Look, I’m no fan of Amazon and I’d like to get off using Kindles eventually. But the alternatives can sometimes be downright unusable. Behold: using the Kobo reader on an iPad in landscape orientation.

It would be nice if MacOS Calendar had an option to send a email receipt when setting up a meeting. For a while I couldn’t get email invitations sent out to attendees. I think it’s fixed now, but I still have doubt that it’s working properly again.

I did not expect the murshroom murder trial to make its way into the Economist this week. But given the intricate nature of the case, I can absolutely understand why. I no doubt expect this will be turned into some sort of mini-series in a few years.

It’s funny the way you sort of “run into” people and their work online. I’ve only been following Simon Willison for about a year, yet it was only today that I noticed a testimonial of his on a Golang project I’ve been using for quite a bit longer. “Serendipitous”, I guess you could call this.

I’ve been misspelling “cancelled” a lot recently, in that I’ve been spelling it correctly yet the linter’s been saying, “no. Use the US spelling of ‘canceled’!” 😏

If there’s one thing I’m learning from Ben Thompson, it’s that everything’s a trade-off and nothing in life is perfect. And that’s no less true for something like adopting a branching process. Should you merge your changes straight to main; or should you keep main stable for production releases, and have a separate development branch? Not the question to ask: either approach sucks (trust me, I’ve worked with both). The answer is to find an approach that sucks the least for you and the way you work.

My mind wandered this morning to a job I previously had that had an office in a building that had a pair of breeding peregrine falcons. They were provided with a nesting box and an ornithologist set up a webcam. The feed is available on the internet and in the office we tacked it on to a TV set up to cycled through things like our Jira board and support queue. Every few minutes or so, the camera feed of the nesting falcons came on and I always enjoyed looking up to see when while I was working.

Since then I haven’t really been following them closely. They still nest there and usually the feed comes online around October. I’ll need to make a conscious effort to bring the feed up when spring rolls around.

Glad I’m not the only one that’s frustrated with Google Maps showing route numbers instead of street names. May be a false memory but I seem to remember this being better in the past. Don’t know why they decided to change it.

I see that JetBrains hasn’t fix that GoLand backspace bug yet, where the backspace key stops working for some random reason. That’s quite a strange one.

“How fast does Stripe post web-hook events?”, you ask. Well at the moment I’m facing a small race condition where a thread makes a call to Stripe, and another thread receives the event before the first one has finished its routine. So yeah, pretty fast.

Release version 1.2.0 of Postlist which contains the following changes:

• New limit attribute which can be used the set the maximum number of posts shown in the list.
• A new mode which display the full contents of a post, rather than just the title or the first line. This can be enabled by setting the new display attribute to content.

Just a reminder that the attributes can be mixed and matched, so you can use both these new attributes together, along with all the existing ones:

{{< postlist limit="3" categories="Example" order="date" display="content" >}}

See updated documentation for details, including how the markup of full post content can be configure if desired (this works in a similar way to microhooks in Tiny Theme, in which you create customer templates with specific names).

🛠️ PocketCal

Nice looking web-app for sharing event dates by Cassidy Williams. Nothing stored server-side: all the event details are encoded in the URL. One of those sites that’s worth keeping in your back pocket for when you need it.

Via: Robb Knight

Great time of year to pick a birthday. Organising an event today and everyone’s sick, including myself. Just received one cancellation because someone’s got the flu. Argh! Ah well. It is what it is.

Lightbulb moments.

It may seem like that spending all evening watching TGV cab rides on YouTube would not yield any lessons¹, and usually you would be correct. But after watching a cab-ride yesterday, I did learn a few things about overhead electrical systems that I found quite interesting.

I also learnt about mid-point anchors. I’ve seen these around our system with relatively newer infrastructure, I was curious as to why they needed to exist, and why they aren’t present in the older sections. Turns out they’re required when both the catenary and overhead lines are attached with tensioning equipment. These are usually weights, and since neither wire are attached to anything fix, they can moving freely along the track. Hence the need for these anchors to prevent that from happening. I also realised that in the older infrastructure, the catenary are connected to the gantries, which remove the need for such things.

Anyway, forgive the rambling and nerdy post. I’ve have a fascination in these electrical systems and I always find such factoids interesting. Probably helps that finding this out offsets the negative feelings I got from spending all evening watching YouTube.

I’m now fully on the train of code first, manual testing next, then unit tests last. It’s while the code is running in a larger system where you “feel” how best it should behave, and whether that behaviour needs to change in any way. You then use the unit tests at the end to lock that behaviour in.