Hey here’s a new video by Rich from … 11 July 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD-QHbRWcoM

Hi, a buddy of mine works in social work currently. He was working from home successfully during the dark age and is now being requested to return to a windowless basement for 40 hours a week. I am wondering what sort of remote work I can help him find. Bit of a random question, but does anybody know of any remote gigs that would be suitable for a non-coder … maybe like office stuff? Kinda scratching my head here.

I’m looking at some “Tech Support” gigs at cool new companies, many of them are very happy to do full remote it seems! I’d share my findings but do not want to increase competition for my friend 😅

aside: anyone know where I can get a rubber duck in clojure colors?

I'd be careful, pragmatically speaking a lot of remote work outside of prestige / high skilled industry is more likely to be exploitative or abusive than in person work (and there are a lot of straight up scams)

by isolating people from coworkers they can get away with more abusive behavior, sadly

I want to start keeping a dotfiles repository but am unsure how you do that. How do you pull in all these random config files in your system into one git repository?

I do it by having symlinks

I have a "dotfiles" dir, and a symlink from "dotfiles/bashrc" to ".bashrc" etc.

There's a lot of info and links at http://dotfiles.github.io/

ok, I'll research symlinks then. Thanks!

I keep the naming consistent so I can use a shell for loop on a new machine: $ for file in $(pwd)/dotfiles/config/*; do ln -s $file .$(basename $file); done (well actually my system isn't quite that nice but that's a simplified version and what I'll eventually get around to...)

I highly recommend making the versions in source control not start with ., since all your tooling should treat files starting with dot specially (and usually not show / offer them)

Will do

hmm, one idea I had just now: have names like dot.bashrc dot.vimrc etc. and just use sed to strip the dot off the front haha

that "feels wrong" since it flips the role of the two sides of the dot

haha, I know of the existence of sed but haven't used it. This is definitely accomplishing my true secret goal of avoiding my real work that I need to do

oh man mastering the unix CLI is such a weird deep fun painful frustrating glorious rabbit hole

perfect way to waste a month of productivity at a time

awk is the best unix cli utility. sed just seems more complicated to me.

I don't know how much awk you know, it's a much more complicated and featureful tool, you use awk to write programs, sed is for line by line processing only

(I don't mean "I don't know how much awk you know" in a condescending way - more like "you might know this already, but...")

I mean, you can write arbitrary programs in awk without abusing it, not so with sed

😅 tbh, i really haven't use either seriously yet. Had more fun playing with awk. is what i meant.

it's a fun little language, its implicit line by line execution is almost like a gui event loop driver

(but you can do things outside that loop also)

people who got fed up with awk's limitations went on to make things like tcl and perl (proper text oriented scripting languages)

I suspect you could use @borkdude’s babashka and get clojure to be nearly as concise or moreso with the right utility lib...

which also reminds me of one of my favorite toy languages: scsh - a set of scheme functions and macros so that you can use scheme as if it was a shell, complete with pipes https://scsh.net/