working on 4 “characters” who are learning Git for the first time, to explain how Git branches work

trying to figure out if there are any major characters I’m missing (the idea is to give an example of how each of them might use branches, like Emilia might just be running `git push` to back up her thesis)

Thinking this morning about how much of teaching is just taking the time to listen. Hearing what someone’s actual computer problem is and then addressing it is so much harder than just telling them what I think is interesting or cool.

And sometimes I don’t know the answer to their actual problem, and I might not even know how to find out, and that feels bad! But it’s okay to just say “I don’t know” :)

finally signed up for a paid subscription to support Molly White’s cryptocurrency reporting

loved her 2024 talk on the how building things on the web is magic too https://xoxofest.com/2024/videos/molly-white/

one of the many good things about asking people questions instead of LLMs is that today i had a question about a project so i went to the discord to ask and the person said “oh no the software doesn’t do that but maybe we could change it so that it could”

(obviously asking people doesn’t always go well too, i have had many bad experiences with this approach too! it’s very messy!)

Is there a QR code generator that

1. is a website
2. is free, no account needed
3. is not secretly also a link shortener
4. does not look like a scam
5. does not include extra branding (the way the Chrome one does)

a friend just asked me this and I really could not find one

interesting to read this article (in french) about how some movies are no longer distributed https://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/chroniques/2024-04-26/repertoire-des-films-disparus.php

the only way I could find one of the movies in this article was to borrow the DVD from the library, and then I bought a DVD player on fb marketplace to watch it

(also the tray on the DVD player I got wouldn't open so I ended up disassembling the DVD player to put the disc in)

big news about the Wizard Zines store: print orders from Europe now ship from a European warehouse in Germany!!!

We've been having a lot of issues with duties & fees for European customers because of shipping from the US so I'm very excited for this.

get your zines here: https://wizardzines.com/

(and here's the shipping FAQ with all the details: https://store.wizardzines.com/pages/shipping-policy)

how do you think about how SSH public key authentication works (versus passwords) and what about your mental model makes you trust it?

please only answer if you _don't_ understand the math of how RSA (or elliptic curves etc) works, I'm interested in exploring what it means to understand the interfaces around public key authentication without actually learning number theory

(also obviously do not try to explain the math to me, also don't explain to folks in replies unless specifically asked)

i'm contemplating writing something basic about copying files over ssh with rsync but the only thing I can think of is how I can never remember how the trailing slash works and it makes me avoid using rsync whenever possible

what are your favourite settings to set in ~/.ssh/config? right now all I have is

Host some-alias
Hostname 1.2.3.4
User whateever

lazyweb: I'm curious about how to get a list of all of the different "kinds" of things SSH can do. my impression is that there's:

- open a terminal session
- just run one command
- TCP port forwarding
- X11 forwarding
- copy files

and that these all separate "commands" or "protocols" inside SSH. Not sure how to get a list of all of them though.

trying to make a list of everything I ever do with SSH