Leon Mika

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Nov 30, 2023: Notice this eastern bearded dragon on my walk today. Not something I usually see during my day to day (granted, I’m not walking my usual routes …

Nov 30, 2023: Really like the word “augment.” I’m using it a lot in the Jira tickets I’m writing. The job is not to modify something or …

Nov 29, 2023: Pocketcasts has started showing star reviews for podcasts I’ve subscribed to in the web-app. Count me as someone who thinks this is a dumb idea. …

Nov 28, 2023: Always a great feeling when you see a bit of code, and you think to yourself “that’s a bizarre thing to do, who wrote this?” Then …

Nov 28, 2023: 📺 Dave’s Garage - the Dave Cutter interviews You know the feeling when you see a YouTube interview of someone talking about their work, and …

Nov 28, 2023: 🔗 DOS_deck Experience classic games with modern convenience at DOS_deck. With full controller support and a carefully curated game collection, enjoy …

Nov 27, 2023: Those familiar trails will have to wait a little longer. Got a bit of “bird watching” to do first. 🦜

Nov 26, 2023: Anyone else miss the split-flap displays they had at airports? I mean, screens make much more sense: no mechanical parts, easier to display …

Nov 26, 2023: 🎄

Nov 25, 2023: Best, First, Favourite On Reconcilable Difference #221, Merlin and John introduced the concept of “Best, First, Favourite”. For a particular category, which would you …

Nov 24, 2023: Trying a new commute. Getting off a station early and walking a bit along the river. Bumps the walking time from 20 minutes to half an hour, but might …

Nov 23, 2023: There are too many people using power-tools around here. 🙉 Where: “power-tool” is defined as any powered device that is not a lawnmower, …

Nov 22, 2023: Got an idea for a new feature for Dynamo-Browse. Began working on it this evening, starting with the UI: Recorded using VHS.

Nov 21, 2023: 🎵 Epic Grandpa, by Izioq This has been a bit of an ear-worm recently, after hearing it in this YouTube video (thank-you to those who credit composers …

Nov 21, 2023: Manuel Moreale post on ad blockers got me thinking about how Gruber tries to record ads for the Talk Show that people might actually enjoy listening …

Nov 20, 2023: Feeling a bit of nostalgia for Half-Life today, given all the talk surrounding its 25th anniversary. It remains one of my favourite games, and one …

Nov 19, 2023: Sort of in-between projects at the moment so I’m doing a bit of light stuff on Mainboard Mayhem. I had an idea for a new element: a remote …

Nov 18, 2023: Ah, it’s good to be back home, walking familiar trails once again. 😌

Nov 17, 2023: Walked the Green Corridor, which runs along the old KTM Railway, with a few people from work. Really enjoyed it. Total distance was 17 km, which was a …

Nov 17, 2023: 🔗 So Many Default Apps Seeing everyone blog (yes, actually blog) about their default apps over the last two weeks has been absolutely wonderful. Robb …

Nov 16, 2023: A Few Thoughts On Using iA Presenter Well the “big presentation” was today, the one I thought would be a good canditate for trying out iA Presenter. And after spending the last couple of …

Nov 15, 2023: Wheels and bridges.

Nov 14, 2023: One thing that thrills me about visiting somewhere new is seeing the little things you can also find at home, such as these pedestrian crossing …

Nov 14, 2023: Morning walk around the southern end of Singapore. Love walking through the green areas of the city. Very quiet and peaceful. Also, the Singapore …

Nov 13, 2023: Had the pleasure of taking the ferry to Batam, Indonesia to see how my employer builds hardware. Wow! It’s absolutely amazing. To see something …

Nov 13, 2023: I don’t like these pod coffee machines for a number of reasons. Today’s reason is that it took me 5 minutes to work out how to turn the …

Nov 13, 2023: Greetings from Singapore. 🇸🇬

Nov 12, 2023: Resurrecting Untraveller And Finishing The RA-V Mission Posts It’s been 10 years to the day when I had the opportunity to tour the Pacific as part of my job at the Bureau of Meteorology, the so call “RA-V …

Nov 12, 2023: It was in my day you had to download what you wanted to read, watch, or listen to before you got onto a plane.

Nov 12, 2023: I’m wondering if peoples love of a piece music has less to do with the music itself and more to do with positive associations with it. By today’s …

Nov 11, 2023: Trying out the image generator in ChatGPT (which I think is just DALL-E). A few friends of mine will get this reference. Prompt: an image of a griffin …

Nov 10, 2023: I’ve been watching a lot of retro-computing YouTube videos recently and I find it amazing to think that much work involving a computer back then …

Nov 9, 2023: Found this on the footpath during my afternoon walk (almost too late I might add). I’m guessing it’s a blue-tongue, based on its size and …

Nov 8, 2023: One last day trip today. Went down to South Gippsland to do part of the Great Southern Rail Trail. Entered the trail at Koonwarra and walked for an …

Nov 8, 2023: It’s incredibly difficult to get a good photo of a Crimson Rosella. They’re quite skittish. But managed to get this shot before it flew …

Nov 7, 2023: I’ve started using Notion for my personal notes. It’s still early days, and I haven’t moved all my old notes from Obsidian yet, but …

Nov 7, 2023: 🔗 Please, Expose your RSS 100% this! It was only a year or so ago that I found out that RSS discovery was a thing …

Nov 6, 2023: Day trip to Mornington Peninsula. Did the Bushrangers Bay to Cape Shank Lighthouse walk, the Main Ridge walk, and the King Falls Circuit walk (known …

Nov 6, 2023: I’m more than happy to give directions to anyone who asks, but afterwards I always fear that the directions I give end up leading them astray or …

Nov 4, 2023: Defaults I see that Gabz, Robb, and Manique — along with many others — have posted their defaults after listening to Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the …

Nov 3, 2023: Also got a bit of train spotting in as well. I parked at Kyneton station in the hope of seeing a train go by. Wish I could say my timing was strategic …

Nov 3, 2023: Enjoyed the day in Kyneton walking along the Campaspe River trail.

Nov 3, 2023: 🔗 Google is moving Shopping List and other notes into one app to worry about, Keep This is somewhat good news, as Keep is a decent note-keeping app. …

Nov 2, 2023: Yay, six day weekend! Gonna get my day walks in. 🌲

Nov 1, 2023: While poking through some old GarageBand projects I came across this track I wrote a few of years ago. I didn’t think much of it of the time, …

Oct 31, 2023: I’ve been asked to prepare a presentation for work, which means I have an opportunity to use iA Presenter. It’s clear that I’ll have …

Oct 31, 2023: One thing Slack has recently started doing is formatting CSV snippets as tables. This is a great feature. Being able to paste a CSV export directly …

Oct 31, 2023: Will try not to make too long a comment about how I generated a report for someone, with created and updated dates for each row, and the first …

Oct 30, 2023: Why I Like Go This question was posed to me in the Hemispheric Views Discord the other day. It’s a bit notable that I didn’t have an answer written down …

Oct 29, 2023: Got a hair cut today. Same cut as always: no. 3 round the side and trim with scissors on the top. I wonder if barbers get sick of trivial cuts like …

Oct 28, 2023: Stealing an idea from Rob Knight and changing Working Set to a GitBooks powered digital garden. Still need to import the blog posts to this site …

Oct 27, 2023: It’s interesting seeing the different names used in unit tests to identify the setup, test, and verification stages. I’ve seen …

Oct 27, 2023: Lunch at South Melbourne Market.

Oct 26, 2023: Happy new theme day. Figured it was time for a new look for this site so I changed the theme from Arabica to Tiny Theme by @mtt. Gotta say, looks …

Oct 25, 2023: Pro-tip: if you’re waiting outside, don’t get caught in hail.

Oct 24, 2023: Work Email Spam Opened my work email this morning and received a greeting from the following spam messages: Webinar to “overcome the fear of public …

Oct 23, 2023: Follow-up to yesterday: I was curious to know if the click-track is only present in bounces of projects imported from GarageBand, or if it also occurs …

Oct 22, 2023: TIL that Logic Pro will include the click-track in the bounce if it’s left on. This “feature” costed me a fair bit of rework today. …

Oct 21, 2023: This conversation with @Gaby got my creative juices flowing so I though I’d put together a small video tutorial for using the GLightbox plugin …

Oct 21, 2023: I enjoyed today’s issue of People and Blogs with Jim Nielsen. I’m a huge fan of Jim Nielson’s blog and it’s always fun reading about how people like …

Oct 20, 2023: Apart from looking at Fiber this week, I also took a look at import maps. I was skeptical at first, but after using them I can probably learn to like …

Oct 20, 2023: Funny how we’ve gone from online services being famous for getting users off their site as quickly as possible (Google circa 2000), to online …

Oct 19, 2023: My upcoming trip will take 40 minutes, so I can probably give it 45 minutes to get there. I don’t need to leave an hour out. Honestly, thank …

Oct 19, 2023: There’s a school of though in Go that says the built-in HTTP handler types are all you need to build a web-service. There’s a good reason …

Oct 19, 2023: Vivaldi has been really unstable recently. It usually crashes once a week on average (which is, arguably, already too often), but this week I’ve …

Oct 18, 2023: More Logic Pro this evening. Here’s a recording of the main theme from Tubular Bells 2. Love how the Steinway Grand Piano sounds. Download

Oct 17, 2023: Have gone down, of all things, a HTMX essays rabbit-hole. I discovered1 HTMX from reading Jim Nielson’s excellent blog, and although I …

Oct 17, 2023: 🔗 Canada’s 84-year radio time check has stopped because of accuracy concerns Interesting article about how Canada broadcasted timing information via …

Oct 16, 2023: Rehearsal today. Haven’t got the PA equipment yet so I had to settle for 30 year old PC speakers. They worked better than expected, but …

Oct 15, 2023: More work on Mainboard Mayhem today. Had a bit more success getting the Windows build into a releasable state. First thing was the app icon. That blog …

Oct 14, 2023: Spent some time today on Mainboard Mayhem, trying to finish the Windows build. I’ve actually got Windows version of the game being built for a …

Oct 14, 2023: 🔗 Age and the past One way to think about age – we become old when we think and talk more about the past than the future. Oooh. I feel a little seen. …

Oct 13, 2023: Installed the latest version of Android today. One obvious change: the calculator app displays fractions in the result. And there’s no way to …

Oct 12, 2023: Went to Castlemaine for a funeral this morning. For most of my life we would regularly go to Castlemaine to visit family. After today, it might be a …

Oct 12, 2023: Spending my free time adding photos to my travel journal and I’m starting to wonder if less is more. Maybe not having tens of photos crammed into a …

Oct 11, 2023: 🔗 Using Web Components on My Icon Galleries Websites Lot of neat stuff referenced in this post, like htmx and web components. I’d like to try …

Oct 10, 2023: I use to write up design documents directly in Confluence, as we use that as our knowledge base, but recently I’ve started drafting them in …

Oct 9, 2023: Launched Logic Pro and did some MIDI recording this evening. Here’s an except from “Top of the Morning” from Tubular Bells 3.

Oct 9, 2023: Yes, PA equipment organised: two speakers, a mixer, and cables. I’ll have to drive to Windsor to pick it up, which is a bit of a hike for me, …

Oct 9, 2023: Goland updated to the latest, and the issue I was having with the debugger last week has been resolved. Curious how upgrading to Go 1.21 seems to …

Oct 9, 2023: All aboard the Goland upgrade train. Calling at 2022.1.4, 2022.2.28, 2023.1.45…

Oct 7, 2023: If I can recommend one thing anyone with a PA hire service should do, it’s to have specifics of the equipment you offer for hire up on your …

Oct 7, 2023: Been out all morning trying to find someone that does PA hire. Drove to three different locations I found on Google Maps. Two of them are no longer …

Oct 6, 2023: Looks like the Go debugger has already checked out for the week. I’m trying to debug this unit test and it’s refusing to start the app. …

Oct 6, 2023: Pixel Phones Are Not Dog-food, and That's a Problem John Gruber on the Pixel 8 launch event: It’s also impossible not to comment on just how much less interest there is in Google’s Pixel ecosystem. […] …

Oct 5, 2023: I’m shutting down Untraveller. I can’t resolve the tension of wanting a comprehensive, but really dry, account of a trip, vs. making it …

Oct 4, 2023: Vivaldi occasionally lockups when I bring up the context menu. I think it happens when it tries to makes a network request for the search icon. I can …

Oct 4, 2023: Had to go to the new office today so I tried out the commute. The walk from Southern Cross to the office is exactly 20 minutes.

