See https://alexbarry.net for projects I’m working on, and contact info.

Also check out github.com/alexbarry

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

    But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

    I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

    edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?





  • Thanks for posting this (I’m the original author). It’s not clear to me where to share my projects like this, many places on the internet don’t seem to welcome any form of self promotion, even if it is open source / ad free / etc.

    My original post was directed towards the self hosting community, but it should still be completely useable with the github pages version (linked in the post). And stay tuned for an Android app (and maybe iOS some day), most games are great offline. I’d love to add multiplayer over bluetooth, the main time I play games like this on my phone is when I’m on a flight or when physically with someone else.

    I’d love to hear feedback, especially constructive criticism! There are some other features and new games that I’d like to add, but I’d love to hear what people actually want, instead of just what I enjoy working on.




  • Thanks a lot! Usually I’m okay up until I reach near the end … spoiler-ish warning:

    spoilers for nearing the end of the game

    I was doing great up until psychic ships kept crashing. I’d arrange all my colonists in a circle around the ship, and usually they could kill the mechanoids pretty easily. But sometimes one or two of my colonists would die. I tried to keep going after that, but then another ship part crashed within what felt like a few days (maybe it was 7 days), then I lost a few more. I had barely recovered from the last one.

    I may have tried to start building the ship too soon. I think I had assault rifles for several colonists, and marine armour for a few.

    But anyway, for a psychic ship, are you supposed to attack it, run away, and kite them back to your well defended killbox-ish base? Maybe that was really my biggest mistake. I would have just left it way on the other side of the map, but the psychic drone was getting bad. And I think there was a fire or something too?

    (end spoilers)

    It’s also possible that I had tried to challenge myself and set the difficulty to the mid level, but forgot.

    Oh, also I often find myself running out of components, and just barely making it to component manufacturing before I run out. I always buy them all from traders, and try to conserve them. But even with component manufacturing, it feels like it takes forever to make one, even if I have like ~15 colonists, where a few are dedicated crafters. Maybe I just need to stay in this stage for longer, until I can get assault rifles for everyone?

    And I never really read much about strategies, I generally just like to figure it out myself, but I suck at trying new things.

    I guess the main thing is that I love the part where you try to survive against natural disasters and have enough food, but I’ve never gotten too into the combat. Plus it felt like it was always pretty easy up until I got to the kinds of enemies that you encounter regularly at the end of the game.


  • Rimworld is probably one of my favourite games. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested. This new expansion also seems really cool, I copied two points from the steam description that stood out to me (spoiler warning! Even the steam description has a spoiler warning before these. Hopefully most lemmy clients support spoiler tags):

    spoiler warning

    spoiler warning (I notice connect on Android doesn’t yet support spoiler tags)

    spoiler warning

    some spoilers from the steam description. Note the description says: Warning - Spoilers Below.

    A psychically-invisible hunter of human souls screeches outside your walls, returning every night to capture a new victim. The proximity alarm goes off, but you can’t see the beast. Study samples of the creature to learn to detect it. Then, become the hunters and kill it where it lives.

    A parasite has mind-controlled some of your colonists - but who? They pretend to be human as they work to infest others. Track evidence, imprison, interrogate, and medically test people to find out who is infested before it’s too late.

    (end spoilers)

    That being said, I’ve only played the base game so far, and I think I’ve always played on the difficulty that is just one above peaceful, and I found it really hard near the end. But I’ve never bothered with killboxes, and I keep my colony wealth high I guess, I like to hoard food, silver, and everything. I also build floors (some people skip them to keep their wealth low). Perhaps I should have added: raid strength depends on your colony wealth (I think).

    Does anyone have any tips for actually reaching the end game event? (Please use spoiler tags! I know a bit about it, but I think many people like to be surprised. Put :::spoiler some text that shows before users expand your spoiler before and ::: at the end.)


  • thanks, how did you do this? Did you just download it and add a background yourself (and upload via lemmy) or is there some cool markdown/lemmy trick?

