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flubba86 @lemmy.world
Posts 1
Comments 355
What was around or ended more recently than people think?
  • Apple didn't invent the concept of podcasts, but they sure popularized them. They used to be called syndicated audio, and were pretty niche. Then Apple added it as a feature of iTunes. The idea was that because your iPod didn't have any wifi or data connection, you couldn't listen to new content while out and about. So you would plug your iPod into your computer with iTunes to sync down all the latest content before you leave for the day. Then they needed feeds of new content to provide to the users, so lots of new episodicals were started, and Apple grouped them under the umbrella of "podcasts".

  • What was around or ended more recently than people think?
  • Apple never made a product called iTouch. You're thinking of a product called "iPod Touch". It was the touchscreen version of the iPod (without the iconic clickwheel). The first one was essentially a slimmer iPhone 3G without a cellular modem.

    I worked in an electronics repair store just after they came out. We replaced hundreds of broken screens on them. The sheer number of people who called them "iTouch" was surprising, considering Apple never called it that.

  • What was around or ended more recently than people think?
  • The fact that high end music streaming platforms are only just now starting to offer super high bitrate lossless "CD Quality" audio as an option, gives you an indication of how good CDs actually are as a physical medium.

    A cheap old CD player connected via SPDIF to a modern mid-range DAC with decent speakers will give you better quality audio than the latest Sonos system streaming from Spotify.

  • Is Python's tooling incredibly difficult, or am I just stupid?
  • I've been full time writing python professionally since 2015. You get used to it. It starts to just make sense and feel normal. Then when you move to a different language environment you wonder why their tooling doesn't use a virtualenv.

  • Is Python's tooling incredibly difficult, or am I just stupid?
  • I like the idea of uv, but I hate the name. Libuv is already a very popular C library, and used in everything from NodeJS to Julia to Python (through the popular uvloop module). Every time I see someone mention uv I get confused and think they're talking about uvloop until I remember the Astral project, and then reconfirm to myself how much I disapprove of their name choice.

  • Who stores eggs in the fridge (UK)?
  • In Australia our eggs are kept in the refrigerated section in the supermarket (usually near the cheese and butter, because everyone knows eggs are dairy), and we've always put them in the fridge at home, so I guess they wash the protective coating off here too.

  • Good way to send small messages between devices ?
  • +1 for Signal. It's already on my phone, and already on my PC and laptop. It is a simple Flatpak install on Linux. It's end-to-end encrypted. I use that for one-off notes and files between my phone and my PC or between my laptop and PC.

    For notes and small files that I know I'll want to save to reference at another time, I put them in my KeePassXC database because that's already set to sync between devices.

  • What was something you learned too late in life?
  • That's so true. I studied Ba. Information Technology for two years in 2004-2005 and dropped out due to family reasons, then I went back 10 years later and did Ba. Software Engineering in 2013-2016.

    In both instances, it was clear about half those enrolled in the programme were only in it for the money, you could tell that some people were just not excited about software. They were the ones who had dropped out by the end of first year.

    The other lot were those who did find it exciting, but severely underestimated the difficulty of the discipline. These were the kind of people who have can edit game config files to add a bunch of mods to Skyrim, they consider themselves a tech wiz want to study to be a game developer. But they barely pass intro to Web programming with html and JS in the first year and fail the first oracle database course in second year. I had some good friends who failed out hard in second year of software engineering for that reason.

  • [Things that Made All the Difference] What's the most or a substantially positively life-changing action you took?
  • I'm also a landmark graduate, and I can confirm it is a life changing experience.

    Doing the forum allowed me to realise I have so much wasted potential, I didn't have to be working minimum wage repairing laptops at the local computer store, I enrolled at University in a IT degree with the goal to be a software engineer. Doing the forum gave me the confidence to tell my boss I'm quitting and going to be a full time student and how that's a good thing for him. The forum gave me the confidence to talk honestly with my wife about what I want from our marriage, instead of me constantly trying to appease her wants. It caused me to have a real, meaningful, deep conversation with my mother, for the first time in 20 years. I was able to tell her frankly that her narcissistic tendencies in my formative years caused me to suffer from debilitating chronic anxiety in my 20s (my sister too), but it's okay because she did the best she could, and I'm getting it treated.

    I went on to do the Self-Expression and Leadership course, and later the Advanced course. My wife did the same. I eventually stopped because of the endless and relentless hard-sell routines to get all your friends and family to come and sign up. They have to realise that's off-putting to most people, but it's their only marketing avenue so it must work reasonably well.

  • I need help choosing a .Net Headless CMS for a new project

    Firstly, I need to mention I'm coming back to .Net for the first time in more than 10 years. Last time I used .Net was on a very old .Net Framework 4 ASP.NET commercial fast food ordering application in 2013. Since then I've been working with Environmental Scientists, researchers, and academics, using exclusively Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, etc) for the last 10 years.

    This new project I'm tasked with is a custom content publishing platform, so my first thought is obviously a CMS for the content. I feel that Headless CMS products are the go-to these days, and that fits well with our needs because it is the authoring/admin side that the customer is most interested in. The frontend, or "content consumption" side of things is a custom scientific data visualizer we are building in parallel.

    My team has been given a MS Azure Cloud subscription to use, and we want to take advantage of as many "cloud-native" approaches as we can. Eg, using Azure Active Directory (AAD) for SSO, using Azure Blob storage for files, Azure SQL for DB, etc. For that reason, we have decided to use .Net to develop this CMS (plus, one of my guys has 5 years experience in .Net, so we don't want that to go to waste).

    There are so many free open-source .Net CMS projects floating around that it should be pretty easy to pick one to use as a base to build upon. But it is proving to be a bit harder to choose than I thought. This is the wish list we are looking for:

    • Free and Open-Source, with permissive licence
    • Self-hosted, ie. not a SaaS
    • Cross-platform, with dotNet6 or dotNet7
    • Needs custom entity types, and entity type instances (we are publishing data types, not Posts and Pages).
    • Customizable content authoring pages for the custom entity types
    • Admin UI written in VueJS or ReactJS
    • Access the content via an Open API
    • Integration with AAD SSO (and bonus if we can use any SAML or OAuth or OIDC Auth)
    • Different user roles (Admin, Author, Reviewer)
    • Use other cloud-native integrations where possible
    • Workflow steps (Draft, Submit, Review, Approve, Publish, Revoke, etc)
    • Content versioning, change tracking
    • Activity auditing

    I know this is a pipedream to find one tool that could do all of that out of the box. Back in my Uni days I would have immediately reached for Drupal, but that is PHP, we prefer to not use that anymore. I thought I found the perfect tool when I came across Cofoundry, it ticks a surprisingly large number of those wishlist boxes. The main reasons I am hesitant to go with Cofoundry are:

    • It is a project from 2017. It has continued to be updated, but not very often since 2018. It was ported from .Net Core to dotNet6 back in 2021, but nothing since then.
    • It uses Angular 1 for the JS side of the admin pages (not even Angular 2!)
    • They are very tightly tied into using MS SQL Server for the db with a bunch of custom MS TSQL stored procedures, and using other MS SQL Server-specific features.

    I've looked at a bunch of others, but they tend to fall into the camp of SaaS offerings that are focused on publishing Posts and Pages, and not much else, or others that are hobby projects with low user base, and haven't been updated in the last 4 years.

    Is there anything I'm missing? I'm looking for something a lot like Cofoundry, but more up to date, not so tightly tied to MSSQL Server, and uses ReactJS or VueJS for the Admin/Authoring pages.

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