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I’m now have a fibre NBN connection, and while it may just be the placebo effect, it certainly feels a lot faster. I regret not doing a speed test with the old connection, but here they are for this hookup:
Via LAN (Tully): 534 Mbps down, 46.6 Mbps up
Via Wifi (Stark): 454 Mbps down, 46.6 Mbps upThis is using Kagi’s Internet speed test, running it 3 times for each transmission medium, and taking the highest result. The average down was about 480 Mbps, with a variance of about 50 Mbps either side of the average. The up was pretty consistent at around 46 Mbps, suggesting that’s pretty close to the plan speed. It seems like the down speeds could be faster on Stark — my main desktop — it wasn’t for the Wifi, but I can live with that.
So yes, quite a noticeable improvement.
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Speaking about games, I was watching a couple of episodes of The Games last night. Even after all these years it’s still a fantastic show. John Clark was a national treasure, of two nations. He is still sorely missed.
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Why does LinkedIn want me to play their puzzle games? What do they get from it? DAUs, perhaps? Nothing against the games, but it’s just strange seeing them send emails about them.
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Amusing seeing all these companies fire their engineers only to rehire them when they realise the AI meant to replace them is not up to scratch. Demonstrates which companies are worth avoiding, lest you be unappreciated despite the value you bring. Hope all the rehires asked for higher pay.
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There’s always a tinge of anxiety whenever I upgrade something in my life. I’m getting fiber tomorrow, and all I’m thinking of is the installation, the shuffling of everything around, how much more it will cost. You’d think I’d also be feeling excited about getting a faster Internet connection. 🤷♂️
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Outage.
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Just discovered the 2D particle system that Godot has. What comes out of the box is quite impressive. I was afraid I would’ve had to hand code how particles moved or how they were rendered. But no: all of that was configuration, and the only code I needed to write was to trigger an emission.
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Word of the day: chiaroscuro: (n) use of strong contrasts between light and dark as a way to affect a composition. A technique used in visual arts, videography, and game design.
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Pam the Bird has been caged, and I don’t know how I feel about that. #melbourne
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Slack needs to do better with their linking. I make note of messages by copying a link to in my Obsidian vault, but following the message requires going through the browser. And if the browser session times-out, because I use a client, there’s no way to follow them. The clients’ don’t support them.
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TIL that Go’s formatter will be fine formatting a file with a composite literal for a slice, yet the Golang CI linter will complain about it and simply say the file is not fomatted:
// gofmt will be fine with this, but not golangci-lint myValues := []myType{ myType{ Foo: 1, Bar: 2 }, myType{ Foo: 3, Bar: 5 }, }So when you find you find yourself seeing a linter complain that a file that’s not formatted when it seems to be (maybe via an auto-format on save feature), try removing the redundant type name:
myValues := []myType{ { Foo: 1, Bar: 2 }, { Foo: 3, Bar: 5 }, }Maybe this is what the
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📺 The Lost Displine of the Alarm: What Notification Design Forgot
Watched this last night, and immediately saw its relevance while perusing the logs of a weekend sync job, and saw “errors” that didn’t need to be actioned. No! Log errors only if the operator needs to do something.
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Since my kitchen clock has decided on tempus immotum, I’ve been casually looking for a new clock. Found one today at the Kyneton Collective (an antique store) that’s in working order and a style that I like. Good price too: only $9, which made it an instant buy.
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Suggested topic for an @atpfm@mastodon.social member special: a tier-list of Apple’s apps ranked based on how much they are a Mac-arsed Mac App.
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The coo crew.
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This ChatGPT Pulse replacement/improvement is not looking good. The email for the scheduled task came through, but it doesn’t contain the entire message. It’s just a click-through to see it in ChatGPT. This is not useful to me. I’ll have to think of something else.
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Vibelog: Weatherpatch - UI Improvement
A few weeks ago, I vibe-coded a web-app called Weatherpatch. This is an app that is designed to receive email newsletters and produce them as an RSS feeds: basically what Feedbin does, but without needing to use Feedbin. The app was vibe-coded with Opus, and while functional, it is hardly an example of good design (unless you’re a fan of Cubism). To wit:
Yeah, Opus just threw the feed management controls all over the place. And I tolerated it for a time. I was more interested in having something functional, rather than pretty. But the thing about a bad UI is that it makes using the app feel bad. Sure I’m not in there managing feeds, but I would like to go in there are copy-paste the email address when setting a new one up.
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TIL that Fastmail added the ability to annotate an email with a private memo, similar to Hey. It also shows up in the email list. This is good. I hope I remember to use it.
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It’s 2026 and bagpipes remain an underrated instrument.
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Trying to recreate ChatGPT Pulse with their new scheduled tasks. Took their suggested prompt, striped the reference to email, and added this site as a source of topics of interest, lest the topics be all about Stripe and AWS. Here’s the prompt I’ve got at the moment:
Give useful or interesting daily suggestions based on the user’s past chats, and the first page of lmika.org. Prioritise actionable ideas, follow-up questions, and topics they are likely to care about, but also include topics that may be of interest to the user. Do not use lmika.org as a reference: use it only as source of what topics of interest the user has. Keep it concise and tailored to recurring themes from their conversations. Break the response into sections, with one section for each topic. Use paragraphs rather than dot points. Include 2-3 links as dot-points at the end of each topic.
The test responses look good, so we’ll see if it’ll work as a scheduled task. My ultimate goal is to get this added as a feed to my RSS reader, but in order for that to work, I need these responses delivered as emails. In theory that’s supported, but I set this schedule up yesterday, and I haven’t received an email just yet. Hopefully tonight.
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Attended one of the lectures that the Melbourne Uni’s School of Physics puts on every Friday for July. This evening’s, given by Professor Matt O’Dowd, was about black holes and how they really screw with the theory of physics and maths. Very interesting. Quite approachable for a layperson like me.
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🔗 Birchtree: A blown up iPhone, not the next Mac:
I think it’s reasonable to say that fifteen years ago, the iPad was where more software innovation was happening compared to the Mac. Today, however, we’ve moved onto a new era.
I think iPadOS has hit a local maxima, and as long as Apple continues to apply its iron grip on the device, it won’t break free from that. But you know what, it’s fine. The iPad doesn’t need to be anymore than it is. But don’t call it a replacement for your Mac.
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Turns out I’m in the weights. They know I’m a software engineer, but not much more than that. Hilariously, Claude and Gemini think I’m a Swift developer and contributor. I guess the models have a problem recognising Go as a proper noun (or there’s a Leon Mika out there that’s a legendary Swift dev).
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Dealing with AI chats is pretty pedestrian at the moment, but we cannot forget that the idea of having a conversation with a computer is actually pretty wild. What started as an attempt to recreate ChatGPT Pulse turned into a conversation about ways of getting the Pulse response sent to me. I think my younger self would find asking a program if it could do this or that, rather than looking up documentation, quite bizarre.