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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • I think you’re confused about my sentiments.

    It doesn’t matter how well the current apps run, they should be 1st class citizen features seeing as power toys has been around since Windows 95 days as a series of useful tweaks and applications that are ubiquitous enough to exist through till now, including the constant expansion of features since the windows 10 open source version was published several years ago.

    If there wasn’t a dedicated community around these features, then you’d have an argument that they’re superfluous but the project has taken off like a rocket with regular improvements and fixes all these years now.

    The point is that Microsoft is prioritizing so many things with AI/copilot these days, it’s a damn shame they relegate actually useful features to the open source community where performance and integration is likely suffering, despite the community’s best efforts.


  • Windows Power Toys is a suite of programs and tweaks for Windows, one of which is “Run” that behaves similar to spotlight search on macOS. If you have to operate in Windows, I’d say the suite is a must-have for Run, Fancy Zones, File Renamer, Screen Ruler, and Color Picker alone. It’s good software that should be built into the OS but for some reason is not— built and maintained by a dedicated open source community these days as opposed to just a couple individuals from inside Microsoft back in the day when Power Toys was a proprietary tool first released on Windows 95.



  • I would make the case for proxmox on the machine so you can divvy up the hardware as you see fit— but also setup the hard drives as a zfs1 pool (1 redundancy failure allowed). This way you can make multiple isolated machines or use LXC containers directly for apps, services, etc. while benefiting from ZFS’s excellent performance and reliability. I would say that TrueNAS Scale has been a bit of a letdown for me because it feels bloated, easy to make mistakes with complicated setups, and I have less control over the hardware. I don’t like how updates have fully broken apps. That said it is a reliable ZFS wrapper with more bells and whistles in the UI over what proxmox offers— caveat being that both can do everything if you want to take the time to learn ZFS commands.

    There is also the TrueNAS based alternative HexOS that is more beginner friendly for just getting a nice NAS setup fast while still supporting apps / containers.


  • Can confirm the LTE models are totally worth it especially if you have AirPods and some music streaming service (or get a model with enough storage for your local songs). It’s amazing being able to just walk out of the house, still have music, notifications, the ability to call emergency services, directions, and even my 2FA unlocks when needed all on my wrist, all day. And unlimited data is only a $10 addon to my existing provider line.


  • I love Actual. It’s fantastic and easy to use. I use off-budget accounts and weekly / monthly reconciliation just to keep the general value of these accounts at stable intervals.

    I have a slight bone to pick with the PWA version of the site though. After a couple months of using the PWA front end to keep my budget and transactions accurate manually, I opened the site on my desktop browser and it completely lost all that work due to a sync issue. Apparently the PWA for weeks had not remained in sync and so all manual entries were not making back to the server. But the app works so well I never noticed because it kept just working. Supposedly there’s an alert saying it’s not synced with the server but it’s not prominent enough. So if you use that feature (the PWA) then be sure it’s syncing often.










  • I use Actual and my solution is to just report the differences in investments value at the end of each week as a transaction. It’s not great but it affords me an opportunity to see trends in a different way and make adjustments feeling a little more informed. I even put my car in and just check KBB every year and update it. Helps with the year end net worth evaluation though it’s not the most flexible.