oftenwrong

The hub is a very simple and inexpensive device that essentially just lets you change USB devices between computers. It has 4 ports for USB devices, and 4 input ports for USB hosts. There is a wired remote control that allows you to switch between the hosts.

The way you turn this into a KVM-like device is by having each host connected to the monitor/s indepentently. In my case, I have only two hosts, and each one is connected via HDMI cable to my single monitor. Each host is set up to detect when the USB hub is connected, and then send a DDC command to switch the monitor input over to itself.

The end user experience is: I press a button on the wired remote, which is mounted on my keyboard tray, and then after a short delay the corresponding computer is on my screen and everything works normally.

On linux, this is trivially accomplished with a udev rule + a script calling ddcutil.

On my work machine, a Mac, I could not find a simple solution that worked reliably on my specific Macbook Pro model that I would recommend, so I had an AI write a custom daemon for this purpose.

The major benefit of this "poor man's KVM" is that you do not need an expensive and finnicky piece of KVM hardware. You do not need to worry about the video chip supporting your setup, or firmware bugs. You buy one cheap, commodity product. The downside is the reliance on the hosts, and on monitor features, and having to set up the functionality manually. In my case, this is the sort of thing I basically just set up and then never touched again, so it was a fine trade-off. If I get new computers, or a new monitor, or I change which porta the computers are attached to, then I have to change the code.

One possible shape is something like unison-lang's CAS AST model:

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/

This model has some significant downsides for humans, but less so for automatons. It eliminates some major problems of software development like merge conflicts, dependency hell, etc.

This is my main frustration with it as well. It is one of the main features in my mind, and it often does not work. It seems to work for many sites I use on desktop (Firefox on Linux, Mac), but doesn't work well at all on Android (Android app and Firefox). I can understand if this issue is outside of 1password's control because it possibly is due to specifics of Android's APIs, but I would prefer transparency in the matter.

https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=89

It is comparatively unsophisticated, but I need it so infrequently that it has been good enough.

I do like the idea of maintaining a complete snapshot of all history.

This is a good application for virtual filesystems. The virtual fs would capture every write in order to maintain a complete edit history. As I understand it, Google's CitC system and Meta's EdenFS work this way.

https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-google-stores-billions-of-...

https://github.com/facebook/sapling/blob/main/eden/fs/docs/O...

    #!/usr/bin/env java --source 25
    void main() {
        IO.println("Hello, World!");
    }

>One notable feature of Fossil is that it bundles bug tracking, wiki, forum, chat, and technotes with distributed version control to give you an all-in-one software project management system.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/whyallinone.md