Spyke

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The Ohio Supreme Court Just Greenlit an Egregious “Fraud Upon the Voters”

I don't think the article included it and it's a little difficult to find the phrasing.

I found a sample ballot

https://www.boe.ohio.gov/clark/c/upload/ELEC_BallotProofs.pdf

The phrasing there is

To create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state

However a vote of "Yes" would establish a non-partisan (or, IMO more accurately, a mixed partisan) committee of 15 (5R, 5D, 5 other) where a majority of the committee must approve the redistricting.

The extended description starts with this

  1. Repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018, and eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.

Technically all of this is correct but I can absolutely see how it's misleading voters.

Full disclosure, I'm not a lawyer or political scientist and I do not live in Ohio.

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The Immich core team goes full-time | Immich

I've never heard of FUTO before and it sounds a little too good to be true. It looks like they have made some grants to other big projects. I like what they're saying to the point that it seems too good to be true.

Does anyone know if this is a legit organization and if it has staying power?

Either way getting further progress on Immich, hopefully moving towards real stability, is very exciting!

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You Need A Budget

There's already an envelope budgeting tool called You Need A Budget that's well known in the personal finance community, making this naming feel intentionally misleading. This tool is also not how the envelope system works. It's not an envelope per day, it's an envelope per category.

I want to assume best intentions here but this project is raising some major red flags for me and I haven't even looked at the source code. I even kind of wonder if its AI...

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EBook Management

I tried to avoid Calibre for as long as I could. In my opinion, it's way too opinionated about how everything is organized. Instead of working with you, the user, it forces you into line with how the developer thinks it should work. The developer is also kind of an ass to his community and, as a dev myself, I have some concerns over some of their choices.

All that said, I finally gave in recently and converted to Calibre because there's nothing else that works as well. It's too niche of a space for there to be much competition. To use it remotely - or, more accurately for my use, headless - the docker image I use sets up a VNC viewer to work with the application.

For actually browsing the content that Calibre organizes, I settled on Kavita. There's no competition for Calibre's organization but Kavita is easily the best content browser I've tried. If you've organized and tagged your ebooks with Calibre, it does a great job of making them available on the web and offers an OPDS server as well as the web viewer. I am more into ebooks than comics or manga but I have a few that Kavita also manages well.

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You Didn’t Build That: How NPR's "How I Built This" podcast contributes to the devaluation of workers’ lives

This guy really has it out for this podcast. This reads to me like Guy Raz personally pissed him off. It's been a few years since I listened to How I Built This but most of the ones I listened to were about the early days of the company when it really is kind of the leader doing long hours and chasing a dream. I think we can recognize that and also recognize what the companies became later.

Many of the ones I listened to would mention that it was a lot of luck - though there were exceptions and those CEOs didn't come across well. It also talked pretty openly about companies that got stolen - Dippin' Dots and Burt's Bees come to mind.

Maybe the vibe has shifted since I stopped listening but this feels unnecessarily harsh. Personally, I don't think this would be the right venue for pressing them on hard issues like unions and regulations - maybe as a retrospective at the end of the interview at most. I think we can recognize the hard work and long hours that go into starting these companies without also accepting their suspect business practices as they get larger (which can have a lot of complicated drivers). Attack the companies and CEOs, not a podcast host who is just trying to make an easy and interesting podcast.

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Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

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I understand the frustration; almost nowhere does agile "right". However, this is a gross misrepresentation of the philosophy.

Specifically it leaves out and ignores this very important part:

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

As seen on agilemanifesto.org

The base philosophy is meant to remind us what we are here to do: make software (or whatever project we're working on), not become dogmatic about processes or tools or get bogged down in peripheral documentation.

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Better music management

I use Lidarr. I know its primary purpose is downloading but if you just never configure those parts, it can do all the renaming, folder organization, and metadata tagging. It uses MusicBrainz primarily, iirc. You can also configure scripts to run it through beets or other tools too.

