andioop

I know I'm not going to be a leaderboard type, especially given my schedule around the holiday seasons. So I take my time and read the whole problem, including the flavor text, and I have to say I appreciate it! Nice and festive, it's the little things that make this seem more like a fun programming puzzle exercise I actively want to do as recreation, and less like a dry exercise to force myself to learn a new language or library. But it still facilitates me doing those two things anyways. The flavor text, along with the ASCII art that gets colored in each day I star, helps it feel like a festive thing too—so I don't feel like I'm being a Grinch doing these puzzles during the holiday season.

I also appreciate the problems staying up after Advent for people using them off-season ;)

I'm a very happy iOS user planning on switching to the FairPhone when my iPhone finally craps the bed. I figure the switch will mostly be easy or just a matter of "go do this on your laptop or a web browser instead," but the two things I am most worried about are:

• Find My iPhone alternatives for FairPhone. I'm an idiot who sometimes loses my phone when the ringer is turned off, so calling it does not help. This is the biggest sticking point for me because I am forgetful and I feel without this feature I might have ended up having to buy a lot more new phones because I couldn't find mine. I know they do have one through Google but wonder if there is such a feature without Google.
• if it can do payment at stores (I've gotten very cozy with Apple Pay) or if I need to start carrying a credit card around again. This is mostly a convenience thing, although there are some card readers that reject my credit card and happily take the same card through Apple Pay, so sometimes it's an actual need. I could probably get around it by just ordering a replacement credit card though.

A bit different from the audiobook request 2 years ago, as I'm not looking for audiobooks (so it does not have to be nice to listen to, I can see code examples) but regular books you read. Let me know which books helped you out the most, or that you just found fun to read!

EDIT: Thank you to everyone for helping me inflate my reading list! I was wondering what question I should ask to get answers including books on databases, cybersecurity, basically any topic that might fall under "computer science" and not just programming. In hindsight I maybe should have posted somewhere other than Programming and said something other than "Programming book recommendations" if I wanted that, but since I am also interested in programming and software engineering all these books will definitely be eaten soon. Thank you!

Oh, and [email protected] for programming books exists but is sadly not getting much attention.

Source

Transcript:

10 things that block your Happiness

1. Self-hatred
2. Not being able to let go of the past.
3. Not being able to forgive yourself.
4. Not being able to value who you are.
5. Assuming RAID is backup.
6. Not making backups.
7. Not verifying backups and finding out restore time.
8. Needing other people to validate you.
9. Letting other people define who you are.
10. Trying to be perfect and to please everyone.

I did try to read the sidebar resources on https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/. They're pretty overwhelming, and seem aimed at people who come in knowing all the terminology already. Is there somewhere you suggest newbies start to learn all this stuff in the first place other than those sidebar resources, or should I just suck it up and truck through the sidebar?

EDIT: At the very least, my goal is to have a 3-2-1 backup of important family photos/videos and documents, as well as my own personal documents that I deem important. I will be adding files to this system at least every 3 months that I would like incorporated into the backup. I would like to validate that everything copied over and that the files are the same when I do that, and that nothing has gotten corrupted. I want to back things up from both a Mac and a Windows (which will become a Linux soon, but I want to back up my files on the Windows machine before I try to switch to Linux in case I bungle it), if that has any impact. I do have a plan for this already, so I suppose what I really want is learning resources that don't expect me to be a computer expert with 100TB of stuff already hoarded.

Local dummy here (slightly more technical than the average user, likely far less than most people in this community) considering switching over. Checked the sidebar for any beginner's resources and looked at a few of the top posts and saw mostly Linux news and stuff meant for people already using the OS.

For my specific case, I use a Mac as my daily driver and (heresy) I am happy, but I also have a Windows computer that I am thinking of switching over to Linux. I use it to play games my Mac can't, and to run [email protected] (I do not run the community but the thing the community is about) and/or Folding at Home whenever I'm not using it to game. Some of them are Steam games, some indies not on Steam, some emulated. Little to no multiplayer games, and absolutely no multiplayer that has anticheat. I have tried running some of the Windows-exclusive games with WINE and they worked but ran extremely slowly, however that was done on my Mac so it may not represent the results of running WINE on Linux.

I just spent an hour searching for how I could have gotten an

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of null

javascript. I checked the spelling of the element whose property I was trying to set and knew that element wasn't null because the spelling was the same in the code as in the HTML. I also knew my element was loading, so it wasn't that either.

Turns out no, the element was null. I was trying to set " NameHere" when the element's actual name was "NameHere".

Off by a single space. No wonder I thought the spelling was the same—because all the non-whitespace was identical. (No, the quotation marks slanting in the second NameHere and being totally vertical in the first NameHere wasn't a part of the error, I am typing them all vertical and either Lemmy or my instance is "correcting" them to slanted for the second NameHere. But that is also another tricky-to-spot text difference to watch out for!)

And what did not help is that everywhere I specifically typed things out, I had it correct with no extra spaces. Trying to set " NameHere" was the result of modifying a bunch of correct strings, remembering to account for a comma I put between them, but not remembering to account for the space I added after the comma. In short, I only ever got to see " NameHere" written out in the debugger (which is how I caught it after like 30 repeats of running with the debugger), because everywhere I had any strings written out in the code or the HTML it was always written "NameHere".

I figured I'd post about it here in case I can help anyone else going crazy over an error they did not expect and cannot figure out. Next time I get a similar error I will not just check spelling, I'll check everything in the name carefully, especially whitespace at the beginning and end, or things one space apart being written with two spaces instead. Anyone else have a similar story to save the rest of us some time?

Besides some of the very, very obvious (don't copy/paste 100 lines of code, make it a function! Write comments for your future self who has forgotten this codebase 3 years from now!), I'm not sure how to write clean, efficient code that follows good practices.

In other words, I'm always privating my repos because I'm not sure if I'm doing some horrible beginner inefficiency/bad practice where I should be embarrassed for having written it, let alone for letting other people see it. Aside from https://refactoring.guru, where should I be learning and what should I be learning?