I am seriously learning how to plumb gas lines to save like $600. So if you don’t hear from me, it will be because I killed myself and probably injured several neighbors.
The flu. The flu has been my rabbit hole for the week 😭
Linux
I’m also realising this rabbit hole with every second I spend on Lemmy. Hell I was reading up on arch at 2 am last night when I couldn’t get to sleep….
Honestly I would skip Arch and just use something like Fedora or Debian. Arch is way over rated. You can build a Arch like system out of anything.
Yeah, but the difference is quite huge IMHO. Arch philosophy is user centric so it is deliberately minimal because then it is up to you what to add instead of having to remove something to get what you want.
I’m using Ubuntu across a few devices atm. All the arch memes and the sleeplessness just drove me to go find out what the fuss was all about.
Start with something like mint and works your way to other distros.
You should be able to live boot mint to see how it runs before committing to installing.
New Zealand birds
Oh cool! Which bird from New Zealand has impressed you the most and how so?
From my memories from growing up in NZ long ago there are lots of funny/rock-n-roll stories about the Kea (very cheeky and charismatic parrot-like bird). I remember finding a funny CCTV video from about a year ago in NZ, showing some Keas screwing around with construction workers working on a road. Every time the workers were out of line of sight they moved the orange traffic cones to change the traffic.
I’m fascinated with them all. New Zealand has been seperated from other contintents for a long time, and until mankind arrived here (only around 1000 years ago), there were no large mammals on the islands, and for the land birds at least, the only predators were other birds. So the birds here have adapted to fill niches normally filled by mammals, and they also tend to be large, long lived and flightless (or poor flyers), because flight didn’t help them escape predation, but size, strong legs and camoflage did.
Unfortunately, they died in large numbers when mammals were introduced (mankind as well as their companions/stow aways) and many have gone extinct.
New Zealand is leading the way in establishing completely predator free spaces (initially mostly islands, but now mainland areas too), so you have spaces where rare birds are flourishing again.
I’ve been in New Zealand for the last couple of weeks, and honestly, my favourites are the North and South Island Robins. They appear fearless, because they follow larger animals around (like people), and hunt for insects that they stir up. What it looks like though is this friendly little robin comes right up to you and starts following you! I also love the Kererū (New Zealand pigeon). They’re big clumsy birds, but so gorgeous! And speaking of pigeons, it’s interesting that rock pigeons don’t dominate city spaces here. They’re around, but mostly, the niche normally filled by pigeons is filled by gulls and house sparrows…
I wrote an Excel macro in VBA that opens a file select window, imports the selected files as new worksheets, copies the data from each worksheet recursively into a master table, prompts the user to delete the imported tables, then prompts the user to save the workbook as a new file.
Excel does have functions that achieve basically the same thing, but it was being too finicky with how it wanted the source tables formatted.
I barely know VBA and idek wtf a Boolean variable is, but I fucking did it and it’s going to make mine and my team’s life so much easier at work. That was my whole Friday lmao
I frequently have to dump a bunch of data from our accounting system, and the process afterward involves a ton of manual cutting and pasting. When I have to do it 70 times, it’s physically and mentally exhausting. I’m not the only one who has complained about this process, and nobody has done anything to make it better. So I’m fixing that shit. I’m not a programmer. I’m an accountant. But I’m also so lazy that I’ll to learn how to program a little to save myself a lot of work over the long run.
Awesome, if you have any questions, shoot. Started down that rabbit hole 20 years and never really came up for air :)
Actually it just leads to many more data type manipulation, SQL, VBA connecting to the other Microsoft app, etc. never regretted it aside from the 3am sessions trying to figure out one more thing, which leads to one more thing… But then that is the rabbit hole piece.
Btwa boolean is just data stored in a single bit, either a 1 or a 0 on the backend, but usually presented as something more obvious to the user like yes/no, true/false, on/off etc
I’d love to learn SQL. I’m going back to school later this year because I have a bachelor’s degree with 127 credit hours. I’m 23 hours shy of being eligible to hold a CPA license in my state. So I found a local community college that offers a computer science program with a focus on database management, and there’s a whole class on SQL that I’m kinda looking forward to. And because I already have a degree, all of my gen eds are out of the way. Taking the core classes for the two year degree at this community college sits right at the intersection of 151 hours. All I have to do after that is pass the CPA Exam lol It’s that easy.
Just to give you another rabbit hole, you can also manipulate pretty much any data source, including Excel using powershell. I regularly use powershell scripts to mass import data that the script processes into an Excel workbook that the powershell formats. I find powershell to be faster doing this (if you use .net framework/LINQ, powershell sucks at large scale data object processing natively), especially if it’s large amounts of data, I typically process combined logs of over a million rows.
They said they barely know vba. So it’s probably the integration into MS tools.
So I had tried using the data import wizard or whatever it was that’s built in to pull an entire folder into the workbook, but I had roughly 70 workbooks, all with 40 columns and anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 rows. At the end of it all, I probably had over 20 million cells. The built-in tool was being finicky. I think it was that the sheer amount of data I was working with was too much for it to handle. But it kept giving me errors about formatting.
So I gave up on it, and I spent several hours of my life reading manuals and forum posts on how best to achieve one step and testing code on backups. It was truly an all-day thing. But when you’re dealing with dozens of files, this macro takes maybe 45 seconds to do its thing whereas the manual process could waste an hour of your day. And I plan to share it with the team once I get it a bit more polished because it’s not exactly where I want it. But I think the rest of my colleagues will love it.
I know a little VBA. I spent a whole weekend writing a macro because I did my personal budgets in Excel, and I wanted to automate some stuff because I could conceptualize how it could be done. I don’t use Windows at home anymore so I want to figure out how to bring it over to LibreOffice Basic. Still, since the business world uses Microsoft products, knowing VBA is a much more marketable skill so it is useful to practice in VBA whenever I can.