There's no perfect solution for this because music metadata is a lot more complicated than movies or tv. But Lidarr gets pretty close to set-and-forget.

I've also tried MusicBrainz Picard with pretty decent results but I found it sort of suffered from the problems you described for your current system.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Wouldn't put it past them as the Retroarch lead devs have done shit like that before.

Do you have examples? I usually stay out of dev drama as well but I just started using Retroarch and I'm curious. I also don't want to support people that abuse the community, so I'd like to be informed.

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What do you use for keeping track of expenses and income

Are you trying to track expenses or budget? The difference is in how you're using the data. Busgeting is a much more active process of making sure money is going to the right place. The difference is a deep topic that might be beyond the scope of your question so I'll leave it at that for now.

For budgeting, the gold standard is still YNAB. There are plenty of valid criticisms to level against it but I've done a lot of research and tried out a lot of tools and it's still the best.

I am keeping a close eye on ActualBudget. It's not ready for me yet, personally, but they're doing fantastic work with that project. If you don't mind a little extra technical maintenance (barely any with PikaPods as another comment suggested), it can get you a long way. Notably, this is the most private recommendation I can make. Since you run your own instance and it's open-source software, you can tell exactly what its doing with your data. Automatic bank import is available but not required or pushed on you.

If you're interested more in tracking, Mint used to be the easiest tool to get into. Unfortunately with it shut down, I'm not aware of any similar replacements. If I were looking for more of a tracking and reporting tool, I would probably import my bank data into a spreadsheet and go from there. I think there might be a gap in the market here (though I also think there were a lot of Mint users who really needed a budgeting tool and, IMO, it wasn't very good for that).

I've started looking at PocketGuard which might be a good replacement for Mint and fit your needs. I can't speak much about it myself yet but it looks interesting.

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How to download Google Takeout zips?

I have tried to solve this many times as I want to regularly back up my Google content - mostly the images for the same purpose you mention.

Unfortunately there is no good solution I've ever come up with or found. I even looked into scripting with something like puppeteer. It requires regular confirmation of your authentication and I just haven't found a good way to solve that since there's no API access. It also won't let you use any cli tools like wget. You could probably figure out how to pull some token or cookie to give to the cli but you'd have to do it so often that its more of a pain than just manually downloading.

My solution currently is to run a firefox browser in a container on my server to download them. It acts as sort of a session manager (like tmux or zellij for command line) so that if the PC I'm using goes to sleep or something, the downloads continue. Then I just check in occasionally through the day. Plus I wanted them on the server anyway, at the end of the day. Downloading them there directly saves me having to then transfer to the server.

Switching to .tgz will let you make up to 50GB files which at least means fewer iterations and longer time between interactions (so I can actually do something useful in the meantime).

I sincerely hope someone proves me wrong and has a way to do this but I've searched a lot. I know other people want to solve it but I've never seen anyone with a solution.

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Server HDD selction

There's a lot of comments talking about used and refurbs. I personally use these types to get good deals but I also have a reasonably robust backup protocol. Not a full 321 backup but an appropriate level of risk for my needs.

My point being, if you go that route, they're cheaper but the odds that one dies on you might be higher. Make sure you manage your backup strategy to a risk value you're comfortable with.

That said, I've also had great experiences with serverpartdeals. I've also used diskprices.com to find deals.

Things to consider are noise, temps, power-on time, etc. For myself, temps are fairly consistent in my case and it's in a closet so I don't care about noise. I also don't need particularly fast access on the HDDs (I use an nvme cache strategy as well) so I can pretty much use whatever. Your needs might differ.

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I need a low budget laptop

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It's not even a dual boot. You can enable a linux access from ChromeOS that is essentially the full install. Shell access as well as GUI apps.

I have used it with a lot of success. The initial startup of the sandbox is a bit slow and I seemed to run out of space quickly on mine but for light work it's definitely usable.