Oct 3, 2023: Organising travel documents for an upcoming work trip. I used to rely on Google Inbox for this. The way it ingested your itinerary and hotel booking …

Oct 3, 2023: Your Dev Environment is Not Your Production Environment There will be certain things you’re going to need to do in your development environments that you should never do in production. That’s …

Oct 3, 2023: It’s so much easier to post about how something others have worked on could be made better than it is to write about what I’ve been …

Oct 3, 2023: Don’t want to turn this into the “look at what’s wrong with Atlassian’s software” blog, but I found another thing that …

Oct 2, 2023: Given the number of times I make wiki pages that are little more than pseudo-databases-as-a-table, it would be nice if Confluence had a way to make …

Sep 30, 2023: Day 30: treasure This one’s inside a box without hinges, key, or lid. #mbsept

Sep 29, 2023: Day 29: contrast #mbsept

Sep 29, 2023: Day 28: workout It was a quiet evening in the gym that evening, which is unusual for a Thursday. I suspect that bolt of lightening that blew up a …

Sep 29, 2023: After having some success getting my early QBasic programs running in the browser I had a bit of a look this morning to see if I could do the same for …

Sep 29, 2023: Day 27: embrace Photo credit goes to my sister, who captured this pair showing affection for each other. #mbsept

Sep 28, 2023: Day 26: beverage #mbsept

Sep 28, 2023: Day 25: flare #mbsept

Sep 28, 2023: Day 24: belt Sometimes a 40 inch belt is just a 40 inch belt, as I realised when I bought mine (honestly, they should describe belt lengths as a …

Sep 27, 2023: The day has arrived. After a meeting in the new office we were told to pack up our things. We won’t see them again until our desks in the new …

Sep 27, 2023: Lost another comment to Jira today. Oof! Don’t get attached to anything you write there. Jira will eat your comment and you’ll never see …

Sep 27, 2023: Electrification of Melbourne Suburban Railways Plaque Found this plaque while passing through Southern Cross station this morning. I didn’t have time to read it, and the subject matter looks really …

Sep 27, 2023: I’ve got a bit behind my photos for the September Photo Challenge. I’ve got one for today that I’d really like to post. But I …

Sep 25, 2023: I was planning to go into the office today. The train went two stops in before everyone was instructed to transfer to busses. Now on a train heading …

Sep 23, 2023: Day of firsts today. Had a session of indoors go-karts as part of a bucks party. Loads of fun. Won the wooden spoon (although only 3 second slower …

Sep 23, 2023: Started practice sessions again as I’ve been asked to play the piano at an event. I thought I’d try something new this time, and start …

Sep 23, 2023: Day 23: day in the life of Saturday mornings usually mean an extended walk to the cafe for breakfast. I took some photos of my route today. This is …

Sep 22, 2023: Day 22: road #mbsept

Sep 21, 2023: It would be nice if there was an option in Mastodon’s web-app to turn off displaying alt text as a popup when mousing over an image. Some alt …

Sep 21, 2023: Day 21: fall This shed hasn’t fallen down yet, but it’s in a bit of a precarious state. #mbsept

Sep 20, 2023: Day 20: disruption Going to take this opportunity to say that I like the design of our road works signs. They have a standard frame from which you can …

Sep 20, 2023: 🎵 Pippin, the New Broadway Cast Recording, by Stephen Schwartz. One of the defining memories of my life was in Year 10, playing the viola in the pit …

Sep 20, 2023: 🎵 Stages, by Elaine Page One of a handfull of albums I use to play constantly on the record player when I was a kid.

Sep 20, 2023: Day 19: edge #mbsept

Sep 19, 2023: I was designing something for work a couple of months back. I got a little fancy and added a domain-specific language to the first draft, thinking …

Sep 19, 2023: About Mocks In Unit Tests (Again) How can one gain confidence that what they’re testing works if one is using mocks? I’m grappling with this now as I go through making changes in one …

Sep 18, 2023: Day 18: fabric My woollen blanket, knitted by my nonna. #mbsept

Sep 18, 2023: Getting to the point in the photo blogging challenge where I’m saying to myself: “have I posted this photo before?” One of the …

Sep 17, 2023: Day 17: intense Didn’t time this photo well. There’s usually an intense game of soccer on this pitch most Saturdays. The Sunday crowds are …

Sep 17, 2023: Spent some time today building a site for my Go utility packages. A feature I’ve decided to add is a Go template playground, where you can test …

Sep 17, 2023: Still waiting for the dream to be able to write code on an iPad. There are some good native apps out there for checking out Git repos and editing …

Sep 16, 2023: Day 16: oof! I can’t understand people that stay up until midnight most nights. It’s only 9:00 and I’m already exhausted. #mbsept

Sep 15, 2023: Day 15: red Red mailboxes means the post will go faster. 😉 #mbsept

Sep 15, 2023: Day 14: statue #mbsept

Sep 15, 2023: Enjoying coffee and breakfast after a really early start and several weeks of hard work, with the satisfaction that the work is now done. Good …

Sep 13, 2023: Day 13: glowing #mbsept

Sep 13, 2023: Day 12: panic There have been a fair few stressors in my life recently, both at work and personally. And although they haven’t got to the level …

Sep 11, 2023: Day 11: retrospect This photo taken eight years to the day: part of a Roman wall in Exeter, UK. #mbsept

Sep 10, 2023: Day 10: cycle Bicycles at the station. Really need to get on my bike and buy one for myself. #mbsept

Sep 10, 2023: I’m no fashion expert, but I’m guessing that if you were to stand on the corner holding this sign, you’re going to stop traffic. …

Sep 9, 2023: Day 9: language #mbsept

Sep 8, 2023: Finished reading: What to Do When It’s Your Turn by Seth Godin 📚

Sep 8, 2023: Day 8: yonder I’ll let the arrow do the pointing. #mbsept

Sep 7, 2023: Oh, I’m having a day at work today. Everything’s broken, or not built right, and Slack has been pinging me non-stop with people …

Sep 7, 2023: Day 7: panorama Might go wide for this one. View from the Paps, near Mansfield. #mbsept

Sep 6, 2023: Day 6: well Taken from the Churchill Island homestead. I’m trusting the sign here to be correct in it’s assertion that there used to be a …

Sep 5, 2023: Day 5: forest I consider myself extremely lucky to live near a forest reserve. I walk through it several times a week. This forest, however, is …

Sep 4, 2023: Alternative Day Four Photo I had an alternative idea for today’s photo challenge, which is “orange”. I was hoping to post a photo of something related to …

Sep 4, 2023: Day 4: orange Taken near the day 2 photo. You certainly can’t miss these. #mbsept

Sep 3, 2023: Day 3: precious A photo of the Hope Diamond, taken while touring the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, in Washington, DC. #mbsept

Sep 2, 2023: I only just discovered yesterday that Feedbin has a read-it-later feature. The section only shows up in the sidebar after you add your first page, so …

Sep 2, 2023: Day 2: buildup New shed being built nearby to house the spoil from a new road tunnel. It’s quite large. I guess they’re expecting quite a large …

Sep 1, 2023: Day 1: abstract Photo of an abstract(ish) sculpture of Bunjil, an eagle regarded as the spirit creator of the Kulin nations. #mbsept

Aug 31, 2023: Feels good putting up another project on my omg.lol page. Feels less good when I realised that I actually got the name of my own damn project wrong in …

Aug 30, 2023: Mainboard Mayhem Project update on Mainboard Mayhem, my Chip’s Challenge fan game. I didn’t get it finished in time for the release deadline, which was …

Aug 29, 2023: GitLab is requiring me to manually click “automatically rebase” when I try to merge a MR. This option is only available after the CI/CD …

Aug 27, 2023: Missed the train this morning, but grabbed a photo of it travelling back to Newport this evening. 🚂

Aug 27, 2023: A note to self for next year: the steam-train for the Wattle Festival comes through at around 9:00. Try to be around the railway line around then. 🚂

Aug 26, 2023: I got a phising message last night. At least, I think it was a phishing message. It was pretty convincing. It said that my address is wrong and needed …

Aug 25, 2023: Seeing a lot more EVs driving around recently, with the record being 12 sightings during one commute. Not all of them have witty number plates …

Aug 24, 2023: Currawong close-up (okay, not really, but any closer and it’ll fly away).

Aug 23, 2023: While passing this sign on the way to work, I always wonder if they ever considered the name Catstruction.

Aug 22, 2023: The ice bus returneth. 🚌🥶

Aug 22, 2023: I’m sorry, but Apple’s magic mouse and keyboard are the absolute worst. I’m making so many typing errors on the keyboard and …

Aug 22, 2023: My recent YouTube watching has been about theme-parks, predominantly Disney. I’m not an theme-park enthusiast but I found both Theme Park …

Aug 22, 2023: Can someone follow you on Substack without you even having a Substack? I have an account but I’m just a reader; I don’t publish anything …

Aug 21, 2023: I have passing fancies of re-theming this blog, mainly to improve the style of code excerpts. I resist the temptation, not only because I’ve …

Aug 20, 2023: Project update for Mainboard Madness. Well, today’s the deadline for getting the thing code complete, and what a surprised, it’s not …

Aug 19, 2023: Visited my Nonna this afternoon and showed her some photos of my recent trip to Italy. I had some concerns that I may have gotten the town she grew up …

Aug 18, 2023: I do like the idea of a personal changelog but I know that I’ll need to have some way to automatically create entries when I post to blogs, make …

Aug 17, 2023: Got some, shall we say… “pointers” about how we could improve the code-base we’re working on at work. As much as it hurts my ego to …

Aug 16, 2023: Anyone else miss the visualisations of Windows Media Player? Pining for the dance of the freaky circles right now.

Aug 15, 2023: Not much going on at the moment. The most interesting thing that’s been happening is that I’ve been playing around with Wails recently, …

Aug 13, 2023: Small project update on my Chips Challenge fan game. Started working on the final level. I was dreading this a little, thanks to my awful level design …

Aug 12, 2023: Early Version of This Blog I was looking for something in GitHub the other day when I found the repository for the first iteration of this blog. I was curious as to how it …

Aug 11, 2023: I’d like to say I’m looking forward to a day of solid coding, but the last few times I wrote that, I ended up with a day full of annoying …

Aug 11, 2023: When I heard about what CNET is doing to their old articles it strikes me as to how relying solely on SSO is a bit of a looser’s game. Ok, I …

Aug 10, 2023: Aargh! I’ve been misspelling “aargh” all this time (two A’s, not one). Incidentally, the word “misspelling” looks …

Aug 10, 2023: Aargh! I haven’t had time to write up new work or even finish the work I’ve picked up because I’ve been in meetings and discussions …

Aug 10, 2023: Multi-carat support in text editors have been a huge game changer to my coding workflow. I love them. I use them all the time, and I miss them when …

Aug 9, 2023: Ok, mark the date: first time I’ve seen someone in public with a foldable phone. The narrow screen is a bit of a giveaway. I knew they would be …

Aug 8, 2023: Giving the Scribe editor a try. Works great. Seems like a perfect editor for those focused writing sessions where you need as few distractions as …

Aug 7, 2023: Oof, attended a council meeting this evening about a development that is planned down the road of my place. Must say, I know of better ways to spend a …

Aug 7, 2023: Why does AWS do things like limit the size of IAM role names to 64 characters? Why not something like 256 characters? I cannot deploy something …

Aug 6, 2023: Went to the Heide Museum of Modern Art with Mum and Dad today. Was really good. Found some of the exhibits to be a little challenging (which, I guess, …

Aug 5, 2023: Working on my Chips Challenge “fan game” this morning. Added the notion of “lower thirds,” which will show text at the bottom …

Aug 5, 2023: Number of consecutive Saturdays where I’ve been swooped by a noisy minor: 2

Aug 4, 2023: Happy Friday everyone. It’s the end of a busy week at work. Wish I can say more about what we’ve been working on. If the stars align, I …

Aug 4, 2023: On a train. Heard an announcement from the Metro control center: “yadda, yadda, follow us on Twitter.” Wondering if anyone outside of tech …

Aug 3, 2023: Sat down on a park bench to reply to someone and this magpie came running up to me. Stayed for a minute then moved on after he realised I had no food …

Aug 3, 2023: A thought just occurred to me while reading this post: all the effort that goes into optimising the browser for bloated, “commercial” …

Aug 2, 2023: On Tools and Automation The thing about building tools to automate your work is that it’s hard to justify doing so when you’re in the thick of it. Easy to see all …

Aug 2, 2023: If there’s any indication of the staying power of Twitter the brand, it’s hearing podcasters continue to refer to the service as …

