Pick a good PIN.

Choose wisely. 9% of people use the same four-digit PIN when allowed to choose it themselves.

Bonus: Shark don’t need no man.

Less empathy means less envy?

This essay in Time says that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder might be less affected by the Facebook effect because they consider the concrete outcomes more than how happy it must make people.

My Sunday Project

So, a long time ago, I got in on a Kickstarter project, because I don’t have enough hobbies. It finally came in yesterday.

This thing is pretty awesome. I did the traditional first thing and printed the Benchy boat.

So, I got myself thinking. What can I do with plastic? How does this modeling thing work anyway? I learned that Autodesk’s Fusion 360 is free for personal use, which is very awesome.

It’s not quite intuitive, but I got this figured out in just over an hour, roughly the same amount of time that it took to print:

And that is how I ended up with a very expensive label maker.

See ya, Elon.

Elon has plans for my data, I guess, but I didn’t really see the need to hang around for it. I only wish I could delete everything immediately instead of just not contributing anything more to his hoard.

I hardly used that account anyway, but I don’t fear missing out on anything there. The news prints anything interesting that happens on Twitter these days, and the rest of the site is the same old trash fire that it was in 2016.

I haven’t destroyed my Mastodon accounts yet, but I don’t use those either… I suppose I can declare my stint with this whole social media thing to be more or less over. I still don’t feel like I’ve lost anything.

Keep on burning that cash, though, Elon. It’s fun to watch.

Committing configuration files

So, the scenario here is that you have a configuration file that you want to be committed so that you have a complete example to work from. The problem is that the completed file might have passwords in it that you don’t want committed to your git repository.

I found the objectively correct answer today. You commit a file with the example first…

My example config.json file:

{
    "my_api_endpoint": "http://apis.kevinja.com/v1/fakeapi/",
    "api_username": "your_username",
    "api_password": "changeme"
}

Then… you do some git magic:

git update-index --skip-worktree config.json

This tells git that you don’t want it monitoring this file anymore.

Now, you can change the file to your heart’s content:

{
    "my_api_endpoint": "http://apis.kevinja.com/v1/fakeapi/",
    "api_username": "kevinja",
    "api_password": "My$uper$3cr1tPa$$w0rd"
}

…and git doesn’t care anymore.

➜  git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

You can always change your mind later:

git update-index --no-skip-worktree config.json