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It’s my conjecture that companies that claim to be in the business of “revolutionising (placeholder)” are choosing hardware designs based on whether there exists an emoji that can represent their product. Apple/Google have gone with phone emoji (📱). Which, fair enough, they got in early. Amazon has gone with cylinder and sphere, which can sort of be represented as a coloured circle in a pinch (🔵). Now OpenAI is staking their claim on the doughnut (🍩).
So here’s my claim. I reserve… um… the petrol pump design (⛽️). It will be a device consisting of a cylinder atop something canonical that will taper in to a base. I don’t know what it will do, if anything, yet it will naturally be white, or black (whatever’s in vogue), made of matt plastic, and be something everyone will buy. It will revolutionise… um… putting things on side tables. Yes, that’s it. For too long side tables have too few pointless things on them. This will solve that problem once and for all.
Investors, you know where to find me. 😜
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Dealing with numbered lists in any web-based WYSIWYG editor is always a pain. I don’t envy the developer tasked in building out that feature. At least the wiki I’m using allows you to start lists at arbitrary numbers, rather than forcing you to start at ordinal 1. Little victories I guess.
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No, what BMW should’ve done is kept their seven-segmented displays. Then, on ignition, start cycling this on the dashboard clock. That would get me to tip my hat at the attempt. 😼
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I’ve recently been aware of the use of “plonk” in Usenet culture to mean adding something to a kill/block list (h/t Reconcilable Differences). I may need to issue a “plonk” to BMW after they put an ad on the dashboard of their cars. They can’t be trusted with LCD screens.
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SSH Cheatsheet
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The more I use websites that support keyboard shortcuts, the more I wish that more websites support keyboard shortcuts.
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It’s amusing to see what are obvious model training runs show up in the analytics. Huge, daily spikes spidering broadly through the archive (no individual page gets any more than a few visitors), all originating from one of a handful of countries.
The latest spike is from Singapore, which got me thinking. I was unable to access my Coolify instance last night. I try to open the login page and all I’d see was a blank browser window. I opened the developer tools and checked the network tabs: all the connections were hanging, waiting for a response. I did manage to SSH into the VPS, which was also quite slow but usable. Checked CPU, memory, and available storage: all fine. So by all accounts, Coolify should be working.
Then it occurred to me: that VPS is running in Singapore. Could it be that these model training runs are saturating the available bandwidth? Access to my Coolify instance was always a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes it would be fine, other times it would be completely unaccessible. It was only when I saw the correlation between the two phenomena that I began to suspect: maybe my blame of Coolify’s performance has been misplaced.
No matter. I’m back on using Dokku, and this new VPS is in Adelaide anyway, so hopefully this shouldn’t be too much of a problem now.
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I’m not sure if I’m the only one that experiences this but SSH on MacOS seems to have awful keep-alive out of the box. Connections constantly hang when I look away for more than a few minutes. So I can recommend this change in your SSH config:
# /etc/ssh/ssh_config Host * ServerAliveInterval 30 -
Decided to consolidate all my little web-apps on a new VPS (‘cause I know of the best ways to spend an evening 😉). Got a new VPS from BinaryLane which should take on the workloads of 4 existing ones. Had a bit of trouble with SSH. Turned out to be DNS, in that I was entering the wrong DNS address. 🤦
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Watching a screencast of myself going through a bunch of admin consoles to setup an integration (I need to write it up as a procedure, and I knew if I didn’t record it, I would forget what I did). It doesn’t make for great viewing, but hearing my off-hand comments about the crappy UX is amusing.
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Trains out. Now taking backup route out of city. Trying a new one: 86 tram to La Trobe Uni for a connecting bus. Tram is chockers.
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Just learnt that Steve Yegge has changed blogging platforms again. He’s now writing on his own site. Sadly no RSS, but I also learnt that XCancel allows subscription via RSS to someone’s Twitter feed (HT @sod). So, doing the best I can under these less than ideal circumstances.
Follow up
Apparently that’s not enough. Inkwell is being blocked by XCancel, so this won’t work. Ah well.
