless (or poor flyers), because flight didn’t help them escape predation, but size, strong legs and camoflage did.
  Unfortunately, they died in large numbers when mammals were introduced (mankind as well as their companions/stow aways) and many have gone extinct.
  New Zealand is leading the way in establishing completely predator free spaces (initially mostly islands, but now mainland areas too), so you have spaces where rare birds are flourishing again.
  I’ve been in New Zealand for the last couple of weeks, and honestly, my favourites are the North and South Island Robins. They appear fearless, because they follow larger animals around (like people), and hunt for insects that they stir up. What it looks like though is this friendly little robin comes right up to you and starts following you! I also love the Kererū (New Zealand pigeon). They’re big clumsy birds, but so gorgeous! And speaking of pigeons, it’s interesting that rock pigeons don’t dominate city spaces here. They’re around, but mostly, the niche normally filled by pigeons is filled by gulls and house sparrows..

International Humanitarian Law which defines war crimes and such.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1
As it turns out most people who cry about war crimes don’t know the first thing about them.

I wrote an Excel macro in VBA that opens a file select window, imports the selected files as new worksheets, copies the data from each worksheet recursively into a master table, prompts the user to delete the imported tables, then prompts the user to save the workbook as a new file.
Excel does have functions that achieve basically the same thing, but it was being too finicky with how it wanted the source tables formatted.
I barely know VBA and idek wtf a Boolean variable is, but I fucking did it and it's going to make mine and my team's life so much easier at work. That was my whole Friday lmao
I frequently have to dump a bunch of data from our accounting system, and the process afterward involves a ton of manual cutting and pasting. When I have to do it 70 times, it's physically and mentally exhausting. I'm not the only one who has complained about this process, and nobody has done anything to make it better. So I'm fixing that shit. I'm not a programmer. I'm an accountant. But I'm also so lazy that I'll to learn how to program a little to save myself a lot of work over the long run.
- Programming is a tool, you don’t have to be a knife enthusiast to want get the correct knife
- Awesome, if you have any questions, shoot. Started down that rabbit hole 20 years and never really came up for air :)
  Actually it just leads to many more data type manipulation, SQL, VBA connecting to the other Microsoft app, etc. never regretted it aside from the 3am sessions trying to figure out one more thing, which leads to one more thing... But then that is the rabbit hole piece.
  Btwa boolean is just data stored in a single bit, either a 1 or a 0 on the backend, but usually presented as something more obvious to the user like yes/no, true/false, on/off etc
  
  I'm interested in SQL. I just need to learn SQL.
  
  I'd love to learn SQL. I'm going back to school later this year because I have a bachelor's degree with 127 credit hours. I'm 23 hours shy of being eligible to hold a CPA license in my state. So I found a local community college that offers a computer science program with a focus on database management, and there's a whole class on SQL that I'm kinda looking forward to. And because I already have a degree, all of my gen eds are out of the way. Taking the core classes for the two year degree at this community college sits right at the intersection of 151 hours. All I have to do after that is pass the CPA Exam lol It's that easy.
- Just to give you another rabbit hole, you can also manipulate pretty much any data source, including Excel using powershell. I regularly use powershell scripts to mass import data that the script processes into an Excel workbook that the powershell formats. I find powershell to be faster doing this (if you use .net framework/LINQ, powershell sucks at large scale data object processing natively), especially if it's large amounts of data, I typically process combined logs of over a million rows.
- What's the advantage of VBA in this use case over other options?
  
  They said they barely know vba. So it's probably the integration into MS tools.

Motorcycle gear. I now know I can buy armoured(!!) leggings that go under my jeans, and an armoured(!!) leather jacket that looks kickass over a hoodie.
- ATGATT!
- Please rate the effectiveness of these garments against zombie attack. Asking for a friend.
  
  I second this. But I'm asking for a future friend.
- Ooo. I just bought a klx 300. I should look into armour.

