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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.


  • 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.




  • 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.






  • Parents, schools, employers, and governments, already use content controls to restrict users from accessing undesirable sites and services on the internet.

    Searching the terms “content blocking” or “parental controls” will get you lists of apps and services doing just that.

    Parents already have the capability. This law doesn’t provide any additional capability for parents to parent their kids. This law seeks, instead, to remove the power and responsibility of parenting from the parents, and assign it to pornographers. They want the operators of adult websites around the world to be the ones determining whether or not to provide content to their kids.


    What this law actually does is provide a means for a website to determine whether an adult or a child is trying to access their content, and to use that information to decide what content to provide. The thinking is that a respectable services like Netflix will be able to decide to provide only age-appropriate content, blocking kids from adult content.

    However, that also means that services like “KidGroomer dot com” will be able to provide different content to adults than it does to children. To an adult, they can portray themselves as a site that provides information on how to protect kids from grooming. But when a kid visits, this law lets the site know it is a kid. The site can now show them kid-targeted content, like how to get in contact with the nearest candy-giving stranger.

    Perhaps we don’t actually want a website to be able to determine whether there is a kid on the other side of the screen.


  • The UK uses single phase to the house. This is provided via one 240v hot and a neutral. Their final distribution transformer bonds one side of the output coil to ground and use it as a neutral, which makes the other side of the coil 240v relative to that ground.

    The US uses split phase to the house. This is 240v provided via two opposing 120v hots and a common neutral. Their final distribution transformer is almost identical to the UK version: end to end, they have a 240v output. The difference is that instead of bonding one end of the output coil to ground and using it as a neutral for the other end, they instead bond the center of the output coil to ground and use that as a common neutral for both ends.