Aug 1, 2023: I wonder if a read-it-later service that could work for me would be one that’ll show a random article once a day on a private RSS feed. I put …

Jul 31, 2023: A couple of updates from my day at work today, in no particular order. Still working on that design task. I’m not quite done yet, but I did …

Jul 29, 2023: Attempting to design an app icon for a Chips Challenge fan game I’m working on. Going for something that looks like the fireball sprite in the …

Jul 28, 2023: Greg Morris wrote an excellent post about personal blogging that resonated with me. I know this is something that I struggle with. There are many …

Jul 27, 2023: Design task at work. Would be so sweet to junk what we have at the moment, which is a rat’s nest of dodgy code and weird behaviours, with …

Jul 27, 2023: It’s great that MacOS comes with virtual machine support out of the box for Apple Silicon Macs. Makes this sort of notarisation testing so easy …

Jul 26, 2023: Success! Managed to get a Go app built, signed, and notarised all from within a GitHub Action. It even cross-compiles to ARM, which is something …

Jul 25, 2023: For reasons that are “totally” coincidental to the news of the day, I had a quick check to see how much the domain Y would cost: Hmm, …

Jul 25, 2023: Apple, please improve the error messaging of your code signing tools. Simply saying “specified item is not found” without saying what …

Jul 25, 2023: To anyone who needs to know this: if codesign is throwing the error The specified item could not be found in the keychain, but you can see the …

Jul 23, 2023: Spent most of the weekend going down various rabbit holes to get a Go application signed and notarised as a MacOS app. I’m trying to do this in …

Jul 22, 2023: A really nice quality of life improvement you can make in Terminal.app: map Option-Backspace to ^W (Control-W, or \027) so that pressing it in the …

Jul 22, 2023: Finished reading: Anything You Want by Derek Sivers 📚 An intriguing book. I’ve never used CD Baby but I did hear of it, and it was interesting …

Jul 21, 2023: I have an Android phone so Apple Maps is a non-starter right now. But one thing that makes me consider Apple Maps is Google’s insistence of …

Jul 21, 2023: John Gruber in his article about Llama 2: Second, I’m glad to see Facebook drop their awkward “LLaMA” letter-casing style. Reminds me of when I once …

Jul 21, 2023: Closed my Plausible account and have gone all in with Tinylytics by Vincent. Not because Plausible was a bad service. Far from it. But Tinylytics …

Jul 20, 2023: Nothing kills momentum on a task with a tight deadline quite like being ask to do admin stuff like “produce an estimate”. Now you’re …

Jul 19, 2023: Found some really nice things about Netlify today. I learnt that you can write server-side functions in Go. I knew that JavaScript functions were …

Jul 18, 2023: Thinking about Manton’s post about bookmark tags reminds me of a bit of UI I built for that admin tool I worked on way back when. It was in a …

Jul 17, 2023: Lava Stream Another random hack today, but this one sort of developed over the week. It all started last Monday. I was doing an exploratory task around …

Jul 17, 2023: Oof, took me an extra hour to get into work due to train issues. At least I got a walk out of it. I feel for these poor souls, stuck on the train …

Jul 17, 2023: Amazing how time just grinds almost to a halt when you’re stuck on a train because of signal failure.

Jul 16, 2023: I met someone I used to work with at the supermarket today. I’m terrible with names, and it’s been more than a decade since I’ve …

Jul 16, 2023: Oh great, now I need to upgrade my Gradle plugin just because I want to debug my app instead of just run it. How do people make forward progress in …

Jul 16, 2023: I’m looking at getting deep links working in a Flutter app. I haven’t got anything working at the moment. In theory I do have the …

Jul 15, 2023: Going through photos of my European trip, putting descriptions on them. Also updating my journal at the same time. I wish Day One supported photo …

Jul 15, 2023: 🔗 XML is the future - Bite code! I wanted to write something about fads in the software development industry when the post about Amazon Prime Video …

Jul 15, 2023: Feature request for Micro.blog: have a way to recall a post entered into the Share Sheet when a user dismisses it. I wrote quite a lengthy post in …

Jul 14, 2023: Best number plate seen on an electric car to date: CHGME. 🔋

Jul 13, 2023: I’m liking the new source browser in GitHub. Saves a decent amount of time for things like libraries where I just want to read the source. No …

Jul 12, 2023: Had the opportunity to see our new office today. It’s fabulous. Converted factory with exposed brick work gives it a startup feel. Lots of …

Jul 11, 2023: The local Woolworths has rolled out what I believe to be E Ink price tags. I was hoping to start seeing E Ink used for things like this. The …

Jul 10, 2023: It’s a little frustrating seeing code examples that don’t explain what the example is trying to demonstrate. I found an example for an …

Jul 10, 2023: And just like that, my ChatGTP luck has run out. Asked it to generate some example code this morning, and what it produced couldn’t compile and …

Jul 9, 2023: Any day I get to spend time with Ivy and Archie is a good day.

Jul 8, 2023: 🔗 Musk feels the heat A lawsuit, the last refuge of a scoundrel. (With apologies to the Simpsons). P.S. Like the new design of Birchtree.

Jul 8, 2023: 🔗 Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit I wonder if anyone at Reddit’s C suite has ever been a moderator. That …

Jul 7, 2023: Finished reading: Do The Work! by Steven Pressfield 📚

Jul 7, 2023: One last trip-related photo: the pseudo souvenir mug I bought. It’s a “pseudo souvenir” in that I didn’t get it overseas1. I …

Jul 7, 2023: Code First, Tests After Still doing the code first, tests after at work and I’m really starting to see the benefits from it. Test driven development is fine, but most …

Jul 6, 2023: A Lisp-based Evans Wrapper I wanted an excuse to try out this Lisp-like embedded language Go library that was featured in Golang Weekly. Found one today when I was using Evans …

Jul 5, 2023: 🔗 Poor man’s team bonding: recurring Slack threads Could be a nice idea for blogs as well. Maybe for someone who’s trying to post at least once …

Jul 4, 2023: I can’t say enough good things about using Dokku for deploying and running web-apps on a Linux VPS. Compared to the competition, it’s so …

Jul 4, 2023: A load of foraging lorikeets.

Jul 3, 2023: 🔗 Who killed Google Reader? Interesting piece from the Verge about the rise and fall of Google Reader, which was killed 10 years ago. I wasn’t a …

Jul 2, 2023: Finished reading: Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield 📚 I think this is one of those books you need to read a few times to internalise it, and this was …

Jul 1, 2023: Just set up a reading goal in Micro.blog for 2023. I kinda like how a book only counts to your goal when you write a blog post about it. A good way to …

Jul 1, 2023: Finished reading: The Song of Significance by Seth Godin 📚 An enjoyable book to read, as I expected from Seth. Will need to look out for opportunities …

Jul 1, 2023: TIL you can enter a photo description in Google Photos. Select a photo, click the Info icon, and a free-text “description” field is …

Jun 30, 2023: caffeinate.me A bit of nonsense I made while fighting off jet-lag. Built using mmm.page.

Jun 28, 2023: Tip for anyone traveling to Australia via Dubai: do not buy a bottle of water to drink on the plane. Drink it before you board, otherwise it will get …

Jun 27, 2023: Last day in Switzerland, and indeed Europe. Did little aside from seeing a bit of Zürich. I enjoyed my visit, but it’s good to be heading back …

Jun 26, 2023: Nerding out at the Swiss Transport Museum, in Luzern. Super interesting! Can definitely recommend.

Jun 26, 2023: Mark one more off the bucket list: travelling through the Gotthard Base Tunnel.

Jun 25, 2023: Hired a car and spent my last full day in Italy exploring a bit of the wider Veneto region. Visited the town my grandparents grew up in and also went …

Jun 23, 2023: I know Venice is known for its canals, and they’re certainly something to behold, but this single rail tram-line blew me away. Edit: it occurred …

Jun 23, 2023: Venice in the morning.

Jun 23, 2023: Vincent’s post about Tinylytics recognising www sub-domains is a welcome one. I’ve had a domain setup for a week in Tinylytics that was recording zero …

Jun 22, 2023: Dealing with the coin laundry driers suck. You buy more time by putting more money in, but the laundry points don’t make it clear that …

Jun 21, 2023: I was wondering what to do for my second day in Bologna until something told me that Florence was less than an hour away. So I decided to take a day …

Jun 21, 2023: Spent a bit of time in the small but lovely university botanical gardens in Bologna this morning. Walking around a new city, I’ve found myself being …

Jun 19, 2023: Breakfast in Parma. Naturally parmesan cheese is on the menu.

Jun 19, 2023: Helped someone set up their eSim this morning. His phone only allowed an eSim setup by scanning a QR code, so I had to take a photo of the Airalo QR …

Jun 19, 2023: Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, in Parma, on a warm and lazy Sunday afternoon. The street was closed off for an event but most of the other …

Jun 18, 2023: On the shore of lake Como. Plenty of boat activity on the water today. For myself, I was happy to stay on dry land.

Jun 17, 2023: Oof! It looks like one of my friends I’m traveling with, the one who did all the planning and was the most enthusiastic about seeing the places …

Jun 17, 2023: View from the top of Torre Castello San Vigilto, in Bergamo.

Jun 16, 2023: On the subject of Google Maps, I think it’s time the app had something akin to tabs, so we can have multiple instances of Google Maps at one time. If …

Jun 16, 2023: TIL you can save planned journeys in Google Maps for later. You make the plan, select a suggestion from the list, and instead of starting it, you …

Jun 16, 2023: A day of site-seeing around Milan. Going through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on our way to Duomo di Milano, the cathedral. Another sunning …

Jun 15, 2023: On The Reddit Strike Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday: Reddit is miffed that …

Jun 15, 2023: Arrived in Milan. It could just be the trams, but this feels like the closest city to Melbourne that I’ve visited so far. Of course, Melbourne doesn’t …

Jun 14, 2023: This safe uses a curious choice of font for the keypad. I’d guess they wanted to go with something more interesting than boring Helvetica? But …

Jun 14, 2023: Currently reading: The Song of Significance by Seth Godin 📚

Jun 13, 2023: Genova’s got this fun little lift near where I’m staying. It travels along rails to the end of the corridor, then goes around the bend to …

Jun 13, 2023: Walking part of the Cinque Terre trail today. It was hard work — lots of steep runs of stairs going up and down — but it was great to be able to get …

Jun 12, 2023: Truthful Travel Talk It’s time to be honest: I think overseas travel is wasted on me. We were driving down from Antibes to Genova today. It was a nice trip, complete with …

Jun 10, 2023: Brief stop at Saintes Maries de la Mer today to look for some wild flamingoes. It was just a chance encounter that we found this small flock of them.

Jun 9, 2023: Paging Alanis Morissette

Jun 9, 2023: Gare Aix en Provence, and the first railway line in France I’ve seen that is not electrified.

Jun 8, 2023: Visiting the Dalí Theatre and Museum, in Figueres this afternoon. I’ve seen Dalí work before but I knew nothing about him before this visit. …

Jun 7, 2023: I’ve fallen behind on the tech news, but I’ll briefly say that after hearing Ben Thompson talk about Apple’s Vision Pro, it’s …

Jun 7, 2023: Mercado de La Boqueria, and the location of our Covid-safe celebration lunch for my friend’s recent marriage.

Jun 6, 2023: Visited Sagrada Família this afternoon. Absolutely stunning cathedral. Photos don’t do it justice, especially from cameras with dirty lenses (sorry …

Jun 5, 2023: I resisted for so long, but today I relented: I installed a Meta app on my phone (Whatsapp, which is probably the better ones of the bunch).

Jun 5, 2023: We were planning to meet friends for a wedding lunch here in Barcelona tomorrow. It was organised months in advanced, but they had to cancel it …

Jun 5, 2023: Making this my first photo of Barcelonia: the lift in our hotel has two doors at 90° of each other. First instance of seeing this.

Jun 4, 2023: Product developers of Android Auto: make it easy for someone to operate the phone as a navigator. Having someone use the phone to type in map searches …

Jun 3, 2023: Morning walk along a wooded trail just outside Elorrio. Perfect for recharging my social batteries after last night’s wedding reception.

Jun 2, 2023: Elorrio, and the day of my friends wedding. It’s been a few years in the making, due to the pandemic, but the day has arrived.

Jun 2, 2023: It never ceases to amaze me how large the seagulls are in Europe and the UK. So much larger than the ones back home.

