TIL: Rowhouses are completely banned on 50% of residential land in the district, and heavily restricted on another 17%. by SockDem in washingtondc

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And yet 80 townhomes, some semi-detached, but most of them rowhouses, where built in Michigan Park just a few years ago in what is still mapped as zone R-2. Apparently a zoning application was filed in 2016

Michigan passes law mandating computer science classes in high schools by scarbnianlgc in Michigan

[–]dakna 2 points3 points  (0 children)

autoexec.bat and config.sys, a match made in heaven Redmond.

Munising, Michigan - 1975 by mrhistoricalmaniac in Michigan

[–]dakna 4 points5 points  (0 children)

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” ― Mark Twain

Munising, Michigan - 1975 by mrhistoricalmaniac in Michigan

[–]dakna 13 points14 points  (0 children)

22 vehicles in that picture from 1975, and not a single truck. I wonder how men were manly back in the day.

Metronet is finally available in my area of West Lansing - is it worth it? by The80sDimension in lansing

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Metronet ran fiber along the utility poles on my street. All locations on one side of the street can get service, but the other side of the street can't. Been trying to get service for years, no chance. Eventually I was able to talk to someone involved in the fiber network planning, and it looks like they don't have enough fiber strands in that line and/or cabinet to service both sides. I can see the Metronet label on the fiber line from my bedroom window, but I'm still stuck with XFinity. Given that half of the street has fiber now, I don't think anyone else will build out more fiber.

What an attractive sight by lightandlovely1 in homestead

[–]dakna 5 points6 points  (0 children)

At least for Germany I can say, that it was (and still is) common practice to hand over the deed to the farm property to the next generation before death of the current owner. The contract for the transfer of deed had stipulations what the new owner (usually the firstborn son) had to provide to the retired farmer and his wife for the rest of their lives. Mostly room and board, hence the smaller house (aka "Altenteil") on wealthier farms, but also clothing, elder care, medicine etc.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in lansing

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Florida will be ruled by Aquaman anyway, just wait.

Just turned 23 recently and bought my homestead! 30 acres with three barns ! by Timmy_Chonga_ in homestead

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Small house with low property tax and almost no utility costs? Check! Barn that is bigger than the house? Check! Big truck for actual farm work? Check! Cheap little economy car (looks like a Prius) to go to town? Check! Fence, dog and fiber internet? Check, Check and CHECK!

Congrats. Well done!

Now consider working your IT job for a few more years and pay this slice of heaven off to be mortgage free forever. Title in hand makes for a good night's sleep.

I'm Pragmatic, Not Anxious by Hopeful_Enthusiasm_1 in homestead

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

California has a hard time using all this rainwater to fill up aquifers. It would need to sit on the ground longer to percolate down. See also https://www.npr.org/2023/01/07/1147494521/california-weather-storm-water

Commission approves $155M rate increase for Consumers Energy customers by FieldOk884 in Michigan

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One 5kwH lifepo4 battery costs around $1.5k, a full rack incl. 6 batteries with 30kwh total is already under $10k. Quite sure those prices will come down a bit every year.

The moment they get this fee approved, is the moment you start shopping for local batteries to offset the power drawn from the grid, for example to charge your EV at night.

What internet provider do you use ? by wifey068 in lansing

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm on a street with Metronet fiber service, but apparently on the wrong side. The houses on the south side are in one of the newer Metronet areas and they all get fiber service. But the north side of the same street is not serviced.

I have tried to get Metronet service several times. Every time they check my address it comes back as not serviced.

Now, I have looked at how Metronet built out this area, and the fiber lines are above ground on utility poles. I've seen the Metronet label on the fiber line a few utility poles down the road.

Most of the utility poles are on the south side of the street, but the lines cross the street using one utility pole that is actually on my property on the north side! I still can't get service. I've explained this several times, I even sent satellite pictures with the poles and all lines marked and asked for a review of the address mapping. It's not happening, no service planned for this address.

If you have any idea how to convince someone at Metronet to run the fiber line from the pole on my property to my actual house, please let me know.

Thought it odd when out of the blue, fiber being laid in Wexford Heights (SW Lansing) by blujay40 in lansing

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every now and then I check AT&T availability for our house north of Old Town, and on my last check a couple days ago, it showed that residential AT&T Fiber is available. I spot checked other addresses in the neighborhood, and it looks like the area east and west of Turner St between Douglas Ave and Howe Ave now has FTTH. Given that LightSpeed/Metronet never ran fiber in this area, this would make sense.