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Had an urge to work on Cyber Burger this past week. Added an interactive tutorial, plus a harder “B mode” with a few new elements. Just managed to get under the maximum size of the cartridge, although it was touch-and-go for a bit, and I did have to pull out the onboard help.
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Was the MacBook Neo ever offered in Macha Green, or did I just imagine/wish it was?
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Enjoyed Adam Wunn’s post about FileMaker, via ATP. I’ve never used FileMaker, but as an avid reader of the technology section of the Green Guide back in the day, I always saw ads for it and wondered what it was. I guess one could, if they were be uncharitable, describe it as something akin to Microsoft Access. Anyone remember Access? Does Access remember Access? 😉
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I must say that I happy to be so lucky my taste in music is such that the pieces I listen to could never be mistaken for AI slop. It helps that most of the pieces I usually listen to predate the frickin’ Internet.
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See what happens when you fall down rabbit holes? You learn about things you’ve been wishing for a while. It’s beta at the moment but I tried it out on a headless Linux server and it seemed to work (at least in one direction). This opens up the possibility of using Obsidian for things. At the very least it gives me a better way for backing my vaults.
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2026 census done. ✅
Just in time for NPM to finish installing a few billion packages. 😜
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So many links in one post. I ended up going down all kinds of rabbit holes off the back of this single post.
Followed Kev down that rabbit hole and I agree. It was quite the journey.
The backbone of the internet is the hyperlink, so go forth and link out to your fellow bloggers with reckless abandon. It’s what makes the web, the web. 🕸️
Paying it forward in kind. Thanks, Kev, for the links.
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🔗 Unsung: Paste And Match Style is not the answer
The problem is that PAMS is drunk with power and flattens everything on its way: [bold, italics, etc.] None of these are “style.” This is actual information that should not be removed. If you wire PAMS as your main ⌘V shortcut, or even if you use it occasionally, you might remove valuable data from text you’re moving around, without even noticing.
I can sympathise that styles might be valuable information to some, but there must remain a way to remove this, leaving only the text. Too many apps implement styles badly, and most of the time, I find it much easier to copy as text and apply the styles again, despite how long it takes. That’s if I want to maintain the styling at all (most of the time I do not).
Simply appealing to apps to improve Paste won’t give us that. Remove PAMS if you must, but for the love of God, make sure there’s something like a “Paste Without Styles” which allows me to paste text as plain text. And make it easier to set this as the default systemwide: why are we still rebinding system shortcuts to get this feature?
(I did not expect to feel so strongly about this, but I just more fired up about this opinion as I wrote this. Paste as it’s implemented now just frustrates me sometimes).
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I’m liking Zed but there were some features that Goland really excels at. Their handling of Git, for example. Rebasing, resolving conflicts, and doing branch comparisons on a single file were easier to do in Goland compared to Zed. Debugging is another one. Might keep that Goland license around.
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Coding agents love to write code. Sometimes the act of operating these things involves telling them not to. Worse is sometimes better. Not always: I wouldn’t put that opinion in their system prompt. But sometimes.
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Interesting seeing how the verbs around vibe-coding are developing, since it hard to justify describing one partaking in such an activity as “coding.” I’ve seen a few describe it as “directing” the creation of an app, like a film director creating a movie. That’s a little fancy for me, and implies a level of hands-on that I feel is lacking in my vibe-coding sessions. Hence why my preferred term is “commissioning,” asking something to make it for me. Do what you need to do, and just tell me when it’s ready. I may have things that need changing, and I’ll come back to you about them. Otherwise, no news is good news.
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Well, the “glow” of my new monitor lasted a whole… what? Five days? Last night I noticed a dead pixel near the middle of the display. It’s frickin’ tiny so I don’t think it’s worth going through the hassle of getting it replaced. I’ll see if I can live with it for now. 😩
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I wish something like HyperTexting was available for Android. I hate to admit it, but having something mindless to scroll while commuting would be welcome, and the social apps I use have a bit too much “person X said thing Y that I hate.” It’s exhausting. What HyperTexting has feels right.