May 31, 2023: Now we’re really checking items off my bucket list. TGV from Paris Montpanasse to Hendaye, on the French/Spanish border. Speed topped at 312 km/h on …

May 30, 2023: Did a very broad siteseeing tour of Paris today. Mixture of Metro and walking: we walked 26.17 km. Looked at many of the popular landmarks (not all of …

May 29, 2023: Where Have I Been Inspired by Manton and Maique, I thought I’d document the places I’ve visited as well. I’d had to refer to this list a few times in the past so having …

May 29, 2023: A Parisian street, and the last few hundred metres of my journey.

May 28, 2023: At Dubai International Airport, buying $12 coffee and looking for departure boards, which are few and far between.

May 27, 2023: Oof. Hours away from departure and I almost forgot to organise travel insurance. Probably need to write up a checklist for future trips. Remarkable …

May 26, 2023: At the cafe this morning. The ledge of this cabinet is the perfect height for dogs to do this. I always enjoy seeing it.

May 25, 2023: It’s easy to forget that the Mac is capable of making pretty decent screencasts with just QuickTime Player. I’m using it right now to …

May 24, 2023: For anyone else that’s interested, the Pixel 6 Pro supports dual SIM, with one of them being an eSIM. Useful information for anyone wanting to …

May 23, 2023: One of those days where something’s broken and you’re looking into it, but you can’t because a thing you rely on is also broken and …

May 23, 2023: I’m trying to be better at finding solutions to problems rather than just complain about them here. Just this morning I was going to complain …

May 21, 2023: I’ve been working on Micropub Checkins over the last week. It’s been a bit of a rush trying to get it into a usable state for an upcoming …

May 21, 2023: Turns out the reason behind my failed attempts at connecting to the VPN I was setting up yesterday was because another VPN running at the time was …

May 21, 2023: It’s wet and cold outside, and I’m currently sitting in cafe that’s got Christmas Carols playing for some reason. Interesting start for a Sunday.

May 20, 2023: For anyone looking to waste a morning, may I suggest trying to set up and debug a VPN. Always super fun spending two hours on it and having nothing to …

May 20, 2023: Only caught the last 15 minutes of the Micro.camp keynote with Om Malik. Looking forward to watching the whole thing on YouTube. It’s also nice to …

May 19, 2023: I think it’s time for the Go maintainers to add a UUID type to the Go standard library. Not so much for generating or parsing UUIDs — all the …

May 19, 2023: Keeping a separate blog for journaling personal project work is becoming a bit of a hinderance. There’s always this uncertainty of where a post …

May 18, 2023: Full Width Notes In Obsidian More custom styling of Obsidian today. This snippet turns off fixed-width display of notes, so that they can span the entire window. Useful if …

May 18, 2023: I’ve become so cynical of online service that I’ve been finding myself going to the pricing page whenever I’m evaluating something …

May 18, 2023: Did some Flutter development last night. Dart is such a weird language. Usually it’s really boring, maybe even too boring. But then you …

May 17, 2023: I don’t do a lot of front-end JavaScript development. When I do, I tend to go towards something super lightweight like Stimulus or try to avoid …

May 17, 2023: It kills me that Stripe offers six test cards that simulate errors when attaching to a customer, yet only one test card that simulates payment …

May 16, 2023: I got a little bored today so I added task progress indicators to this Obsidian roadmap thing I built for work. What the task progress indicators look …

May 16, 2023: Trying to track down a bug this afternoon. Manage to reproduce it on my first attempt, which was great, until I tried again and was unable to induce …

May 16, 2023: 🔗 Double-screen ‘free’ TV will show you ads, even when not in use - Ars Technica What would you be willing to do for a free TV? If the answer is hand …

May 15, 2023: I’m finding it my Obsidian-based squad roadmap automations useful so I spent a little time on it this morning. I wanted the Jira status in the …

May 13, 2023: Back working on Micropub Checkin. Re-engineered the home page to now include a list of what would eventually be check-ins — both historical and soon …

May 13, 2023: This is your now monthly post about how I continue to be blown away by ChatGPT. I’ve been asking it questions all morning about how best to do …

May 13, 2023: Does this loading window really need to be modal?

May 13, 2023: Watched the Australian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest 2023: Promise, by Voyager. It’s good. It’s very good! Certainly the type of …

May 12, 2023: The Nexus 7: The Good Android Tablet Telling that this article about the Nexus 7 came out during Google I/O this year. The Nexus 7 was as close as Google (or, arguably, anyone) ever got …

May 12, 2023: Enjoying the Bike app, by Hog Bay Software. Good for those times when you need a bit of structure in what you’re working on, but not too much …

May 11, 2023: Also rediscovered Fleetwood Mac, after a long pause since hearing it when I was a kid. Seems “Dreams” is the more popular one (I keep …

May 11, 2023: Rediscovered Nigel Westlake’s Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra. First heard it in Year 11 Music, when we had to study the score. …

May 10, 2023: I’ve been finding myself doing less test driven development recently. I use to be… well, not “religious” about it, but it was …

May 10, 2023: Kinda wish Go adopted the idea of explicitly nil types, similar to Kotlin or Swift. It’ll make the language less minimal, but the cost of …

May 9, 2023: F5 To Run While going through my archive about a month ago, I found all my old Basic programs I wrote when I was going through school. I had a lot of fun …

May 9, 2023: It’s a cool day today, yet the bus driver decides to put on the air conditioning like it’s the middle of summer. Feels like I’m …

May 9, 2023: I had no idea that Google I/O was on this week. Usually this kicks off my conference watching season, but with my upcoming trip, it’s taken a …

May 9, 2023: I’ve been trying to get a site up on Netlify that can serve assets from Git LFS. The only way to enable this is with the CLI tool, and whenever …

May 8, 2023: Had a bit of success with organising the roadmap for the squad I’m running. I decided to see if good old Obsidian could help me here. I just needed …

May 6, 2023: It’s quite something seeing developers using Go to build (toy) operating systems. As much as I like Go, I wouldn’t call it something designed for such …

May 5, 2023: The state of modern office software is depressing. I want to have something tailored for tracking the roadmap for my squad: current priorities, …

May 4, 2023: Oof, someone save me. I just realised that my flight to Europe would’ve got me a day earlier than my hotel booking. Thankfully I manage to move …

May 4, 2023: In-Band vs. Out-Of-Band Error Codes In gRPC Is the NOT_FOUND response codes in gRPC an actual error, or could one use it to indicate a resource doesn’t exist — and it doesn’t matter …

May 4, 2023: 📺 Sophie Koonin – This Website Is under Construction, a Love Letter to the Personal Website Saw this boosted on social.lol. A really good talk on why …

May 4, 2023: Twitter, Public Alerts, And Federated Protocols So apparently Twitter’s leadership team has discovered the value it has for public alerts: Of all the changes Elon Musk has made to Twitter, …

May 3, 2023: I just got news today that work has decided to move office. Somewhere with much better public transport links (i.e. a tram line). As someone …

May 3, 2023: Seen a few posts on Micro.blog over the last few days about people sleeping badly. Might be that those posts are contagious because today it’s …

May 2, 2023: I’ve found myself using ChatGPT to do quite mundane things recently, like get the postcodes of cities around the world. It feels like I’m …

May 1, 2023: Much of the personal stuff I’m currently doing outside of work involves writing. Lots of writing. So much writing. It’s not like a novel …

Apr 30, 2023: Hmm, either Daniel is super obsessed with the Beths (or at least posting about it), or there’s a bug somewhere. 😀

Apr 30, 2023: Content Warning: About A Spider This spider was hanging around my garage door opening button for a few weeks now. I didn’t think much of it until today, when I noticed that it …

Apr 29, 2023: I’m going to be putting on my “I don’t like fun” hat for a minute and say I’m so glad there’s no “verb” for posting on Micro.blog. No tweeting, …

Apr 28, 2023: I’ve abandoned any further thought of self hosting my code, at least for now. As predicted, I found other shiny things to distract me away from …

Apr 28, 2023: I’ve set up an instance of Linkding within PikaPods this afternoon. I’m going try it out as my bookmark manager, given that my Pinboard …

Apr 27, 2023: Dentist today. The only mistake I made with arranging the appointment is booking it for today. Seeing the dentist doesn’t feel like a Thursday …

Apr 27, 2023: 🔗 Cheating Is All You Need New post by Steve Yegge. I always enjoy his writing but please, can someone buy Steve a domain name? He changes blogging …

Apr 26, 2023: 🔗 CSS Wish List 2023 I’ve wanted attr() to be more widely accepted in CSS values since, well, I can’t remember. A long time. I want to be able to do …

Apr 25, 2023: April usually means controlled burns, and they’re conducting these burns at a bush reserve near my place. I was afraid that the smoke would be …

Apr 24, 2023: About Those Checkmarks This posts going to be about Twitter. Yes, I know; another one out there. It’s also going to be a bit speculative in nature, so feel free to …

Apr 23, 2023: Note to self: a shell script will always be quicker and easier to write than a Go program for a throwaway thing, no matter how much you wished it to …

Apr 22, 2023: Day One and Project Jurassic So, Day One is in danger of being sherlocked by rumor’s of Apple’s upcoming journaling app: Mayne echoes the sentiment of several app developers who …

Apr 22, 2023: Nerd Counterflex You know that Washington Post article that has the list of websites Google used to train Bard? I been seeing people post screenshots of their sites in …

Apr 21, 2023: Options For Self-Hosting Code Repositories I’m considering something that some might say is stupid: I’m looking at options for self-hosting my personal code repositories. I’m …

Apr 21, 2023: It’s always fun playing the “which faraway land is closer to me” geography puzzle when setting up an online services that …

Apr 21, 2023: Dear The Economist, Please restore the witty headlines you use for your articles to the digital edition. That’s one of the reasons why I read you. I …

Apr 20, 2023: Sunny day today, yet a bit chilly. So the hat and jacket ensemble is out at the moment.

Apr 20, 2023: Adding a new feature to dynamo-browse and now I’m beginning to wonder if this is why JavaScript has both a null and undefined type. In short: dealing …

Apr 19, 2023: Got to use one of the software tools we build and sell at work for a “real” purpose today, as in not just to test something. Felt good. …

Apr 19, 2023: Maybe, before AI swallows our careers to the point where we’re little more than glorified prompt engineers, they’ll be a brief period of …

Apr 19, 2023: 🎵 Going Home: Theme from Local Hero This week’s ear-worm. Apparently I loved this track when I was a little kid. Well, apart from the very …

Apr 18, 2023: This teeny tiny lizard made its way into my house somehow. I’ve seen it on and off over the last week, but I managed to catch it and put it …

Apr 18, 2023: 🔗 The Windows 11 Trash Party There is no way to turn this news feed off. The best you can do is “manage interests” which kicks you out to …

Apr 17, 2023: I’d argue that Google Reader shutting down was probably one of the best things that could happen to RSS. It might’ve been bad at the time, but …

Apr 17, 2023: My Pinboard subscription has expired today. I don’t think I’ll be renewing it. Might be time to look for another way to manage my …

Apr 17, 2023: I think GitLab wasted their effort building their “queued” MR comment feature, in which comments added to code lines are not seen by the …

Apr 16, 2023: Wow, some serious work’s happening on the overhead wires of the train line. Looks like they’re replacing these old stanchions. I guess …

Apr 16, 2023: Building F5 To Run At the risk of talking about something that I’ve only just started, I’d thought today I write about what I’m working on right now. …

Apr 15, 2023: Tending to the archive of all my old projects, documents, music, etc. that have survived the many machine transfers over the years. It wasn’t …

Apr 15, 2023: Finally got my Twitter archive and uploaded it to Micro.blog (thanks @manton for the awesome feature). Happy that I’ve got an archive of them …

Apr 14, 2023: I realise now the problem I have with Twitter’s request archive settings pane. It’s prompting for a password when I open the pane, not …

Apr 14, 2023: Made some improvements to my Keyboard Maestro macro which converts selected text from camel case to upper-snake case. Made a small fix to deal with …

Apr 13, 2023: If Musk wants to save money on SMS OTPs, then he can increase the authentication timeout on Twitter’s setting page. I’ve been challenged …

Apr 13, 2023: 📺 Sash! - Adelante (Official Video) No, you stop scouring the web for a music video from your childhood and get back to work! 😀

Apr 12, 2023: Okay, I think I got all my transportation booked for Europe. Three train journeys, and one hire car. Plus all the other transport booked already. Only …

Apr 12, 2023: Argh! My kingdom for a document scanner that has power, a network connection, a functional UI, and that works without needing some terrible app. …

Apr 10, 2023: 🔗 You, Me, and UI Really enjoying these series of articles from The Verge about UI and UX design. Lots of facinating subjects there. Oh, I also …

Apr 9, 2023: 🔗 Children’s author Paul Jennings reflects on childhood, success and his writing process I’ve was a huge fan of Paul Jennings work when I was a …

Apr 8, 2023: Lake Burley Griffin, taken on a bike ride from Tuggeranong.