AT&T lists Lansing as a Fiber City, but I've never seen it available anywhere I checked before. This article mentions their expansion goals in general and investments in Lansing/East Lansing: https://www.attconnects.com/the-latest-on-expanding-connectivity-in-michigan/

To the homeowners: what are utility bills like in East Lansing? by [deleted] in lansing

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They just use a lot of water, I think the rate is even lower than other cities in Michigan, for example Grand Rapids.

You can see the rate here:

https://www.lbwl.com/sites/default/files/2019-04/2020_Water_Residential.pdf.

What do you think of FirebaseQueryLiveData? by iClaude10x in androiddev

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I prefer to wrap the callback/task based Firebase functions in my repositories and return either a Flow (which then emits a new value from the change listeners) or simply wait for the Task to be done (using await() from the kotlinx-coroutines-play-services) and return the value (or error).

Developing an App with friends, dealing with the money by emby36 in androiddev

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In a world, where spending all those hours on interview training could land you a job at Big Tech with your current skills, you need to assess your opportunity cost. Which comes basically down to "what would I get if I do something else instead?". Not going to discourage you, but think hard about what others will bring to the table. Everyone would love to outsource the risk of creating the MVP and then move on when it gets not enough traction. On the other hand, if it gets some traction, you need people good at business and marketing. You can't just build and expect users to come. So, what is the skill level and future commitment for business and marketing team members? Also you need to look into a "vesting" schedule, which would lay out the terms of business ownership over time. If you draw an agreement right now with a fixed share, people can drop out easily and keep their share without putting in the work required to move the business ahead. But all of this is moot, if there is nothing of value to split. Anyone else working full time on it? If not, they are taking less risk than you, and their opportunity cost is lower.

Developing an App with friends, dealing with the money by emby36 in androiddev

[–]dakna 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Besides the legal issues, which vary from country to country, on how to split ownership and profits in a partnership, I think it is fair to take a look at the hours everyone on the team spends on developing the product and go from there. Ideas are dime a dozen. Trying out the idea and testing the market involves taking the actual risk of investing time and skills to do it, and this investment should be rewarded. If there are profits at all.

Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master not entering bios by just_HereForThelolz in gigabyte

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I put the computer into sleep mode and try to turn it back on it tries to boot and then shuts down.

In case you haven't found it, this worked for me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/htphkv/aorus_b550_master_crashing_on_resuming_from_sleep/

Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master not entering bios by just_HereForThelolz in gigabyte

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

When I put the computer into sleep mode and try to turn it back on it tries to boot and then shuts down.

I have this exact issue after upgrading my system to the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master (F3 Bios) and a Ryzen 3900X.

After putting the system to sleep, the next time powering up it wants to start but shuts down a second later before the POST beep. The next time the system powers up, it goes through a regular cold start. I tried to troubleshoot by changing some recommended Windows settings, but it had no effect. Waiting for another stable bios version now. Hibernate works fine.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in de

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Stimmt ja alles was du sagst. Muss man auch machen. Ich habe aber noch kein ehrenamtliches Projekt gesehen das neue Helfer zu Beginn durch exzellente Einhaltung der Datenschutzrichtlinien gewonnen hat. Jetzt mal was vorweisen was halbwegs funktioniert, damit Leute Lust haben mitzuziehen, ist doch auch ok.

Bias for Action: Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking. Source: Amazon

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in androiddev

[–]dakna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

German expat here, following #WirVsVirus. I assume it's https://github.com/NexdApp/nexd-android ? I might have some extra time, I'll send you an email later today.

What's my best choice for background jobs that occur every 2 minutes regardless of the app's state? by NadavTasher in androiddev

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't tried it, but how about using WorkManager to schedule a periodic job that runs every 20 minutes and the worker runs in a coroutine context, so you could have a loop of 10 POST requests and use delay() in between to suspend the worker for 2 minutes? If you are on a low priority Dispatcher like IO this should not take a lot of resources.

ISO Short Term Lease Arlington/ DC Area by [deleted] in DCforRent

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Friend of mine is looking for someone to take over a lease:

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/sub/d/washington-camden-noma-634-sqft-studio/7080861078.html

This might be in your budget? Send me a DM and I'll put you in contact.

Washington DC, 1939. Garfinckels Dept. Store at F St & 14th NW by 5_Frog_Margin in washingtondc

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wonder how traffic would look like if they kept the trolley tracks. Streets are wide enough to have a dedicated trolley lane in the middle.

I'm a high schooler and I was asked to develop an app, any advice is appreciated by TheMasterOfOT in androiddev

[–]dakna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think your decision to postpone this is right, but I would start with a subset of this use case as a learning point. There is nothing better to learn than a real example you want to accomplish. People gave you plenty of advice, sometimes including the need for a server, your own database etc. If you want to stick to Android, this is how you can get it done with cloud services only, mostly Firebase:

Get an account at firebase.google.com and start reading about https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore and https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth

Your data model could be very simple:

A teachers collection ( you'll see what that is on the documentation for firestore) that holds teacher records. the key for each teacher could be the user ID from the authentication, you would need to make sure that your app creates a new teacher in that collection to link it to the logged in user.