Well, I crocheted a beret today and started a trihexaflexagon for my wife's birthday the other day. So I suppose it's crochet this week.
- That's rad. How did the beret turn out?
  Also, this is the first time reading out trihexaflexagon and also getting a refresher as to what it is. It's a really fun word to say. Makes me feel like a top tier rapper when I say it out loud. haha
  
  It turned out pretty well, it was my first time improvising a pattern from looking at a finished piece. I ran out of yarn right before transitioning from the top of the beret to the head band, but my wife let me use some of her black yarn to finish it off.
  There's a little bit of a visual indication that the black starts before the end of the round, but it's only like 10 stitches (out of 100) so it's not very noticeable.

The creativity and inquisitive curiousity in this thread is honestly inspiring and heartwarming.
My week was spent in object oriented code and log burning stove installation. The cherry on the top was putting my knee through the glass so last night was devoted to thinking about how it can be repaired without spending more money.

One of my 2025 goals is to learn to draw well, and I've been making slow, steady progress at that. My goals are 2-fold - make quality drawings of furniture for my other new hobby, woodworking - and draw cursed shit that is disturbing to friends and family alike. Here's a texture study I did yesterday in about an hour.
- We used to call those "doodles" back in my day /s

I bought a new domain name for my indie web presence, so that I can keep my boring professional stuff separate.
- I have 3 domains... I need help
  
  That's a totally reasonable number!
  Also, just an FYI you can use nginx as to serve multiple domains/websites from a single server on the cheap. ;)
- Oh nice. What kind of 'indie stuff' are you making?
  I did see that you're into writing. That's cool. I've been trying to stick with it. I have a decent amount of ideas for stories but not enough typed out. =/
  
  Oh nice. What kind of ‘indie stuff’ are you making?
  So far, it's just my morning pages. I figure if I share my most raw and unfinished stuff, then it will be mentally easier to share the stuff I actually put polish into.
  I have this server running an Quartz frontend, that I can just push markdown files to. But yeah, that'll probably move to a subdomain, and the main site will be wacky neocities type stuff, idk. Something rough and fun, though.

War thunder and some weird electrical issue in the house connected to the servers

Voice cloning with python. My end goal, which of course I will never finish, is to create a little server or box that you can ask questions or send text to that will sound like me. My dad died over ten years ago and I would love to hear his voice again. I plan to make something so my kids can hear me again after I’m gone.
- I used this and it worked very well. I realize it’s paid and not self hosted but an alternative and works surprising well.
  https://elevenlabs.io/
- Oh yea, I had that on my backlog to do as well. Currently pivoted to figuring out how to design a keyboard so I can 3D print one
  
  Also on my list. At least the PCB. I have a keychron I’m ok with now but it’s not 100% what I want. Maybe 96%.
  What I really really want is something designed like the Ocreeb MK2 or the beyblock20 all running QMK. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get to that.

Drove through Weldon, NC —> list of famous people —> Garland H. White —> 28th infantry of the USCT (US Colored Troops) —> Buffalo Soilders —> Brigadier General Charles Young Tree (NPS) —> Brigadier General Charles H. Young
So I took myself on a Black History Month tour while riding to daughters gymnastics competition.

Do I have to pick one?
OpenPGP use on Apple devices MainStage as a front-end for my bass rig MainStage for backing tracks in a live setting LilyGO TDeck 3-octave G major arpeggios
- That all sounds like some big brains kinda stuff. If I may ask, what does OpenPGP cryptography have to do with live music mixing/balancing?
  
  Haha, absolutely nothing. OpenPGP just happened to show up somewhere along the way and decided to vibe with the music-making stuff!

Work believe it not. Been trying to fiddle around and get an integration working so the team working on it don’t take 3 times the effort. I really should let go and let them try it out themselves but it’s a fun distraction.

Been playing around with a book idea. It's in the style of the Ouipo inspired book, A Void. The book, written in French, is done so without using the letter "e". Perec is a mad man and an amazing writer. And I don't think anything I will write will be anywhere near that quality.
I want to write something similar that is a world without 'ai' (written by AI*). It's been fun structuring chapters, characters, themes, settings, etc. I'm not a writer by training, but I do like word play and so this has been fun.
I have no hope or dreams of publishing, but I might show a few friends who get it. And hope that it tickles them the way it tickles me.
I really don't like the output so far. And I have my doubts about it becoming good. But I got something that wasn't outright bad the other night. So who knows?
- I once read a book without punctuation. It was very difficult to read! It was about a hypothetical apocalypse where everyone suddenly goes blind.
  "Blindness" by José Saramago
  I don't specifically recommend it though.
  Good luck writing your book 🙂
  
