When within ~/project/, I want different envvars than elsewhere.

Task.

What

I haven't really tested Atom and iTerm, yet. Instead, I've just downloaded them, run them for a few hours, and then switched back to Sublime and Terminal. Let's give them a few weeks of solid work - fixing bugs, seeing what packages I can implement, and seeing how the workflow goes.

Actionable items

• Install and configure Atom and iTerm
• Mandatory usage across projects (change aliases and so on)
• Test for three weeks:
  • January 11+
  • January 18+
  • January 25+
• Write up a report and store it in this repo.

Someone told me that .gitconfig is now deprecated in favor of .config/git/config. However, I can't find any record of this. In terms of the config hierarchy, git looks at them in this order: /etc/gitconfig, ~/.gitconfig, and ~/.config/git/config. So, moving my entire local ~/.gitconfig doesn't seem to be a smart idea, as any recreated version by accident will override it if I move it to ~/.config. Git itself suggests either place.

Why would I use one, over the other? Is there any benefit?

How does one do this?

GitHub Issue Templates are great, but they are somewhat misnamed: you can't have multiple templates, but only a single template which automatically loads. This template inevitably fails to deal with all possible open issues. For instance, questions are not the same as bug reports.

Short of including a line in a template saying Delete this template if it does not apply, are there other strategies to working with repositories which need multiple types of issue templates? Is this problem easily abstracted, and can it thus be streamlined?

This is an open question.

I want to export a single function for a Node package I am writing, so that you don't need to specify a method to use it. However, I want to run unit tests for all of the little functions I am writing around that function, because that's how you do TDD. So, how do I export those little functions, while also exporting the main function?

CF https://github.com/RichardLitt/gh-description/blob/master/index.js

I am very good at starting projects. However, the long tail at the end is harder. Recently, while discussing this with some people in the altMBA programme, they brought up the idea of finding a closer to help me out with my projects. Find someone who is consistently good at shipping products and making sure they are wrapped up and finite, instead of dragging them out and continually doing them.

I don't have a great way to look for this person; I can post on social media about it, or on Hacker Paradise and my other alumni networks. However, I think this is more of a long term goal of mine. Opening this issue to remind myself to be on the lookout for someone who I can organically start working with.

To Do: Close this issue in three months if there's been no change in status.

I never release my npm modules or GitHub code as releases, and I've no real idea why I should. According to Yoshua, this would help me in a few ways: "Ideally you'd also keep a changelog, list of commits and contributors. Also npm creates git tags which GitHub reads as releases." But I'm not really sure what this means.

Unanswered questions

• How is a codebase improved by having a changelog and/or list of contributors in a release?
• What is the benefit of a git tag from npm?
• What are the benefits of releases, in general?
• Should I changelog everything?
• Should I be adding contributor lists to everything?

@noffle points out that toilets take an amount of water which is an order of magnitude more than the amount used for hydration Source. For example, five daily flushes is 42 days of drinking water.

This is an interesting measurement if you are looking at personal water consumption, but it is not a useful metric for curtailing water usage. It is not useful because it lacks context. I could accurately state that Lake Baikal has 5,670 cubic miles of water, or 22% of the surface fresh water on Earth, and therefore it should be drained and Russia should stop hogging water, but it wouldn't make sense to do so. Likewise, stating that 5 gallons of water is a lot of water doesn't say anything about the system in which that variable may be meaningful.

Tangentially, putting a number on something outside of its context activates internal biases humans have, which result in the impression that large numbers are impressive. You can easily see this by suggesting that I drink 2% of all of the water I actually use, which is small, and therefore I don't need to worry about drinking water, because it's so little. In reality, this could mean I should actually waste less water elsewhere in my life. Framing numbers is important.

A better way of understanding personal water usage is to ask these questions:

• What is the total amount of water in my direct environment?
• How much water is wasted, and how much is recycled?
• What is the cost for the water, and is this cost appropriate given the longevity of the water system?
• What is the source of the water, and is it sustainable?
• How much water do other activities I partake in take? For instance: food, washing, electronics, restaurants, civil services, and so on?
• Is the dollar the most useful metric for the total amount of water used and in the system, and does it reflect my load on the system?
• Is my water subsidized?
• Is personal, consumer curtailment the best way to ensure sustainable water usage?
• Are other activities more relevant: such as eating food which does not take the same amount of irrigation (aka, not almonds)?
• Am I better off dedicating my personal thought-hours elsewhere than my personal consumption: is there a charity, NGO, or co-operative where I can most effectively partition my time to help fight water exploitation? (Phrased another way: am I better off digging an outhouse to stop water consumption, or would I be better off coding a map of water usage that goes viral, promoting knowledgeable water usage?)

The US is experiencing, and will continue to experience, a water shortage that seems to correlate more with human interference than a simple drought can explain. In some areas, the aquifer is being emptied at an unsustainable rate, and there are long term fears about the long term supply of fresh water.

