Nice! Thanks!

I’d rather listen to Raditude than Pinkerton…

I lived in Grenada for a couple of years. It’s a chill, safe place. I had my family there and we always felt safe, as long as we kept an eye out for speeding buses when crossing the street. It certainly checks the boxes you specified. Night life is limited. I’m planning to go back for a vacation in February.

As I recall there is a time of year that gets very windy. I think that’s in winter, but my memory is fuzzy. The internet says February is the windiest, and that matches some of my memories. In any case it’s always warm. I wouldn’t worry about rain. That’s tapered off by December. If it does rain it’s a warm rain, and it’s likely to come in short showers so I don’t think you’d be stuck inside all day.

If you want to be in walking distance to amenities I’d recommend staying near Grand Anse. You can also get public buses there. (They are actually vans.) There are resorts close to the airport, but in those places you’d be dependent on taxis to get away from the resort - which might be fine if you want to be somewhere quieter.

When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.

What I’m hearing is shepherds’ pie, but spherical

I made a rendering of a lighthouse on the Dark Ocean in 3D Studio Max. Or I guess it would be better called a darkhouse. Unfortunately that image is lost to time.

I enjoyed Digimon as a teenager. I never got any cards. However I did make a liiiittle fan art.

Aw, thanks! That’s high praise!

I used to organize a meetup for Javascript programmers. It was more about sharing information than about debate, but I think there might be overlap with what you want. The format was a regular meeting schedule once a month where 2-3 people would give presentations to show off what they’ve been working on, teach how to use a new framework, or whatever they were interested in. So in a way it has handing out information from on high, but I think because we had different people each meeting sharing their perspective there was a good element of exchange of ideas between peers.

Now it turns out that people need lots of leadership energy to create room for exchange of ideas. At the beginning I’d get about 6 people at each meeting, few of whom volunteered to step up in front of the group. So what I did was to show up every month, and talked about whatever topic I could come up with. At most of the meetings it was just me talking. When I did get other people to present it was through prodding and hassling. But people were interested enough in the material, and found enough value in just being in the same room with other people with similar interests that people kept coming back. It stayed small like that, growing slowly for maybe 2 years. But then we hit a critical point where there were enough people coming, and people were inspired enough that suddenly we were getting 30-50 people each month, and I had no problem finding volunteers to present. And it wasn’t the same volunteers either - we had a good rotation of different people interested in sharing their ideas. That continued for another 6 years before I moved and passed organizer responsibility over to the next generation.

My point is that a club like this needs a lot of energy and attention. It’s going to grow slowly. But it will grow if you keep at it, and put in the work. We reached that point where the group became sort of self sufficient in that I didn’t need to be the one making presentations anymore, and I didn’t need to actively seek out volunteers to present. But I still had to put in the work to make sure we had the meeting space available every month, show up to let people in, work out the meeting schedule, get food. Anything like this will die if there isn’t someone holding it together through force of will. But it’s worth it! It was a great experience!

I know you said you want your club to self-manage. But people need structure. If you ask people to show up and have stimulating discussion they’re going stand around awkwardly not knowing what to talk about. Something like a presentation followed by discussion gives structure that helps people to open up, and explore their own thoughts. Or since you want multiple perspectives maybe a debate or a panel format would work better for you. Get 2 or more volunteers to talk about a specific topic. I highly recommend lining up panelists ahead of time - you’ll have a rough time getting volunteers on the spot. If you prep your debaters ahead of time by asking them to present different views they might be less likely to simply agree with each other. Once your scheduled panelists get ideas flowing it will be easier to encourage attendees to step up to speak. You might have a debate or panel followed by open discussion, or rotating panel seats that people can step up to and leave as they feel inspired. But again, based on my experience I suggest being ready to be the one person standing up and debating yourself for maybe many meetings before the club finds a self-organizing energy.

I’m quite happy with Thunder.

#7 is my goal owl

I bring my kid to school on a bike. I follow the right-of-way rules at the 4-way stops and at left turns. But every day there are 1-3 drivers who wave me ahead, and refuse to move until I go first. I don’t care what the rules are - I just want consistency!

What helps me most is to find a comfortable rhythm, which is a combination of stride cadence and breathing. I’ve read advice on counting strides, and matching breaths to certain steps. It’s hard for me to coordinate all that so I go by feel. If you’re not feeling comfortable maybe try going slower.

When your legs don’t want to move it could mean that your muscles aren’t warmed up. You might feel better after taking it easy at the start of the run. Or your muscles might be tired from recent exercise. Either way make sure you’re hydrated.

It would make sense for the terminal to handle syntax highlighting since that would match how editors work. But the convention is that the shell handles highlighting, not the terminal. You can check which shell you are running with the command,

$ echo $SHELL

It’s done that way because the shell is a running program that is capable of telling the terminal which colors to show (by mixing color escape sequences into text). Compare that to code in an editor which is text, not a running program so the only option is for the editor to handle highlighting[1]. Editors need syntax files to configure highlighting for all the different programming languages, while terminals don’t need this because the shell tells them what colors to show.

[1] setting aside the “semantic highlighting” LSP capability - that was invented long after syntax highlighting conventions were established

Seems like a matter of preference, and I see the logic in it. I’ll mention that Nushell makes it easy to create custom shell functions that are invoked as sub-commands in this manner. https://www.nushell.sh/book/custom_commands.html#command-names

This happens to be the plot of the book series, The Accidental Minecraft Family

My favorite is Time Surfer. The core mechanic is basically the same as Tiny Wings, but the theme, artwork, levels, etc are all very different. I especially enjoy the chiptunes!

Are there other relevant standards? The XDG base directory specification has been around for a long time, and is well established.

Maybe your comment wooshed over my head; if so I apologize.

Are you saying that you don’t want to write your software according to the XDG spec, or that you don’t want to set the XDG env vars on your system? If it’s the second that’s fine - apps using XDG work just fine if you ignore it. If it’s the first I’d suggest reconsidering because XDG can make things much easier for users of your software who have system setups or preferences that are different from yours; and using XDG doesn’t cause problems for users who ignore it.

OP’s recommendation is aimed mostly at software authors.

So yes, “XDG” stands for “Cross-Desktop Group” - but I don’t agree that using the spec assumes a windowing system. The base directory spec involves checking for certain environment variables for guidance on where to put files, and falling back to certain defaults if those variables are not set. It works fine on headless systems, and on systems that are not XDG-aware (I suppose that means systems that don’t set the relevant env vars).

OTOH as another commenter pointed out the base directory spec can make software work when it otherwise wouldn’t on a system that doesn’t have a typical home directory layout or permissions.