  A buddy of mine just told me about an other one sentence. Dies: A Sentence is by Vanessa Place whose gotten more than a little heat lately for some of her provocative art. While I haven't read it, he says it's good. We have similar enough tastes that I trust him.

i bought an orange juicer. been making orange juice every other day. it's awesome
and i'm not even over my dishwasher high

People talking and analyzing the movies and tv series I watched as a kid with each video ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours, 14 minutes and 28 seconds

Lately, it's been the man pages for bash. Linux is a rabbit hole all on its own. The man pages lead you from one hole to another and each has its own usefulness. Who would have thought that reading the manual could actually be useful?

Toying with the idea of running my own email server. Lots of people say this is a bad idea.
Been doing lots of research. I have a VPS for it already and want to set it up with postfix, dovecot, roundcube, and mariadb.
I don't want to host locally because I don't want it to depend on my internet connection and because my ip address will likely change at some point and most residential IPs are blacklisted.
But also don't want to host it on someone else's machine unless I can totally encrypt the drive. I have been looking at how to do full drive encryption on a vps hard drive by adding dropbear ssh to the initsys so I can ssh in and enter the decryption password when rebooting.
This also doesn't seem ideal, because it would require me to be available to do this for every reboot.
So still researching to see what other options there are.
- If you host your own email, expect your email to land in most people’s SPAM folders unless you warm up the domain first.
  If your email is going to be important / mission critical, let someone else host it.
  
  Yeah, my plan will be to use a domain that I don't actually use for my email to start with, make sure that I can reliably send and receive mail with it. Then add my normal email domain for sending-only to start, will just need to add it to my spf and dkim records. Once I test with that and verify that I can reliably send mail then I can fully switch things over.
  Still trying to decide what do do about full disk encryption.
  Thinking that maybe I can host a decryption key on private github repo, have the preboot environment use a local key to download the decryption key to ephemeral storage and use it to unlock the disk. This doesn't make it truly secure because anyone with access to the boot partition could figure out what is happening and do it manually. but it would make it difficult enough that a bored sysadmin at the vps provider couldn't just browse me data easily.
  I'd really like it better if I could have it send me a push notification to my phone to authorize the unlock. Maybe I can set that up with how ever I decide to host the decryption key.
- As other people said, getting the mail delivered is the hard part. Check if your mail is received by Google, Microsoft, because apparently they blacklist by default.
  You can do everything yourself and then set up a relay for sending, so all mail is sent through someone else who can make sure it is delivered. Then you could get something like purelymail, which is 10$/year to deliver your mail. (I have no relation with purelymail, I am their customer, but it took me quite a while to find a mail relay that is not for sending bulk spam but for real people).
- Ive had great success with Mailcow on my Vps, they have good Docs to follow and also setup the DNS. Just wanted to drop that suggestion :)
- That sounds really fun

KCD2
- Came here to say the same. I can't stop playing
  
  I was a huge fan of the first one and this new one looks even better. I guess I’m waiting for it to go on some sort of sale
- What's that? Mine was a game cslled The Dark mod
  
  I had to look it up myself. It means Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. It's a new medieval RPG video game.

Been rebinging Warehouse 13 (dumb but I love it). It stayed as an attempt to trick myself into doing some long overdue paperwork - even doing it slowly while half watching show is better than continuing to avoid it completely. That worked for a day or so, but now I've descended to just cycling through savoury and sweet snacks and watching a season a day...
- In my head canon, Warehouse 13 is just a continuation of Friday the 13th: The Series, where they track down cursed antiques their crazy uncle sold before they wreak more havoc on the world.
- Forgot about that show!

Househunting
- I weave cat hair ear muffs. I don't have a wife, but there's this waitress I just met, and I'm pretty sure she likes me back.

Learning Japanese on Duolingo and other sources (learnjapanese.moe) because why not
cookie clicker again... Same save this time tho
Oh and I started a modded Minecraft server again... Well that one was just yesterday

the biathlon world championships!