In other areas, this may be less meaningful. For instance, Montréal appears to have a constant influx of water from the Great Lakes, which it manages at two main water treatment plants in the city. Their website is, unfortunately for my research, in French. The main inlet for the Atwater plant can bring in excess of 2,160,000m3 a day 1. 3% of the world's fresh water is in Quebec, most of it in the St. Lawrence 2. Treating this water to make it safe to drink is costly. I don't know how this cost is apportioned, or whether my water bill covers all of it.

In California, things are obviously more dire. California depends on the snow-pack 1, and drills into the aquifer when it is too small. Unfortunately, the aquifer is a finite resource. The Central Valley used to be almost entirely marshland - now, most of it is farms, which take up most of the water.

Ideally, water usage is kept minimal, both personally and by businesses, farming, and other large scale uses. However, it is hard to correctly advise exactly how much water ought to be used, and to appropriately apply a price-tag to water usage. Most water humans use needs to be filtered, pumped, and otherwise shipped around in various states: this is expensive. But the tag doesn't reflect the sustainability of the system, but rather current demand and expected short-term trends. This can conflict with advice to consumers - don't flush unless necessary, don't keep the tap on while brushing your teeth, etc - which, in general, suggests cultural microchanges which may be ineffectual overall compared to curtailing business usage and eating sustainable foods.

It is very hard to go beyond this summary, due to conflicting measurements of water, and difficulty finding relevant details regarding how much water is available in the system. However, in order to have a reasoned discussion about water usage, we may need to do so.

Hi! I would like to request for a Filipino Translation Contribution thru github.

How do you do this:

git clone user/repo

And emulate this:

git clone [email protected]:user/repo.git

Buffer is useful for Twitter, but it underperforms for Instagram, and it isn't connected to other social medias.

When I post a book review using this process, I should also do the following:

• Post the URL to Twitter with the image and a specified comment
• Post the book title to Instagram with a link to the URL
• Post the review to Scuttlebutt
• Post the review to Facebook (if Facebook is something I'm interested in maintaining, which it isn't clear it is, as I have it disconnected most of the time)
• Post the review to Medium?
• Post the review to the Mailchimp list
• Post the review to my Tinyletter list
• Add the review to my weekly newsletter roundup
• Post to relevant Slacks

Right now, I post only to Mailchimp and Twitter - the former manually, the latter through the Buffer API.

All of this is contingent on putting out high noise, medium signal messaging. Basically - if I write something, post it for people to see. I'm not entirely interested in high signal, low noise messaging: that's what my weekly newsletter is for. Twitter is high noise low signal by default, so I can push everything there with impunity.

I'm not entirely convinced that my book reviews (among other types of content, like my 2018-april blog going on right now) are actually low signal, anyway. I know people enjoy reading them, and measures of signal seem arbitrary.

In any event: there ought to be a shell script or a webapp that I run which does all of this posting for me, or some way of setting up a non-brittle poster through various APIs and connected services - for instance, through RSS (something I'm having issues doing through the Jekyll RSS feed plugin).

This probably isn't a solitary problem, and may help others.

I normally take a hot shower before bed, and a cold shower in the morning. This morning, I looked up a bit of the science. Over the past few weeks, I've been wondering if the hot shower is useful because it cools me down, afterwards, or if it is useful because it raises my core temperature. If I'm hoping to cool down, why don't I take a cold shower before bed?

It is unclear based on the evidence. A twenty minute look suggests that a hot shower is useful because it helps you cool off, while a cold shower triggers your flight-or-fight system, and may actually be less advantageous. Washing may be the most important part. Taking a hot shower and then lying under a moving fan for a while, as I do while reading, is probably the best of both worlds. I could take the shower a bit earlier in my routine - before dishes.

Unanswered questions:

• Does it help to force your body to cool off before sleep, or is this just a normal trend that happens when you feel tired, anyway?
• Does the hot shower help you cool down only because you're damp after a shower? If that's the case, should I dry less vigorously?
• Would lowering my core temperature with a longer cold shower - say, 10 minutes instead of 2 - be more useful?
• Hot showers help with dry skin. However, is dandruff actually related to this, or is it less marked merely because I am washing more?

For now, I'm going to continue the hot shower at night because frankly it feels nice. On some days, it is probably ok to call it off, as long as the face is washed, which helps with general skincare.

Studies would be appreciated.

And this as the description.

There is a consistent issue with documentation in code where people misspell things. How can we enforce spell-checking for documents?

It looks like node-markdown-spellcheck might work well. Or this CI package. If we ask Travis to check new entries for each PR, then we can identify spelling errors as they come in, and establish a project-wide dictionary to ignore.

for example notes

https://github.com/RichardLitt/knowledge/blob/master/SUMMARY.md

new location https://github.com/RichardLitt/knowledge/blob/master/random/notes.md

Hi Richard,
I'm just taking my first steps with open source. I came across your knowledge repo and would love to contribute to your random/quotes folder with a few quotes I've collected along the way. They are currently languishing in an Evernote list and it would be good to unleash them. Can I send you a pull request? I'm taking part in Hacktoberfest so also hoping you'd be willing to label my PR (hacktoberfest-accepted) so it gets logged as a valid contribution? Mike

Do this when you have more content here. Assign to yourself in one month.