Apr 8, 2023: It’s a shame that NetNewsWire and Feedbin have lost access to Twitter’s API. But, much like Google shutting down products, it provides a useful …

Apr 7, 2023: Caught up with my sister, and her two cockatiels this afternoon. Nice to visit them again.

Apr 6, 2023: Greetings from Violet Town, 2 hours into a 6.5 hour trip to Canberra.

Apr 4, 2023: I heard that Apple Classical had movie soundtracks so I installed it on my iPad to see if they had the lost album I’ve been looking for. Sadly, …

Apr 4, 2023: Here’s a free idea for a mindless action movie. A middle-aged, middle-class, run-of-the-mill guy is walking down a suburban street when he spots …

Apr 3, 2023: Overhead someone say, in not so many words, that my UI design for something was sub-par. 😔 Sad, but can’t deny that it’s true to a degree. …

Apr 3, 2023: Used ChatGPT a record number of times today (5). Asked a lot of questions about Stripe, like what happens to invoices when a subscription is …

Apr 2, 2023: Listening to ATP #528 follow-up about putting ChatGPT in front of Siri. It occurred to me that doing so will completely defeat the purpose of Siri …

Apr 2, 2023: Updates To Dynamo-Browse In the off-chance that anyone other than me is reading this, it’s likely that there will be no update next week due to the Easter weekend. It …

Apr 2, 2023: What would be a nice addition to the spell-check suggestions menu is a brief (3-5 words) definition of the word. I always find myself choosing the …

Apr 2, 2023: When I first saw John Gruber’s post post about Wavelength, I immediately dismissed it as yet another app I couldn’t use, forgetting that I …

Apr 2, 2023: Currently reading: The Brand You 50 (Reinventing Work) by Tom Peters 📚 When three different bloggers you follow all write about the author retiring, …

Apr 1, 2023: First Posts Of The Day It’s bit strange how the first post of the day can always feel like the hardest to get out. Every one after it is so much easier to write. I …

Mar 31, 2023: Completely forgot how to commute properly. This is the second day this week I forget to bring my umbrella on a day with forecasted rain. I got lucky …

Mar 30, 2023: Ugh! Mountains of work to do and only a week to do it all. Gonna be a bird-by-bird sort of day today. But first… coffee (well, coffee number two …

Mar 29, 2023: Left work late and now caught in a train suspension due to an accident (someone got hit by a train). So… dining out this evening.

Mar 29, 2023: Learnt a lot about digital video today. Fascinating stuff. Didn’t realise that frame rates can be non-integers (59.xx FPS). Turns out it’s …

Mar 29, 2023: There are nice things about having separate IDEs for different languages — GoLand for Go, WebStorm for HTML+JS, etc. — but I can see the advantages of …

Mar 29, 2023: Love hearing from successful bloggers who’ve recently celebrated a major milestone (Manton, Ben Thompson, Kottke) that they thought that they …

Mar 28, 2023: Got a small envelope with a US stamp delivered today. No idea what it was. Certainly wasn’t expecting anything. (opens it up) Ah, my …

Mar 28, 2023: 🔗 Google is killing most of Fitbit’s social features today An amusing thought came to me while I read this: Google has an opportunity to play to it’s …

Mar 27, 2023: The Android Obsidian app has been playing up recently. Sometimes when I try to make a new note, I loose the ability to add new lines. I have no idea …

Mar 26, 2023: Bocce at Carlton Gardens this afternoon. We probably played our fastest game of speed bocce today, clocking in at 13 minutes. Second fastest was 14 …

Mar 26, 2023: Updating Bocce Scorecard I didn’t get to a lot of side-project work this week, but I did have to make a large change to a project we use to track scores for our …

Mar 25, 2023: Doing some changes for a hobby software project I’ve made for a few friends. The whole “software is never finished” can be a drag …

Mar 24, 2023: Doing some web UI development at work. It’s actually kind of nice doing complex UI work again: fussing about colour and layout, playing with …

Mar 23, 2023: For anyone else that needs to know, if you need to look at the API docs for Deno, you’d want to go to Docs → API. Don’t go to Modules → …

Mar 23, 2023: Now that in-person events are happening again, tech meetups are beginning to cross my radar once more; and so too is the tension between feeling I …

Mar 22, 2023: 🔗 The Command Line Is the GUI’s Future It has always been a truism that what we have gained in ease of use by switching from the command line to …

Mar 21, 2023: Having an AI write code for you is less interesting than having an AI that ingests all the code across an entire organisation, then allows you to …

Mar 21, 2023: In today’s look at the Spam folder: some emails from Amazon’s Alexa Dev. Rel. team. Given all the recent layoffs in that division, …

Mar 20, 2023: Reheating Chicken Schnitzel in a Microwave Some tips for heating up chicken schnitzel that you had for dinner in a 1.1 kW microwave for lunch the next day. This is something I occasionally do, …

Mar 20, 2023: Doing something different1 at work this morning. I’d figured that instead of working on tickets or doing team-lead stuff, I’ll hit my head …

Mar 20, 2023: Getting some pretty strange spam emails sent to my Gmail address (which I still use). It’s the same badly formatted multi-MIME message body with …

Mar 19, 2023: Updates To Dynamo-Browse And CCLM I started this week fearing that I’d have very little to write today. I actually organised some time off over the weekend where I wouldn’t …

Mar 19, 2023: A better peacock photo (well, just).

Mar 18, 2023: One of the photos I was going to use in my last post was this photo, which was modified using Google’s Magic Eraser. You can compare this with the …

Mar 18, 2023: Photos Of Churchill Island Yesterday, my parents and I went to Churchill Island for afternoon tea and a walk around the homestead. Here are a few photos of that outing. …

Mar 17, 2023: Rode an eBike for the first time today. Can definitely recommend. Even with the assist engaged at the lowest level, it made a huge difference going up …

Mar 17, 2023: Greetings from Cowes, Phillip Island.

Mar 16, 2023: The amusing thing about the Go gopher mascot is that you’ll find it in various projects that are implemented in Go but have nothing to do with …

Mar 15, 2023: My first experience with a distributed SCM systems was Mercurial. Running hg branch created a new branch and automatically switched you over to it. …

Mar 14, 2023: Using tools I’ve built to help me at work and all I see are features not implemented. Never-mind that the tool didn’t even exist a year …

Mar 13, 2023: It’s amazing what a difference going to the gym can make. This afternoon I was feeling so lethargic, like all I wanted to do was crawl into bed. …

Mar 12, 2023: Photos of Fitzroy Gardens, while we play our bocce comp. grand final. Perfect weather for it. Also lots of weddings going on.

Mar 12, 2023: Dev Log - 2023-03-12 Preamble When I moved Working Set over to Micro.blog, I’d thought I’d be constantly writing micro-posts about what I’m working on, …

Mar 11, 2023: It took me a while to get use to it but I’ve grown to like The Verge homepage redesign. Having the micro-posts there seems to work well, especially …

Mar 11, 2023: I know UI designers like using either Sketch or Figma — and after signing up to Figma this week, I can see why. But I’m going to give a …

Mar 11, 2023: Do sites that just load their articles with (video) ads, pop-overs, requests for emails, etc. see any improvements in their metrics after doing this …

Mar 10, 2023: 🔗 After 6 long months, an Android phone finally cloned the iPhone 14 The screen-shots of this “mini capsule” are hillarous. The animated waves that …

Mar 9, 2023: Hiding Your Attachment Folder In Obsidian's Outline A useful little CSS snippet for anyone using Obsidian that wants to hide their attachment folder from their outline. …

Mar 9, 2023: Working with some GitHub access tokens last night left me wondering why there’s no way to just renew an expired token. Dealing with the secret is not …

Mar 8, 2023: Completed the release of Dynamo-Browse 0.2.0. Most of the work in the last week was updating the manual, especially the scripting API. Some more …

Mar 8, 2023: It’s 2023 now, and I still hate code reviews.

Mar 7, 2023: Seeing Mastodon posts from Jason Snell about his trip to Aotearoa New Zealand prompted me to check when I travelled to Queenstown for a holiday. It …

Mar 7, 2023: Follow-up from my earlier post about ChatGTP this morning, it turns out I probably should’ve RTFM: Thanks to @andreab@social.lol for the tip.

Mar 7, 2023: Oh, AWS. Once again your brilliant UX design chops shine through in the products you release. I always wondered why copying an API keys from an SSO …

Mar 7, 2023: Remember in Gödel, Escher, Bach when they were saying that a (then) theoretical AI is less like a calculator and more akin to the human mind; and just …

Mar 6, 2023: I wish more app developers built websites for their apps. There are many benefits in doing so. It’ll allow others to see what the app does …

Mar 6, 2023: Evidence that I didn’t sleep well last night: for a split second I thought this was actually a note I made. I even remarked as to how neat I …

Mar 5, 2023: A lot of track work going on this weekend. I enjoy seeing these trucks that can go both on roads and rails. You don’t want to be waiting for …

Mar 4, 2023: Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for …

Mar 4, 2023: To Wordpress Or Not To Wordpress I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. I’ve been asked to setup a new website for someone who wants to stand up a new business. In therory this is …

Mar 4, 2023: Ok, I now understand why everyone is going on about the Wordpress block editor. I’ve installed Wordpress this morning to play around with it in …

Mar 3, 2023: Here’s something I’d never would have imagined: Jaycar does same day delivery. I experienced this once before but I dismissed it as just a …

Mar 3, 2023: It sometimes sucks being a listener of Apple tech podcasts when you’ve got an Android phone. I love the shows where an indie dev talks about an …

Mar 2, 2023: Foldables and rollables are so 2022. Where are the scrunchables? When I’m done with my phone, I want to be able to scrunch it up into a little …

Mar 2, 2023: I was listening to an episode of Sharp Tech the other day. When the conversation moved on to AI and Ben Thompson’s experience with Sydney, an …

Mar 1, 2023: For anyone working with YAML Cloud Formation, if you were to see this error message: E0001 Error transforming template: 'NoneType' object has no …

Mar 1, 2023: Quotes Around Names In Error Messages I saw this error a few minutes ago: failed to process input: RUNTIME ERROR: function has no parameter stack This threw me for a minute as I was trying …

Mar 1, 2023: Interesting feeling I had just now. I was drafting a reply in Micro.blog which I chose not to post. And yet, it feels like I’ve posted it. …

Feb 28, 2023: A park I frequently go to once had a non-directional beacon transmitter built there. Being somewhat interested in things like this, I always enjoyed …

Feb 27, 2023: Web Search Works With Blogs Too Here’s one more reason to write (or syndicate) to your blog instead of post directly to social media: you can use web search engines to find …

Feb 26, 2023: Some acorns fell to the ground while I was passing under an oak tree this afternoon. I looked up and saw a few female king parrot perched there, …

Feb 26, 2023: TIL that long-clicking some toolbar icons in desktop Safari will bring up a menu. I would’ve though a right-mouse click would suffice for that, …

Feb 26, 2023: Setting up Yarn on a new machine to manage some JS packages. As usual, everything about how the tool works is completely different from the last time …

Feb 25, 2023: Close encounter with a kookaburra. Taken a few days ago while on a walk.