    I was going to say that I was on my phone and couldn’t do that, but I guess I probably could have. (edit: also I forgot that Lemmy even supports image uploading, let alone that I could link to it) I mostly just wanted to see if Lemmy supported the embedded image markdown syntax of ![description](URL to image). (It does!) I found online that some markdown variants support adding CSS at the end of the image, but it doesn’t look like lemmy supports them.




  • You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))

    I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.


  • To clarify on this: even the people who use gibberish as their password and don’t store it and rely on password resets via email are actually somewhat safe if their email is also highly safe. Maybe their password strategy for CRA implies they don’t take their email password security seriously either… but still, my point is just that “at least as secure as your email” can be an incredibly high bar if you do it right


  • axby@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.caCRA now allows 2FA apps
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    7 months ago

    Yes but you’re free to use an email provider which also supports security keys, which gmail and proton mail* do. I understand that the CRA needs to accommodate the average person who doesn’t care about security, but I think everyone in this thread appreciates when they also cater to people who care deeply about security and are willing to use strong unique passwords in a password manager and security keys or at least TOTP.

    * it seems like they require keeping TOTP enabled because their mobile apps don’t support security keys. Meh.


  • This may sound like a wild fantasy to some, but the US IRS seems to have some partnership with ID.me which supports security keys. But I’m impressed that the CRA supports TOTP before major banks so maybe this could happen.

    Granted they also have separate logins for state income tax and California is… well let me just say that I’m grateful that the CRA doesn’t force you to reset your password every 4ish months. (California state income tax (FTB?) does).


  • Ah, I hadn’t heard of the SSL issue, thanks for sharing!

    I’ve noticed that Tangerine only allows for a 6 digit pin, but I think they might also allow for a security question and SMS 2FA? I started signing up with them and gave up when they required a Canadian cell number (I hadn’t yet switched due to high costs, but recently they’ve become surprisingly reasonable—ignoring roaming) and I saw the 6 digit pin password requirement.

    I think it was also BMO that a friend told me required a maximum 8 character password until very recently?

    Anyway overall, thanks for reassuring my suspicion: I should just pick one of the banks and not let “perfect” (or even “decent”) be the enemy of “almost adequate but not great”.


  • Thanks, I suspected this (I only see “authenticator app” when I log in on a new device or periodically, but I wasn’t sure.

    Related: for finance related services like Questrade, I’ve stored my TOTP keys on a U2F key, Yubico in my case. Besides the hassle of managing physical keys, is there any drawback to this approach? I’m slightly worried I’ll lose all my keys in a house fire or something, but I assume there’s a recovery option.


  • Unfortunately I think this is the norm with big banks in Canada, and it is similar to a credit union in the US from when I briefly lived there. Security seems to be a second priority to people losing access (presumably only briefly, since they have brick and mortar locations everywhere).

    Wealthsimple and Questrade seem to support TOTP but I’m not sure if you can still bypass it with SMS. I don’t think so but I haven’t dug into it.

    I’ve used CIBC before and they also seem to require keeping SMS 2FA enabled. Also they send me fraud alerts over SMS, “respond Y to authorize this suspicious transaction”, and I’m dreading the day where I have to enable roaming while travelling just to send a text. They send push notifications through the app to login on a new device though, so maybe in 10 years they’ll do it for transaction approval too.

    Also aside about TD: is there really no way to download a CSV file of all your transactions? My partner uses them and I think we were limited to 18 months, and may have even had to download each much separately (luckily I can use use a program like cat to workaround this, but that seems like a pain for most people). CIBC has irritated me in a lot of ways but I think I can download transactions from back to 2012 when I first opened my credit card, maybe earlier.

    Do you or anyone know about other big banks? My partner and I are looking into a joint account and I want to be able to download all transactions to CSV. Ideally we could get TOTP only (no SMS 2FA) but I’m not counting on it.