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The YouTube algorithm has decided I’m interested in city planning videos from Canadians, particularly Ontarians (not without cause). As a consequence, I’ve learnt the names of a few national and provincial public transport authorities. Via Rail? GO Trains? I know what those mean now.
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Found out that
!works in Claude Code, allowing you to run shell commands a.la. Vim. A nice feature that I wasn’t expecting. -
The ability to reply to posts from Inkwell is a nice feature. Really adds to the value of following Mastodon accounts via RSS.
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name a musical album you listen to, more or less, once every day. Strict ruleset. You REALLY listen to it every day, unless life intervenes, as it is wont to do
Probably closer to every other day, certainly 2-3 times a week, but Tubular Bells III, by Mike Oldfield.
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📘 Devlog
Well Read - One Week Later
It's been a week since I learnt about Inkwell's API and got an agent to start work on an RSS reader. Since then, Well Read has been in a state of flux, as I ask for agents to make changes to the interaction and layout. I think I've got it in a pretty good state now, certainly in a state that works well for me. The earliest screenshots of Well Read, taken on 11 March 2026 The Today and Recent tabs still retain their original behaviour, although the idea of using 6:00 pm of the previous evening as the cutoff for " Continue reading →
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Anyone else notice that AWS names their US regions after states instead of cities? It’s curious. Is it because naming us-west-2 “Portland” could spark confusion as to whether it’s located in Oregon or Maine? Surely the “us-west-2” would be a hint as to where it’s geographically located. 🤷
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Above the clouds.
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Word of the day: kenopsia, (n) the strange sensation experienced while seeing a place that should be/is usually filled with people that is empty or abandoned.
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On my commute. I wanted “Mark all as Read” added to Well Read. Cracked open the coding agent to make the change, push it to Forgejo to build the release, which I side loaded onto my phone. By the time I arrived at my station, it was there. Pretty nice!
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It looks like Go’s getting a UUID package added to the standard library. Someone’s been reading my mind, or at the very least reading my blog. 😏
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It’s kind of fun seeing what product decisions coding agents make when you slacken the reins a little. Without being specific, I asked an agent working on a TUI to have a way to indicate that a row in a table is selected. I would’ve expected it to highlight the row, but no: it opted to indicate a selected row by showing a bullet in the left-most column, much like a checkbox on a web-based table. Interesting choice.
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Does anyone else keep a blog and not want people they know know about it?
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It’s interesting seeing people get caught out with how the doors work in the Metro Tunnel. At every other station, you need to press the button to open the train doors, but in the Metro Tunnel, they’re automatic. Maybe if they opened as soon as they started beeping (there’s a few seconds delay).
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A lot fewer people on the train into the city today.
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I wonder if the split between the coding as a craft, verses coding as a means to a finished product, is a false dichotomy. There’s always a mix between the mundane and the interesting for any coding project. Moving and shuffling data between API, modal, and database is pretty rote at this point, and is something that a coding agent can pick-up pretty easily. But there are still problems out there that rely on craft to do well if you look for them. Updating and aggregating records within a transaction using optimistic locking and intelligent choices for retries, for example. That is interesting work, and the satisfaction that comes from hand-rolling it is worth the delayed gratification, not to mention the understanding thrown out as a by-product.
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You see these car lifts or “stackers” everywhere in South Melbourne. Didn’t know they were as prevalent as they are until I knew someone who used one. Apparently they’re decent, if they’re working.
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Grew frustrated with Android a few days ago and wondered if I would ever switch to iOS. But after setting up a pipeline for a Flutter Android app, being able to side load it directly from the build artefacts is way too good a feature to throw away. So I can’t see myself switching anytime soon.
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📘 Devlog
Well Read - An Inkwell Client for Android
When Manton mentioned that Inkwell has an API, I… um… may have vibe-coded an Android client. It's called "Well Read", which is not a great name but better than "Inkwell Client" which was the working title. Much like Inkwell, it follows the river approach to RSS. There's a Today tab and Recent tab, each showing a portion of the entries in reverse chronological order. Today shows all the posts from today, plus the last 6 hours of yesterday. Continue reading →
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Oh, and make sure it’s Java 17. Tried building the APK with Java Temurin 25.0.2 and Gradle errored out with this super useful error message:
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception. * What went wrong: 25.0.2Great job, Gradle. Always helpful. 😛
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For anyone else going mad that you’ve set
JAVA_HOMEbut Flutter is not picking it up and reporting a different version, you need to configure the JDK path in Flutter itself. It may be getting confused with the version that comes with Android Studios. Use:flutter config --jdk-dir="$JAVA_HOME" -
I’ve not yet used a REST endpoint tester that I liked. I have dreams of building one that would work for me, but I haven’t found a workflow that is any better. Something about using GUI tools for testing REST endpoints that just sucks.
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We never got a satisfactory answer as to why a raven is like writing desk. Maybe it will prompt one to wonder why a crow is like a kitchen bench. Well, it’s probably not worth considering why, as the two are completely different things (that is, unless, you opt for a bench with black surfaces).
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📘 Devlog
Weiro - Update 6th March 2026
A small update on Weiro. I've been working on it over the past week, trying to get it in a state that is pleasant to use. I'm been trying to get something halfway usable before doubt scuppers my motivation and this project appears on the growing list of aborted attempts at making a CMS. There've been one or two close calls, but it hasn't caused me to stop yet. A large part of that was a feature I knew I wanted but was daunting to implement: uploads. Continue reading →
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📘 Devlog
CSVTool - A Vibe-coded CSV Editor
One of the fun aspects of these new code agents is seeing what they're capable of producing just form the prompt, so called "vibe-coding." There are some that are definitely all in on the concept: I'm thinking of Steve Yeggie and his Gas Town work. As for myself, I still prefer to be a bit more hands on. But it's still amusing to see what these agents are capable of just from the prompt. Continue reading →
