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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The screenshot folder itself is certainly not limited to just screenshots. Any file you can save can be kept in there. To my mind, the “entry point” is “saving a file to this particular folder”, regardless of the specific method used to do the saving. The screenshot is just an extremely convenient way to do that.

    I just thought of a way to improve this technique with Tasker. Tasker can work with the clipboard, edit files, and take a screenshot. So, you could set up a gesture to trigger a task in Tasker. Tasker can then take the screenshot, dumping it into the folder. Tasker can then check the clipboard; if there is text in your clipboard, it can prepend it to a single “TODO.txt” in your screenshot folder.

    Linux could be configured much the same way, using shutter and xclip to capture the screenshot and clipboard, respectively.


  • California’s new age verification law puts the onus on the operating system. When you install or setup your computer of device, you will be required to state your age, or the age of the child that will be using the machine. Sex offender App and Web developers are still required to demand the user’s age before providing their services, and children will still be required to announce their minor-ness to P(a)edophiles.

    But, California will not require photos or ID scans, so it’s only the second worst of the three available options. The best option, of course, is to allow children to not tell potential pedophiles that they are kids.


  • What always got me personally is exactly that — over time I’d end up with multiple “entry points” depending on context (screenshot, chat, browser, notes…).

    So long as you’re manually processing everything, screenshots work for all of that. You can take a note in any text box anywhere, and screenshot it. Chat message? Screenshot. Browser? Screenshot. Notes? Screenshot. You can even take a photo and then screenshot it to capture it into your workflow.

    I have Shutter (apt install shutter) on my desktop, and I’ve changed the Print Screen key to shortcut to “shutter -s”. This lets me capture an area of my screen with one button (and a mouse drag). Bam, more screenshot.

    The downsides of screenshot are obvious, of course: Extracting the text from the screenshot is a bit of a pain in the ass. If you really want to keep the same entry point, though, you could setup a script to OCR newly captured screenshot/photos to extract the text. An OCR-friendly font might make that pretty reliable.

    Now I want to improve my setup…



  • On my phone, my Screenshot folder is syncthing’d to my desktop, so most of the time, capturing something in the moment is as simple as dragging three fingers down my screen. My Camera and default Download folders are also syncthing’d, so just taking a picture or saving something from a browser has it captured across my devices.

    I also use Tududi, which has Telegram integration, for the quick note. Taking the note is just a matter of sending a message in Telegram, which is available on all my devices. Signal’s “Note To Self” feature is also useful; I trust it more than Telegram for sensitive data. In Firefox on my desktop, I have “Automatic Tab Opener” (Browser extension) pulling up my Tududi inbox every hour, reminding me to actually deal with the notes I have previously taken.





  • I was in real estate. We collected earnest money from a particular buyer, and held it in an escrow account. The deal fell through, and we were required to return the money. However, the buyer ghosted us. We couldn’t reach them to return it.

    Our escrow account is audited by the state. We have to account for every transaction to or from that account. If we don’t have paperwork to justify the transfer, we could get fined or have our licenses revoked. We didn’t have paperwork for this buyer, so we had no legal authority to do anything with this money.

    Any account with any business can potentially have the same problem: a legal obligation to transfer money to a known person, but no way of actually completing the transfer.

    The solution is to transfer the money to the state’s “unclaimed funds” division. When the state audits our account, we can show that these funds are the state’s problem, not ours.

    The funds I’ve found were from a couple class action suits where I was apparently a member of the class. It amounted to tens of dollars. They were apparently filed long after I had moved, but I had never updated my address with the defendants.



  • This feature isn’t depriving anyone of anything. Neither is the guillotine in my front yard. It hasn’t been used to decapitate anyone. It’s just sitting there in case it’s needed at some point in the future.

    Oh, those cameras in the elementary school bathroom? Yeah, those aren’t actually hooked up. They don’t have any power, let alone a network connection to the security camera system we just ordered. Those cameras are there just in case they are needed later.

    This date field is a Checkov Gun hanging on the wall in the first act.



  • I would strongly suggest Pangolin for that use case. It combines a reverse proxy with a VPN tunnel between your local network and your VPS. You can host your services on your local machine, and serve them from the VPS. Pangolin also sets up your letsencrypt certs for https.

    It also provides a security layer: if enabled for a site, you have to be logged in to Pangolin before Pangolin will proxy traffic to your site.