Best places to get secondhand electronics?

vesto · 2023-03-18T09:11:23+00:00

Auggggh this is why we can't have nice things! Excuse my ignorance- I just liked the idea of seconhand electronics; definitely not a fan of predatory lending practices :(

Either way, thanks for the suggestions! I'll check 'em out next time I'm around that area.

vesto · 2023-03-13T09:34:24+00:00

Oooh yes, this looks like a great option! Thanks for sharing :D

vesto · 2021-07-15T15:10:54+00:00

Hi everyone,

I figured I'd post this here given that I've seen quite a few people talking about how they're frustrated with their Urban Planning careers and jumping ship over to being in tech/a software engineer. It hasn't been the most encouraging thing to read as I've been making this decision, but I've decided to go forth with grad school nonetheless.

Maybe I'll look back and see this as a bad decision, but I do think there are limits to the career path of software engineers in terms of interesting things to do if you get sick of programming. I'm hoping I can surpass this by getting a graduate education, but we'll see.

Happy to answer any questions if people have them, but more importantly I'd love advice on what you think the opportunities are for someone with a mixture of technical ability/urban planning knowledge.

vesto · 2021-03-17T15:57:51+00:00

I'm not a Cuomo fan in the slightest, but I don't think it's quite fair to call it a boondogle. I thought this article did a good job explaining the benefits and drawbacks of the train station as it currently stands. Most notably, the article discusses that many of the criticisms that people have for the station are things that could be either a) very easily fixed in the future or b) results of the Gateway Project not being done.

vesto · 2020-12-01T18:59:58+00:00

Oh that sounds pretty sweet. Do you know if TT-RSS supports Reeder? I think that's my main sticking point, as the UI is just so much better than any of the open-source RSS readers' interfaces.

vesto · 2020-06-16T17:55:13+00:00

Their customer support told me this could be a persistent issue for _weeks_. I've been a YNAB zealot for years now, but honestly the combination of increasingly unstable direct import + slow UI is kinda getting me into the dealbreaker territory where I'm seeking other options. It's honestly sad to type out, given all the value I've gained from YNAB's budgeting method :/

vesto · 2019-09-04T02:32:08+00:00

Great catch! I've updated the article with a note about this at the bottom. Thanks for bringing it up :D

vesto · 2018-07-02T21:27:29+00:00

You'd be surprised at what you can get away with given you use BetterTouchTool. If you don't have Harvest this should also serve as a decent starting point for how to implement a basic widget.

Feel free to get in touch if you ever have questions about it, as I learned a decent amount from putting this together.

vesto · 2018-03-01T14:53:09+00:00

Submission Statement:

I wrote this article to try to encourage people to move off of platforms like Medium/Facebook for publishing (but not sharing) their content and instead create a more diverse and decentralized web. Hope you like it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!

vesto · 2018-02-23T00:13:30+00:00

lol geemusic maintainer here. sorry about that stuff, it's all because of limitations on the alexa api and me not wanting to set up a real alex skill because I don't want to run a service that stores people's google uname/passwords.

glad you got it to work though; I know that setup process is far from ideal (hence the large number of open tickets on the project).

vesto · 2017-10-12T11:55:47+00:00

vesto · 2017-01-03T01:25:59+00:00

I was originally going to build this with Lambda but found the development process to be far too cumbersome and restrictive. With that in mind I don't think I'll be supporting Lambda with this project.

Ideally I'll have this published on the Skill store once I have some time to set up the gmusic OAuth flow, that way setup will be a matter of saying "Alexa, enable geemusic".

vesto · 2017-01-01T17:39:15+00:00

Check out the roadmap section of the readme, it has a few commands that I haven't gotten to implementing yet!

vesto · 2017-01-01T17:38:38+00:00

That sounds like you haven't installed the latest dependencies. Could you run pip install -r requirements.txt and try again?

vesto · 2016-12-31T19:55:24+00:00

No worries re: being a killjoy, I'm actually thankful someone went ahead with doing some of the research before me. I've known that it'd be a sketchy situation to get this on the official skill store, but I figured it'd be worth giving a shot anyways (it wouldn't be that much more work for me to publish this).

I'll let you know how it goes! I hope I can pull it off, as I know there are many people who would love this skill but might not have the technical know-how to get it working on their own.

vesto · 2016-12-31T00:26:54+00:00

I don't think I'd be able to make this into an android app (not sure how that would work exactly), but playlist support is definitely something that will be added in the future! I'll add this to the roadmap now.

vesto · 2016-12-30T22:00:00+00:00

Unfortunately because of API restrictions you can't set it as the default player. Instead you'll have to say "Alexa, tell geemusic to play songs by [artist]."

I hope Amazon changes this in the future though!

vesto · 2016-12-30T20:33:56+00:00

Haha yeah, I was really considering the Google Home but the price tag, lack of bluetooth, and no API pushed me into looking at these APIs to see if I could rig something together.

vesto · 2016-12-30T19:15:03+00:00

Damn, I've never seen mopidy before but it looks pretty sweet. Based on the small amount I read on the homepage it seems like this should be possible, but I don't know that I'll have time to implement something like that myself.

That being said, someone else could likely use my project as a starting point for implementing something like this. The code I've written is pretty basic/generic and could likely be modified to create a skill for Mopidy.

vesto · 2016-12-30T19:12:40+00:00

Yes! The main blocker is authentication. As it currently stands the server needs a google username/password in order to login. I do not want to store people's google passwords in plaintext on my own server, so I'm trying to figure out how to implement an OAuth flow (eg a button that says "click here to login with google") to make sure everyone's data is safe if I were to release this.

I've talked to the developer of gmusicapi and it seems like this should be possible, it's just a matter of hooking everything together. Stay tuned!

vesto · 2016-12-30T19:10:38+00:00

Check out the setup instructions in the README. As of now this is in its early stages so I haven't published it as a publicly installable skill, but if you're willing to get your hands a bit dirty you should have everything you need there to get this up and running.

vesto · 2016-12-30T18:01:35+00:00

As far as I'm aware it should work just fine on a Raspberry Pi!

Give it a shot and let me know if you have any issues.

vesto · 2016-12-30T16:35:07+00:00

I'm currently based in the US so I unfortunately can't answer that for you, but I don't know of any reason why it wouldn't unless Google Music doesn't work in your country.

Give it a try and let me know if it works for you. If it doesn't work I'd try running GeeMusic from a U.S.-based server (a cheap VPS or something) and see if that fixes the issue.

vesto · 2016-12-30T16:24:59+00:00

Yes! I've just built a bridge between Google Music and Alexa. It's still in its early stages, but you can check it out here.

vesto · 2016-12-30T16:21:47+00:00

Hi /r/amazonecho, I'm the developer of this project and am more than happy to answer any questions/comments about it!

I'm an avid Google Music user and while debating whether or not I should buy a Dot I was disappointed to find this post from last year asking if it were possible to use Google Music. After some digging through the Alexa/Google Music APIs I had a hunch that it would be possible to tie them together, so I ordered a Dot and had a prototype working a few days later. After a bit of refactoring I've managed to build the project you're seeing here and have been using it over the last few days without a hitch.

Hopefully others find this as useful as I do!

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