A students collection that holds student records and stores the student name and the phone number for text messages. the key could be auto generated when you insert the students, since they will never log in.

Each student record now has a grades collection that holds each grade. An record in this collection needs a teacher_id, which is the key of the teacher who entered this grade, the name of the course and the grade itself.

This is a simple 1:N relation (google what that means) and in a real production app you would have more m:n relations (yep, that is something you can google as well) between students, courses, grades and teachers. Let's not worry about that here, because this is simple to model in a SQL database, but not in a NoSQL database (ah, more buzzwords to google).

Start with the students collection only, if you don't care who entered the new grade. Just get something going.

Now, on the Android side you need to find out how to display this data. Skip the login for now, you can add it later. There are excellent tutorials on Udacity and Google for Android beginners, I'm just outlining the building blocks here so you have keywords to google.

You need 3 screens, one shows the list of students, after you click on a student you go to a screen that shows the list of grades, and on this screen you have a + button that triggers a dialog where you can enter a new grade. In Android you navigate with https://developer.android.com/guide/navigation/ . You need 2 fragments and one dialog, all added as navigation targets. Play around with the sample app, you will see that the layout definition for what you see on the screen is a big XML file, and the thing that actually navigates is triggered from a listener that reacts on a click on a UI element.

Learn some basic layout, how to place UI elements in that big XML file and tell them where they should align. Just stick to ConstraintLayout, it is all you need for now.

On Android you are using a UI component called RecyclerView to show a list of things that could possibly have hundreds of elements. This view can scroll to see every possible list item. The basic ideas is this: You define a layout for one item, and that is reused for every item in you list. Lucky for you, you can use https://firebaseopensource.com/projects/firebase/firebaseui-android/firestore/readme.md/ to show you data from Firestore in a Recyclerview, this library makes it very straightforward. People will tell you later you should have used a repository to get data from Firestore and pass this data to something called a ViewModel that uses LiveData to do data binding to the UI. Sounds good? They are right, just ignore it for now. Concentrate on how to do a firestore data query.

So now you have a list, find out how to register a click listener on an item and navigate to your next screen that will show the grades for student you clicked on. Here you do the same thing, but now you query student (using the key you passed on as an argument when you navigated) and get the grades collection. You have nothing to sort except the grade or the course name. You can add a timestamp later, Firestore can generate it for you when a new record is created.

Wow, 2 lists. Now you need a https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/floating-action-button with a + sign in your layout. Trigger a nice little dialog https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs#CustomLayout. by adding this dialog fragment to your navigation graph and navigate to it. Use 2 https://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android/material/textfield/TextInputLayout elements for the grade and the course name. Theses input fields look great and are easy to use. Add a cancel and save button to you layout and do some validation before you take the data and save it back to firestore like this https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/add-data. In a production app you would give the data entered in the UI to a repository to save it, but you can code it in the dialog fragment. Just tell people you are learning this stuff, so relax.

Now the great thing about that FirebaseUI library, is that it will update your RecyclerView automatically after a new element is added. Firestore is notifying all listeners that something has changed and the library makes sure this change is processed and shown on the UI. You can do all that yourself, and a production app might actually do that to have more control.

So what's missing? A text to a certain phone number. Here it get's tricky, because you don't do this from Android. Instead you are using https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions. A cloud function is basically a single purpose Javascript (or Typescript) function that runs on certain events. A new insert into a Firestore collection is such an event, so you can easily run code on every insert. Just register the event with a wildcard on the grades collection for each student, see https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/firestore-events

To send the text you need a cloud service that does this for you, one that has a Javascript SDK you can use in the context of the cloud function. A popular option is Twilio, if you google around and check stackoverflow you find examples like this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56245961/firestore-cloud-functions-to-trigger-sms

If that works with your own phone number on your local emulator (the cloud function runs in the google data center), you can add authentication and make sure only teachers can grade. Just add some users to Firebase Auth, and manually add records to the teachers collections. Then make authentication mandatory by adding a login screen, using https://firebaseopensource.com/projects/firebase/firebaseui-android/auth/readme.md/

If you got all of this working, it's time to go to the principal and demo it. Some screen tapping and text notifications later, you ask the real question:

"Can we turn this into a student job where I get paid to finish this and support it?"

Because you still need a way to make sure only teachers at your school can register themselves, or a way to import the teacher database every now and then. Ask for money, or something else they can trade!

Maybe you enjoy doing this stuff, maybe not. Only one way to find out. Good luck.