urusan @urusan@fosstodon.org

I recently got a new System76 laptop, and I needed to change a BIOS setting, and I found...nothing was there! The entire BIOS was just boot order.

It turns out that this is a good thing though. It's a coreboot system, and everything you would find in the BIOS is controlled inside the OS. I found what I was looking for in settings.

Why have we been dealing with these weird 1980's proprietary BIOS systems? I had no idea there was a better way.

It might be a good time to remember that the massive firestorms and the resulting smoke is the trigger mechanism for nuclear winter, not the nuclear weapons themselves.

Also, if anyone still believes humanity could survive a large-scale nuclear war, just imagine the events on the West Coast, except everywhere, many times heavier, and heavily radioactive. It won't matter if you survived the first strike as the atmosphere is destroyed and the Earth plunged into a frozen darkness.

I'm thinking about selling my car, and I just realized I should ask if anyone here knows about a better, more open way to find a local buyer?

My father-in-law told me to put up a post about it on Facebook, but that's not particularly satisfying.

I'm just imagining the endgame for big applesauce: it's the year 2040 and the typical 20-something gamer is downing a half dozen "energy pouches" a day!

My wife and I were trying to avoid giving our kid applesauce pouches, with my wife going as far to say this was a ploy by "big applesauce" to get kids used to food in disposable pouch format.

However, at some point you have to make some concessions to convenience to avoid losing your sanity.

We are sticking to cloth diapers though. It helps that they are superior to disposable diapers.

One of my kid's applesauce pouch flavors is "Berry Madness". Do I really want to be feeding him pure madness?

Is it madness for berries? Or madness berries? Or just an amount of berry flavor that is madness?

I just realized that new hand sanitizer smells terrible now! :( Apparently, the formulation changed.

I just got a new office chair! It's one of those fancy Herman Miller Aeron chairs (refurbished, so it's less absurdly expensive). Hopefully it'll help with my ergonomics and comfort at work.

I completely re-did my home office once I started experiencing mild RSI symptoms. I had meant to do this for a while, but it was never a priority until now.

Unfortunately, I forgot to unroll the carpet protection pad last night and it is so curled up right now! I guess it'll be another half day.

One day I hope to have this built into the main lighting system, either as a secondary set of traditional lights or through color controllable LED bulbs. That second possibility is extra enticing if I can control it on a schedule throughout the day, but the programmable LED landscape is madness right now, and far too expensive.

Also, side note: instead of turning the red lights on and off, I just leave them on 24-7. They aren't very noticeable during the day, and LED lighting is cheap.

Just to clarify, at night the only lightning is the pure red light. Having the main lights on or looking at screens (especially bright/large screens) is counterproductive.

I also just use portable lamp fixtures for the red lights. I ended up getting a "can" fixture that sends light upward, and I bounce it off the wall to produce diffuse red light. Some of my other rooms use the reading lamp attachment on a tall floor lamp and a plug-in night light as fixtures.

I was an extreme night owl for most of my life, but now I'm a mild morning person (wake up at 7-8, sleep at 11-midnight).

The other life hack is the polar opposite. I have two bright 10,000 lux lamps with a high color temperature, normally used for light therapy or color-critical craft tasks, set up beside my bed. They're on an electric timer and click on about an hour before I wake up. There's two so I can't roll over away from the light.

Since I added this, I almost never need an alarm clock to wake up. I just wake up slowly and naturally within a few minutes of the set time.

The lack of disruption to circadian rhythms is a big deal. It makes it possible to read while being in what's effectively a dark room, as far as your body is concerned.

The night vision preservation property is also surprisingly useful. You can walk out of the room into an actually dark room or outside and see fine right away.

I have 2 related life hacks that I don't see other people using, but make a big difference for me.

Red lighting at night: I have pure red lights to put on at night. It allows one to see in monochrome* at night. It does not disrupt circadian rhythms or night vision. Note that it has to be pure red light, by the time it's orange or pink, it loses its properties. My wife requires a night light and we can both sleep with the red lights on without disruption.

* Not true monochrome, red gets lost

Oh, I almost forgot Bash!

Also, while not programming languages, all developers should learn at least the basics of: Github-flavored Markdown, HTML, CSS, JSON, YAML, and XML.

Promising but I haven't learned enough to give an informed opinion on: Rust, Go, Typescript

Situational
* Javascript - Not a good language, but fundamental to web programming
* SQL - if you need to do anything with databases
* Java - I'm sure this will be unpopular, but Java isn't really that bad. There's a lot of jobs for it
* Kotlin - Java rebuilt from the ground up. Learn it if you have to do a lot of JVM development.
* Clojure - Get the power of Lisp for the JVM (if you have to use the JVM)

Definitely
* Julia - the best language I've seen in years, has the potential to replace all languages except systems languages
* Python - an excellent battle-tested language, has excellent learning material available for it, the language of science communication (but has performance issues)
* C - a true minimalist classic, especially useful in conjunction with other languages, fills a medium-level language niche
* Ruby - One of the best object oriented languages. Read "The Well Grounded Rubyist"

Alright, well since I can't seem to make an appropriate poll for this, here's an open-ended question: What programming languages are worth learning nowadays?

Ideally, they should be ranked by how worthwhile they are to learn.