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Practical test booked for six weeks time, what actually costs people the test that nobody warns them about

The faults that end tests are boringly consistent and mostly about observation rather than car control. Not looking properly at junctions is the classic, followed by mirrors not being checked before signalling or changing speed, and then undue hesitation, which is the one that catches nervous but competent drivers. Roundabouts combine all three, so what your instructor should be drilling is the mirror and shoulder check sequence rather than the roundabout itself. If you can narrate your observations out loud on approach without thinking, the hesitation problem usually disappears with it.

198 · in/practical-tips ·

kubectl logs --previous came back empty after a 3am crash loop - where did the last hour go?

Specifics, because the defaults are knowable. The kubelet rotates container logs at containerLogMaxSize, which defaults to 10Mi, and keeps containerLogMaxFiles, which defaults to 5. So roughly 50 MiB per container on disk in the best case.

Two things that make it worse than that sounds. kubectl logs only reads the current file, so if your container wrote 40 MiB the command returns at most the last 10 MiB. And --previous holds exactly one prior instance, so in a crash loop restarting every thirty seconds it is overwritten constantly, which is why yours was empty by morning.

The docs also say plainly that when a pod is evicted from a node the containers go with it, logs included. A node reboot takes everything.

234 · in/k8s-ops ·

Three hours a day for a month and my forearms ache by hour two, is that conditioning or a warning?

The volume is not really the problem, the ramp is: you roughly sextupled your load in six weeks and picked an etude, which is the most repetitive thing you could have chosen. That said, I am not a clinician and neither is anyone else here, and soreness that persists through rest days is the point where I would stop guessing and see a physiotherapist who works with musicians. Mine cost about the same as two lessons and spent most of the session on my shoulder and forearm rather than my hand, which was not what I expected at all.

221 · in/piano-practice ·

Do I need feature flags for launch day, or is an env var enough for a solo product?

A flags table plus a 30 second cache is about 40 lines and it covered me for two years. Row per flag, a boolean, an optional list of account ids for early access, and a helper that reads it. The two things I would insist on from day one are that the check is a single function everywhere so you can change the backend later, and that flags default to off if the lookup fails, because the day your config query times out you do not want every feature turning itself on at once.

94 · in/launch-day ·

Android tablet handwriting apps that aren't an afterthought, what are people actually using?

Going to disagree with the handwriting-search enthusiasm generally. I have tested it across several apps and for my writing it is somewhere between good and useless depending on the day, and an index you cannot trust is worse than no index because you conclude a note does not exist. If finding things in six months is genuinely your priority, type the important parts. Handwrite for thinking, type for keeping.

143 · in/note-taking ·

Is rewriting my lecture notes afterwards doing anything, or is it just tidy procrastination?

I did exactly this for a year and a half and the honest diagnosis was that copying is a comfortable activity that feels like studying. The test I eventually applied: if I could do the task while mildly bored and listening to a podcast, it was not learning. Rewriting passed that test easily. Turning each page into three questions I had to answer from memory did not, because it was hard and I hated it, which turned out to be the point.

231 · in/note-taking ·