Feb 25, 2023: I don’t understand people — adults who are by themselves — who go to a cafe just to watch something on their phone with the load speaker. A bit …

Feb 25, 2023: Reading something about workplace memos this morning got me thinking: are workplace memos still a thing? As in printed memos pinned onto bulletin …

Feb 24, 2023: Looking at the core gRPC status codes this morning. There are 17 status codes in all, and most of them — like NOT_FOUND or PERMISSION_DENIED — are …

Feb 23, 2023: Looking through my drafts last night to see if I could use one of them for my daily post. Found one that I wished I actually published at the time. …

Feb 22, 2023: Spent some time closing off the Dynamo-Browse shortlist. I think I’ve got most of the big ticket items addressed. Here’s a brief update on …

Feb 21, 2023: With all the designs I’ve made for systems using the Stripe API that blew up in my face because of some undocumented edge-case, you …

Feb 21, 2023: It’s Tuesday, I don’t shutdown my laptop during the week, and I only just now launched a terminal and IDE. Guess how much programming I …

Feb 20, 2023: Whenever I read something about tech or music, a voice in my head starts saying things like I can do that, I can’t do that, I could’ve …

Feb 19, 2023: Less Consuming, More Creating Mike Crittenden posted a good quote from a random Hacker News commenter: Less consuming, more creating. Doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter if …

Feb 18, 2023: Ballarat Beer Festival 2023 My friends and I returned to Ballarat today for the Beer Festival. It was another stunning day for it: sunny, mild, not too hot. Much like last year I …

Feb 17, 2023: Very hot today. Mercury hovering just under 40°C, with every chance that it may get hotter than that. But you know what? I rather it be hot today than …

Feb 16, 2023: 🔗 From Bing To Sydney Hmm, it’s hard not feeling a little unsettled after reading this Stratechery post. One thing’s for sure, I’m a …

Feb 16, 2023: Anyone making a software tool that converts times between time-zones, please let me enter the time-zone as an offset from UTC. Something that only …

Feb 15, 2023: Ignoring Bard to Speak to Paulie So this happened today. Our team was testing the integration between two systems. The first system — let’s call it Bard — can be configured to …

Feb 14, 2023: 🔗 ChatGPT clearly has a place I tried ChatGPT for the first time this morning. I needed a shell script which will downscale a bunch of JPEG images in …

Feb 13, 2023: Flights and accomodation for the Europe trip booked. It’s been hanging around my to-do list for the last two months. Good to finally check that …

Feb 13, 2023: I suspect, in a world where companies are replacing staff with AIs, that the organisations that choose to keep the humans on will have the competitive …

Feb 12, 2023: New Stuff Setup Weekend A bunch of new stuff I’ve bought has arrived recently and this is the weekend I finally get around to setting it up. New Furniture The largest …

Feb 12, 2023: Spotify Video Follow-up Some follow-up from my post about Spotify videos. I looked into this a little and from what I understand they’re not full videos but …

Feb 11, 2023: I just realised there’s a downside to cross-posting my Micro.blog posts to Mastodon: I can’t use hashtags ironically anymore. Not that I’m in the …

Feb 11, 2023: Computers may have bested humans in Go but we still hold the advantage when it comes to Go. 😉 (Although for how much longer is still an open question)

Feb 10, 2023: Toying with the idea of cancelling my Spotify subscription. There are a number of reasons for this, but one that really gets to me is the insistent …

Feb 10, 2023: Trying out Keyboard Maestro to automate some niggly things I occasionally need to do. Got my first macro working, which converts a selected string …

Feb 9, 2023: I don’t know what I need to do to get Swift Packages working. It never seems to work for me. The option to add dependencies are in the menu, but …

Feb 9, 2023: Read my last post during lunch to see how well it read. Couldn’t get past the third paragraph without thinking: wow, this is really boring. …

Feb 9, 2023: On Higher Order Functions In Go It’s a bit surprising that higher-order functions like map and filter have not caught on in Go. They seemed to have caught on quickly when they …

Feb 8, 2023: Spent the last week updating my travel blog a bit. Started writing about the the trips around the south pacific I took for work almost 10 years ago. …

Feb 8, 2023: A watched kettle never boils, and a watched clock will not get the train arriving sooner (sadly).

Feb 7, 2023: Making A Long Form Posts Category In Micro.blog I use the Categories feature of Micro.blog to organise the types of posts I make on this site. One of the categories I have on this blog is called …

Feb 6, 2023: I, Developer There was a bit of a discussion on Mastodon and various blogs about how best to call someone who writes code for fun or profit. I’ll spare you …

Feb 6, 2023: Pro tip: don’t have a sprint planning meeting with the hiccups. I’ve tried it today and it’s just didn’t work out.

Feb 5, 2023: Out walking my usual Sunday arvo. route. Perfect conditions for it as well.

Feb 5, 2023: Mahjong Score Card Device I’ve recently started playing Mahjong with my family. We’ve learnt how to play a couple of years ago and grown to like it a great deal. …

Feb 4, 2023: Tried doing some electronics this morning. Not much to show for it apart from some reading, designing, and driving to Jaycar to grab some components. …

Feb 3, 2023: OS/2 Dreaming I’ve been thinking of OS/2 recently. Yes, the ill fated OS that IBM built with Microsoft. Re-reading the Ars Technica write-up of it and …

Feb 2, 2023: Follow-up to my last post: you can turn off committing after conflict resolution in GoLand by clicking “Modify options” in the Merge …

Feb 2, 2023: I don’t understand code editors that think they know when to commit changes “better” than I do. GoLand is guilty of this. I just …

Feb 2, 2023: This hollow is hot property at the moment. It was occupied by a couple of kookaburra chicks about a month ago. They’ve since flown the nest. Now …

Feb 1, 2023: It kills me that Pinboard doesn’t automatically set the title of a bookmark if you add one without it. So easy to fetch the page and get it from …

Feb 1, 2023: Premature abstraction is the root of unnecessary rework.

Feb 1, 2023: Might just have to accept that the way I manage links to posts of interest is not perfect. There might be some room for improvement — something that …

Jan 31, 2023: A reminder to myself that the only way to get a blog post out there that you’re happy with is get a blog post out there that you’re not …

Jan 31, 2023: A Rambling Thought About The App-Only Social Networks Re-reading this post got me wondering how much traction Hive and Post are getting from the Twitter exodus. I am aware that Hive had to deal with a …

Jan 30, 2023: It’s been a rare (but not unprecedented) three coffee and one caffeinated tea kind of morning today. 😴

Jan 29, 2023: The cafe I go to has started playing music where I sit. I find music at a cafe distracting, mainly because I find myself paying attention to the music …

Jan 28, 2023: I never considered myself someone who believed that Go must’ve had generics from the start. I appreciated that the designers added them to the …

Jan 28, 2023: 🔗 The Magic of Small Databases I kinda want this but for internal databases. There’ve been several times at work where I’ve had to collect …

Jan 27, 2023: Saw the following quote while reading this article: You could fill a book with all I know, but with all I don’t know, you could fill a library. — …

Jan 26, 2023: It’s 2023 now and podcasts are still saying that I should Google so-and-so to see an article they’re citing, instead of just putting a …

Jan 25, 2023: On a train now peeking at someone’s laptop. His desktop is completely covered in document icons. And I mean completely, as in there’s no …

Jan 25, 2023: Busses should use the tram lines more. I remember being taught that if a bus was driving on a tram line, it must be treated like a tram. This gives …

Jan 25, 2023: Passing by the Vegemite factory on the way to work. You usually get a whiff of its signature smell when you walk by, but today it was particularly …

Jan 24, 2023: Ah, my Smart Response XE developer kit has arrived. Time for a new project.

Jan 24, 2023: Achievement unlocked: first spam email offering to identify and fix vulnerabilities in one of my GitHub projects (it’s open source: if there are …

Jan 23, 2023: I hate the term “business logic.” Is there a better noun-phrase for things the software is meant to do that doesn’t sound …

Jan 23, 2023: Currently reading: Temeraire by Naomi Novik 📚 About half way through the first chapter but already very captivating. Started strong right out of the …

Jan 22, 2023: On the subject of birds, I was looking at my status.lol statuses this morning. There are only a handful on there but I saw these two and it made me …

Jan 22, 2023: Putting up a new print today. Original is by a local artist, although I didn’t get their name.

Jan 22, 2023: This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I cannot stand the MacOS development experience. I wanted to start a new project, a MacOS SwiftUI …

Jan 21, 2023: My 2023 Word I think I’ve settled on my 2023 word of the year: generous. Specifically (although not exclusively) generous in the projects I work on. …

Jan 21, 2023: Looking at the “backlog” of things to work on for Dynamo-Browse before I set it aside. I’ll fix a few bugs and add a few small …

Jan 20, 2023: I think I’ll take a little break from Dynamo-Browse. There’s a list of small features that are on my TODO list. I might do one or two of …

Jan 20, 2023: Updates To My Online Presence Making some changes to my online presence. The first is moving my knowledge base site from a set of HTML pages generated from a bespoke tool to one …

Jan 20, 2023: Discovered that the cafe I go to offers raisin toast. It’s too early for hot cross buns but the last couple of days have been relatively cool …

Jan 20, 2023: Might be time for a new, larger monitor. The one I’m using now, a 12 year old Samsung SyncMaster P2250, has worked well for me (apart from …

Jan 19, 2023: I’m cautiously optimistic that upgrading my iPad to iPadOS 16.2 has fixed the keyboard issue I’ve been experiencing. It’s been two days and I haven’t …

Jan 18, 2023: 🎙 Really Specific Stories: John Siracusa As an avid fan of all of John’s podcasts, I’ve been looking forward to this episode of Really …

Jan 18, 2023: I wonder if finding anything related to Kubernetes sidecars, cluster configuration, or tools boring or unnecessary is a career limiting move. Update: …

Jan 17, 2023: Feature for web-browsers: a keyboard shortcut to go to the last tab that had input focus. Would be useful when you find yourself switching through …

Jan 17, 2023: Spent 15 minutes going through newsletters looking for a Go package I wanted to use. I really need a proper system to track these package of interest. …

Jan 16, 2023: This Coulda Been A Podcast Started listening to a “podcast” published as a YouTube video. I don’t like that this is how people choose to publish their shows. I …

Jan 16, 2023: 🔗 The Shit Show What gets me about Twitter killing access to third-party clients is the lack of comms to the developers. No shutdown timeline. No …

Jan 15, 2023: I also saw an interesting water-bird this morning. Don’t know what species it is. Looks a bit like a Pied Cormorant but the colour around the …

Jan 15, 2023: While walking this afternoon, I met a small flock of gang-gang cockatoos. A gang-gang gang if you will. And yes, I have been sitting on that line for …

Jan 15, 2023: Hand-made, Home-cooked “Here, buy this sandwich. It’s hand-made. “Well, it’s machine made. But hands made the machines. “Well, hands made the …

Jan 14, 2023: I’ve turned off cross-posting to my work journal in Micro.blog. I think it will help me write a little freely there. I just cannot shake the …

Jan 14, 2023: Finally bit the bullet and got scripting working in Dynamo-Browse. It’s officially in the tool, at least in the latest development version. …

Jan 14, 2023: Oof, I really feel for those third party developers responsible for Twitter clients. It’s not their fault that Twitter’s API is down, but it sucks …

Jan 13, 2023: Also, if you like Oxygene Pt. 4 rearrangements, here’s one I made several years ago. Not as faithful to the original as the one linked to in the …

Jan 13, 2023: 🔗 Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code A pretty good recreation of Oxygene Pt. 4. Also, I’ll have to explore this …

Jan 12, 2023: Hustle Writing There was one other thing that was a bit distasteful about those posts on how you can further your career by being a technical writer, and it had to …

Jan 12, 2023: I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole today reading posts about how you can get ahead in your technical career by writing online. A lot of …

Jan 12, 2023: Froth and Bubble Woke up in the early morning with this poem in my head: In this world of froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone; Kindness in other …

Jan 11, 2023: I don’t know what’s causing the ongoing issue with my iPad keyboard folio. Sometimes I can resolve it by fixing the alignment of the pogo pins, so it …

Jan 10, 2023: Every time I scroll through the history in a Slack channel, I get the notice suggesting that I use search. But the reason I don’t use search is …

Jan 9, 2023: I’ve also started playing around with Netlify to host my Hugo sites. So far I’m impressed. Made a change to the layout, pushed to GitHub, …

Jan 9, 2023: Hammers, Nails, and Hugo Going through my hammer and nail phase with Hugo. Trying it out on my personal knowledge base to see if it could replace the tool I wrote to generate …

Jan 8, 2023: Well, looks like buying shoes online was a mistake. The pair I bought was causing me pain, so I went to the store and after getting my feet measured, …

Jan 7, 2023: I won’t lie to you. I got some pretty strong vibes of the Birds at this point in my walk.

Jan 7, 2023: Just bought a domain name which assumes UK English spelling, and then it occurred to me that I probably need to get the name spelt in US English as …

Jan 7, 2023: Spending some time this morning working on the layout of a new Hugo site. I must say I’m pretty impressed by Hugo’s capabilities. So far I …

Jan 6, 2023: I’m starting to suspect that my wandering eye for blogging CMSes is driven less by the features of the software itself and more by the style of …

Jan 6, 2023: Currently reading: Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination by Hugh MacLeod 📚 This was the book that was easier to get as atoms rather …

Jan 5, 2023: 🔗 Twitter suffers major outage in Australia and New Zealand I was about to make a joke about Twitter not paying their PagerDuty bill. But then it …

Jan 5, 2023: Anyone who wants to start a public relations firm, here’s a free name for you: The Boast Office.

Jan 4, 2023: Back to work today, and first cab of the rank is a design task. I use to start writing notes of the design in Atlasssian Confluence, but today I think …

Jan 3, 2023: Until recently, I’ve been using Mastodon via the web-app on my phone. And credit to the Mastodon developers for making a pretty decent …

Jan 2, 2023: Looking for my 2023 word. The one at the top of the list is “travel”. I could pick this one as I do have a significant trip planned this …

Jan 2, 2023: On Posting Here Daily I sometimes struggle with the idea of trying to post here at least once a day. While perusing my archive I find days where my posts are cringeworthy …

Jan 1, 2023: First post of 2023. If current trends are to be maintained, I better get posting right away. 😉 Happy new year.

Dec 31, 2022: 2022 Year In Review I’ll be honest: these year in review posts feel like going to the dentist. I generally hate doing them, but I know that it can be good exercise …

Dec 31, 2022: Don’t like becoming a “regular” at cafes. It’s nice while you’re going there, but you ineviably move on and start going …

Dec 30, 2022: It’s been a while since I’ve used Pinboard to track a link. I found myself using other things for this. temporary links go to Obsidian, …

Dec 29, 2022: Only slept three or so hours last night, and yet it feels like I got a lot done today. Funny how that can occur. Maybe it’s the feeling that if …

Dec 29, 2022: Check this one off the bingo card: responding to PagerDuty alert during the Christmas break to do routine production support work. 🧑‍💻

Dec 28, 2022: Poking Around The Attic Of Old Coding Projects I guess I’m in a bit of a reflective mood these pass few days because I spent the morning digging up an old project that was lying dormant for …

Dec 27, 2022: Spent the day restyling the Dynamo-Browse website. The Terminal theme was fun, but over time I found the site to be difficult to navigate. And if you …

Dec 27, 2022: The unwanted.

Dec 26, 2022: Spent the day updating some Day One entries of my recent trip to the US. Some days effectively had scrawls of an update I wrote while I was over …

Dec 26, 2022: I was about to write something disparaging about threads again (this time about Mastodon threads), and while I personally can’t stand the reading …

Dec 25, 2022: Wishing you all a merry Christmas, a safe and restful holiday, and a happy and prosperous New Year.

Dec 24, 2022: 2022 Song Of The Year For the past twelve years or so, I’ve been invited to play the organ at the children’s Christmas Eve mass at a local(ish) primary school. …

Dec 24, 2022: Reading The Verge article about Twitter adding view counts to tweets (HT Daring Fireball), and hearing from the Twitter dev that most tweets get zero …

Dec 23, 2022: Today I am reminded that sometimes, if you think too much about what you hope to post for the day, you end up not posting anything at all. This …

Dec 23, 2022: I’ve been resisting using mocks in the unit tests of Dynamo-Browse, but today I finally bit the bullet and started adding them. There would have …

Dec 22, 2022: Woot! Officially on summer break. Sure it’s only for just under two weeks, and I’ll need to be on call for one of them. Still, feet… …

Dec 22, 2022: Thinking About Scripting In Dynamo-Browse, Again I’m thinking about scripting in Dynamo-Browse. Yes, again. For a while I’ve been using a version of Dynamo-Browse which included a …

Dec 22, 2022: Ear is still blocked so went to the doctor today to see if I can get some treatment for it. Turns out the cause is excessive mucus production, a …

Dec 21, 2022: On Using LinkedIn As A Replacement For Twitter Just listened to Dave Winer’s recent podcast about Guy Kawasaki considering LinkedIn as a replacement for Twitter. I agree with pretty much …

Dec 21, 2022: NASA’s InSight probe has gone quiet: Saying goodbye to spacecraft such as InSight is always difficult. Humans send these robotic probes out into the …

Dec 21, 2022: Anyone saying that blogging is dead has obviously not been blogging.

Dec 20, 2022: I generally hate shopping for things like groceries and clothes, but I especially hate it for anything significant that involves quotes and sales …

Dec 19, 2022: The World Is Bigger Than Twitter By this time you’re probably sick of all the takes out there about the current direction of Twitter. And a bunch more from someone who …

Dec 18, 2022: Bocce in Calton Gardens. Perfect day for it.

Dec 18, 2022: Ok, thank you for the insistent reminders, Patreon. I know my subscription for CGP Grey is coming up for renewal. You only need to tell me once. 🤦‍♂️

Dec 18, 2022: Project Exploration: A Check-in App I’m in a bit of a exploratory phase at the moment. I’ve set aside Dynamo-Browse for now and looking to start something new. Usually I need …

Dec 17, 2022: Ok, I’ve changed my mind. I’m now following Mastodon users on Mastodon instead of Micro.blog. No real reason for this other than I’d …

Dec 17, 2022: Reached the point in my life where I can buy a pair of runners online with the knowledge that I’ll feel comfortable in them. My feet have …

Dec 16, 2022: Working on a component design. Need to add a parameter which will store a single event type, like user-created. But with software systems being what …

Dec 15, 2022: Ok, this song is starting to grow on me. Shame it all sort of falls down near the end.

Dec 15, 2022: Trying to get over a blocked ear that I’ve had for a week and a half. I think it’s slowly improving, but each stage seems to introduce …

Dec 14, 2022: Wow, two comments on the same day about a post from Micro.blog appearing in Mastodon with inline hyperlinks. Looks like Micro.blog’s got a new …

Dec 14, 2022: Looking for a new project to work on. I kinda want to give Unity a try, maybe look at making a game of sorts. How I’m going to get the artwork …

Dec 14, 2022: After following a few Mastodon users, the Micro.blog timeline is beginning to feel like my main social feed. I’m being really conservative in who I …

Dec 13, 2022: RSS And Tumblr's Quote-Style Posts Tumblr needs to improve how they generate RSS items. Quote-style posts — in which the post consists of a quote from someone else, followed by a reply …

Dec 12, 2022: 🔗 Infinite Mac A Mac with everything you’d want in 1995. A fully loaded version of System 9 running in your browser. Posted here because I found …

Dec 12, 2022: It’s debatable whether or not frequently posting here has improved my writing. I suspect not so much, given that I mainly write micro-posts …

Dec 11, 2022: Ok, I’m probably the only person that feels this way, but I not a fan of all the “yearly wrapped” things that apps like Spotify and …

Dec 10, 2022: Playing around with location services in a Flutter app. Pretty straight forward getting something up and working, which is something I like about …

Dec 9, 2022: The weather has been cycling between summer and winter all week. A few days ago it was 33°C and I had the AC on. Today it’s max 18°C and …

Dec 7, 2022: Two things occurred to me after reading the Stratechery weekly article about ChatGPT. First, it might be a good time to read Gödel, Escher, Bach …

Dec 6, 2022: Made a telemedicine call for the first time last night (I caught Covid-19 and developed an ear infection) and I’m quite impressed by how pain-free the …

Dec 4, 2022: And after one last 15 hour flight, I’m back home. And I get to stay home for more than a week. After almost a month living out of my suitcase, …

Dec 3, 2022: Went on a tour to see the Hoover Dam this morning. What an impressive feat of engineering. Equally impressive was the bridge where the first shot was …

Dec 2, 2022: The amusing — and quite frankly, obvious — thing about everyone moving to Mastodon and the Fediverse is that it demonstrates that you don’t need …

Dec 1, 2022: 🎵 Twenty Four Hours from Café Del Chillia Effectively intermission music but I have found myself liking it. I do, however, think that with just a few …

Nov 30, 2022: Follow up to this post about Kindle books that are only available in the US. Apparently it’s not enough to just be in the US, with a suitable IP …

Nov 30, 2022: I think there’s safety in saying that this year’s Microblogvember was tough, what with all the travelling and inability to come up with …

Nov 29, 2022: I usually eat two or three cans of tuna for lunch a week. And yet, I still don’t really consider myself a fish eater. Why? What needs to change before …

Nov 29, 2022: Flight home from the US is next week. I’m hoping for an uneventful trip. The news is not cooperating though. 😏

Nov 29, 2022: I use to be quite religious in putting two spaces after a full stop. The only exception was when I’m writing on Micro.blog, since it keeps the …

Nov 27, 2022: Dynamo-Browse Running With iSH Bit of a fun one today. After thinking about how one could go about setting up a small dev environment on the iPad, I remembered that I actually had …

Nov 27, 2022: I heard the best way to get motivated to do something is to say to yourself “do it for five minutes and if it isn’t working out, you can stop.” I’ve …

Nov 26, 2022: State election today. Number of people making their commitment to the process quite early. #mbnov

Nov 25, 2022: Massive delay to my flight on the weekend. What was originally a morning departure is now an evening one. But I think the new itinerary actually works …

Nov 25, 2022: Revived my silly little online finska scorecard and gave it a new domain name: finska.fun. This is in preparation for the summer, where playing a game …

Nov 24, 2022: I’ve been approaching Microblogvember by taking the prompt and writing a post around it, which results in posts that are a bit forced. A better …

Nov 23, 2022: You’d think I’d have a post with the word update in it. I use “update” at work all the time: apply this update to update the …

Nov 23, 2022: 📺 The Computer Programme (1982) Discovered from reading this Ars Technica article about the history of ARM. Was commissioned by the BBC in the early …

Nov 23, 2022: Back home from Canberra. But only for a few days and then I’m off to the US. Should be good but I’m not looking forward to that 14 hour flight across …

Nov 22, 2022: I hate days that involve airports or air travel in any capacity. Not so much the actual flying part; that’s all fine. It’s just all the …

Nov 22, 2022: Typing in “graze” into Google Photos returned this photo. Conveniently, this was taken six months ago to the day. #mbnov

Nov 21, 2022: Nee Audax Toolset I’ve decided to retire the Audax Toolset name, at least for the moment. It was too confusing to explain what it actually was, and with only a …

Nov 21, 2022: Oof, scrum ceremonies really take it out of me. 3.5 to 4 hours of meetings, usually hosted by me and with me doing all the talking. Really kills my …

Nov 21, 2022: Rocking my super cool hat and jacket ensemble this morning. We’re a couple of weeks from the high UVs of summer so I wear the hat whenever …

Nov 20, 2022: GitHub Actions and the macOS Release I’m using Goreleaser to build releases of Audax tools, since it works quite well in cross-compiling a Go program to various OS targets in a …

Nov 20, 2022: Enjoyed another trip to Tuggeranong this morning. Went to the same cafe, ordered the same breakfast. I think I even sat in the same seat. It’s …

Nov 20, 2022: 🎙 The Talk Show: Grand Scale Foot-Shooting A fascinating episode of the Talk Show. Couldn’t put it down, metaphorically speaking.

Nov 19, 2022: The view from Mt. Ainslie.

Nov 19, 2022: @odd shared a link to O Rly and given the recent tech news I couldn’t help myself. Enjoy.

Nov 19, 2022: I got nosteligic for O’Reilly Books Online a few minutes ago. No novels there, just tech books. But wow, was it a great service. Large range of …

Nov 18, 2022: Free idea for anyone interested in building an Obsidian plugin: a calendar picker which will open up an arbitrary daily note, either in the past or …

Nov 18, 2022: What the fridge happened to Tumblr?! It took me 15 minutes to find the RSS feed of a blog there. To save everyone the pain from trying to find the …

Nov 18, 2022: Nearing the end of the week and I’m starting to tire. Can’t retire just yet though: got to look at a clean-up task caused by a release I …

Nov 17, 2022: Half Measures I’m coming to realise that one of my shortcomings is not completely following through on a task. I’ve got a habit of only doing enough to …

Nov 17, 2022: You know, the whole point of having standup-free Thursdays is that we would have the morning to get work done. It wasn’t intended to have a …

Nov 17, 2022: A couple of hours away from where I am right now is a town called Bowral, with a pronunciation reasonably close to barrel. We stayed there one easter …

Nov 16, 2022: A defining feature of the cafe culture in Melbourne that I absolutely love is that most cafes are independently owned and I think preferred. Well …

Nov 15, 2022: 📺 Victorian Drivers View Now, I know what you’re thinking: watching cab-rides on YouTube is great, but there aren’t any of the Melbourne …

Nov 15, 2022: It’s interesting to think how many products made of aluminium are actually referred to as tin. Alfoil, sometimes called “tin foil”, …

Nov 14, 2022: Oof, what a day. It was not my intention to leave this Microblogvember post to the last minute, but it’s been really hectic at work. Things are …

Nov 14, 2022: I’m starting to suspect that Slack might not be the productivity magic-bullet it’s touted to be. That is, unless your job is getting …

Nov 13, 2022: Ivy and Archie show their affection by preening elements of my face; usually the eyelashes, ears, and nose. And while I appreciate the sentiment, …

Nov 13, 2022: Most of what’s going on with Audax and Dynamo-Browse is “closing the gap” between the possible queries and scans that can be performed over a DynamoDB …

Nov 13, 2022: I usually make small adjustments to photos before I post them here, like small crops to emphasise the subject. I’ve tried cropping them as squares, …

Nov 12, 2022: I had my suspicions that today’s Microblogvember post would be difficult to write. Well, my suspicions turned out to be correct. #mbnov

Nov 12, 2022: The National Carillon, on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin. Music was being played on it this morning, although I didn’t recognise the tune. It …

Nov 11, 2022: Ugh, I just completely screwed up the test deployment of something just now. Missed a service that needed to be in place before rolling out a config …

Nov 11, 2022: I prefer to have my phone in my pocket with the display facing my leg. But with the Pixel 6 Pro I had to switch it around because the display was …

Nov 11, 2022: It feels a lot like I’m rubbernecking but I just cannot look away from the slow moving trainwreck which is the Twitter takeover. Laying off people who …

Nov 10, 2022: Google Photos came up with this amusing suggestion today. Just to be clear: it was the birds that were rotated, not the camera. 😀

Nov 10, 2022: A few months ago I decided to try a different approach with working on personal projects. Instead of having many projects running in parallel — where …

Nov 10, 2022: State election coming up in a couple of weeks. My parents, who have recently signed up as paid members of the Labor party, has put up a yard sign for …

Nov 9, 2022: One thing is certain: humans are fallible. They forget, or do not follow through sometimes. So if you find yourself at a crossing with someone else, …

Nov 9, 2022: Half-implemented micro-services are the worst. It can really slow down your development velocity to the point where you feel like you’re walking …

Nov 8, 2022: The consensus seems to be that it’s preening time. #mbnov

Nov 7, 2022: For today’s Microblogvember post, I would like to make a shout-out to the blog of Jodie Cook. I find pretty much every one of her posts’ …

Nov 6, 2022: Since finding out that echo was today’s Microblogvember word, Pink Floyd Echoes has been playing in my head all afternoon. It’s one of my favourite …

Nov 5, 2022: Oof, I would have though that after writing here for a couple of years, I’d find the Microblogvember challange easier. I guess experience is no …

Nov 4, 2022: Hackathon today. Taking a little break and looking at admiration on how much we managed to achieve in a few hours, especially considering that …

Nov 3, 2022: On my way to the airport to catch a flight, while wondering that if I just went for a Nav rating when I had my recreational pilot license, and kept …

Nov 3, 2022: They’re running electric busses on the route I take for work. I’m traveling on one now. Not the same as travelling on a tram; rails are …

Nov 2, 2022: Cape Shank, Vic. Taken today. A feast for the eyes and ears (and maybe a tasting for the other senses as well). #mbnov

Nov 1, 2022: 🔗 github.com/charmbracelet/vhs This little tool is awesome. It allows you to easily make GIFs of a command line session from a text-based DSL. I tried …

Nov 1, 2022: Pro-tip: add challenges.micro.blog to your feed reader to get the daily challenge word for Microblogvember delivered to you through the magic of RSS …

Nov 1, 2022: Urge to buy a Nintendo Switch: 4/10 It’s holding steady at the moment but it’s been rising slowly over the last couple of months. I figure it won’t be …

Oct 31, 2022: Day Trip: Macedon And Trentham I had the pleasure of taking the day off today and going for a few walks around Macedon and Trentham. Being someone that’s really into keeping …

Oct 30, 2022: Trying to build an old Android app that has fallen out of date. Doing this always brings up some weird errors. The version of Gradle being used was …

Oct 30, 2022: Opinionated Tips for New Micro Bloggers Coming From Twitter or, How I Use Micro.blog To all new-comers from Twitter, welcome to Micro.blog! No doubt you’ve received the welcome message from Jean with …

Oct 29, 2022: Rail work beginning in earnest. A large work train carrying ballast and track sections has pulled in: They had to close the road and pedestrian level …

Oct 29, 2022: Setting up a GitLab instance in Linode. Got to this point in the instructions: Oh, the command to get the password is missing. Well, I guess …

Oct 28, 2022: If I’ve asked you to review a pull request I’ve raised, please be clear in your comments. Don’t just point out things that I got …

Oct 28, 2022: Places hiring for senior software developers shouldn’t bother offering perks like free food or table tennis. I’d be happy with a promise …

Oct 28, 2022: I’ve stopped using the Substack app for reading newsletters. Not because I didn’t like the app. It’s sort of been an unconscious …

Oct 27, 2022: Finishing off the last part of my tech knowledge setup which is to regenerate the web version when I make a change to the source markdown. I’m …

Oct 27, 2022: Seeing a lot of retweets from @marco with screenshots of gambling apps ads on people’s iOS product page. Ugh! What a terrible user experience. It’s …

Oct 26, 2022: More track works going on, this time involving this pile of ballast in some way.

Oct 26, 2022: I can tell myself that I shouldn’t look at another CMS, but I know that I’d just wouldn’t listen. So to save us all time, this is …

Oct 26, 2022: My health insurer had a “cyber attack” recently in which some pretty sensitive data was stolen. They’re sending email updates every …

Oct 25, 2022: 🔗 Slow Roads Endless driving game in the browser. Pretty frickin’ well done. There’s also a Medium post on how it was put together. (via. …

Oct 24, 2022: Just thinking about all the documents I need to write for work. Half the time they’re fill-in-the-form type documents with an informal workflow …

Oct 24, 2022: In a spot of bother this morning. We’ve got sprint planning coming up this afternoon and I have virtually no tickets organised. There might be …

Oct 23, 2022: Never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually looking forward to the hackathon work is putting togeather. Spent the morning writing notes and coming up …

Oct 22, 2022: Audax Toolset Version 0.1.0 Audax Toolset version 0.1.0 is finally released and is available on GitHub. This version contains updates to Dynamo-Browse, which is still the only …

Oct 22, 2022: Follow-up to yesterday’s post: Adam Fusco and I had a bit of a test of this over at social.lol. Turns out when you send a private message, the …

Oct 21, 2022: I came this close to sending the Mastodon equivalent of a DM today. That it works by simply setting the visibility of a toot made me wonder if the …

Oct 21, 2022: 📺 The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles YouTube recommended this conference talk by John Romero on how id Software did their game …

Oct 21, 2022: 🔗 Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Are Now Open Source Wow, I did not expect that. Although I probably should have since it’s owned by Automattic now.

Oct 20, 2022: Putting the final touches on the website for the upcoming release of Audax Toolset v0.1.0, and I’m finding myself a bit unhappy with it. Given …

Oct 20, 2022: Dealing with tables in Obsidian reminds me that as much as I think I like working with tables in markdown, the truth is that I really don’t. …

Oct 20, 2022: Bridging The Confidence Gap I had to do some production work with DynamoDB this morning. It wasn’t particularly complicated work: run a query, get a couple of rows, change …

Oct 20, 2022: Tried something different for lunch today: a halloumi cheese pocket. The ingredients were halloumi cheese and pastry, so not a particularly large …

Oct 19, 2022: Looking at the pitches for a hackathon being planned at work, I’m coming to realise I get excited about pretty boring things. New mobile apps? …

Oct 18, 2022: Technical Knowledge Management Update Finished the first pass of moving all my technical knowledge into static Markdown files. I’ve got all the files now in a Git repository hosted …

Oct 18, 2022: 📺 WTF are all these config files for Web front-end developers need to find a way to get all their project configuration into a single file. There, I …

Oct 17, 2022: Some Links To Motivational Posts That Help Me This post contains a bunch of links to posts and articles that motivate me in some way, either with blogging or working in public. Sometimes I feel …

Oct 16, 2022: It’s strange that the blog posts I enjoy reading from others are the same sort of blog posts I feel weird about writing myself. Classic example …

Oct 15, 2022: Speed bocce with friends today. Congrats to Jules for winning the 2022-23 season, breaking a three-way tie at the end.

Oct 15, 2022: About Jsonnet's Juxtapose Feature We use a lot of Jsonnet a work. We use it to generate Cloud Formation templates, Kubernetes YAML files, and application configuration from a single …

Oct 15, 2022: Here’s the best part about waking up early on a weekend. You’re coffeed and breakfasted at an early enough hour that when it’s time to start your day, …

Oct 14, 2022: A Day in the Life North-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Vic, Australia at 8:20 am. Waiting with my coffee at the rail crossing for the train to pull …

Oct 12, 2022: Option Currency Symbol Reference A small, incomplete reference of the various currency symbols that can be produced using the Option key. Here because I always forget these, and …

Oct 12, 2022: Redesigning How I Manage My Tech Knowledge I might plan another redesign of how I keep little bits of tech knowledge that I occasionally need to refer back to. I’ve been posting them here as …

Oct 11, 2022: Another gripe about how Chromium browsers don’t have a “go back 30 seconds” button on their HTML 5 audio player. They do know that …

Oct 11, 2022: Once in a while, I like to listen to old episodes of Hypercritical. They’re more than 10 years old now and yet they’re still a great …

Oct 11, 2022: While reading the part about podcasting on Scripting News this morning, it got me thinking: has Apple’s foray into podcast subscriptions …

Oct 10, 2022: It’s weird that when you join a second or third Slack workspace, all the onboarding stuff is shown to you again, as if you’ve never used …

Oct 9, 2022: Working on recording that how-to video again this morning. Managed to get a take that I’m happy with. This is after maybe 35 recordings in total …

Oct 8, 2022: One thing I miss from using Gnome and Linux is the ability to pin any window to the top layer, so that it appears above all the others. I’m a …

Oct 7, 2022: This week’s ear-worm: Hergest Ridge 🎵 Another Mike Oldfield album (surprise, surprise). I’ve only recently discovered this after my dad …

Oct 7, 2022: Ok, I’m all in on Obsidian for my note taking now. I’ve found myself using it at work every day this week. The editor they’ve got in the latest …

Oct 6, 2022: Useful thing to know about Go: you can do lookups on a nil map: var xs map[string]string = nil x, hasX := xs["hello"] The result will simply …

Oct 6, 2022: 🔗 Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads? The well of bad ideas may not be bottomless, but it certainly is deep.

Oct 6, 2022: An Alternative To The Reply All Idea For Micro.blog Just thinking about Micro.blog conversations and the discussion about having a way to reply all. I wonder if a better alternative is to be able to …

Oct 5, 2022: Tinkering around with some tools I use to help me at work. One, a CSV editor which runs in the terminal, has a command-line interface that is so wimpy …

Oct 4, 2022: The (Annoying) Way To Get the Current MacOS Appearance Scheme From the Command Line Ok, here’s something bizarre. I’m trying to get the current MacOS appearance scheme — either light or dark mode — from the terminal. The …

Oct 4, 2022: There a so many good, high quality TV shows available at the moment. And yet I have little interest in watching any of them. They feel like such a …

Oct 3, 2022: New blog alert: lmika.day Started a check-in blog, similar to manton.coffee. Having a record of places I’ve been to has been something …

Oct 3, 2022: Trying Obsidian for note-keeping at work again. I used it a lot in my last job, but I never really liked how the markdown was styled, so I stopped …

Oct 2, 2022: Homeward bound.

Oct 1, 2022: Photos of Lake Tuggeranong This morning I went to Tuggeranong, south of Canberra. After a cafe breakfast I took a walk around the lake. It was a lovely spring morning for it: …

Sep 30, 2022: 🔗 Google suffers from a digital petro curse Hearing the story about Stadia reminded me of this post by DHH. His thoughts on why Google can’t …

Sep 30, 2022: 🔗 Google Kills Stadia Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they …

Sep 29, 2022: 🔗 Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement lacks crosswalks, checkboxes, Google I wonder: if Google, as many suspect, is using CAPTCHA for image recognition …

Sep 29, 2022: Birds in the hand.

Sep 29, 2022: Things Dynamo-Browse Need I’m working with dynamo-browse a lot this morning and I’m coming up with a bunch of usability shortcomings. I’m listing them here so …

Sep 28, 2022: An idea for anyone maintaining a 2FA app. When there’s only a few seconds left for an OTP code, start fading the numbers out. I only look at the …

Sep 28, 2022: The best Slack shortcut I learnt today is Shift+Esc. This will mark all messages as read. 😌

Sep 28, 2022: I had some trouble trying out status.lol yesterday. Turns out the reason was that I was using the API key from meta.omg.lol. instead of from …

Sep 27, 2022: As a change of pace, I’ve picked up a frontend ticket at work today. TypeScript, React, GraphQL: yes, I’m using it all. I know a little of each so I’m …

Sep 26, 2022: Here’s something I learnt today about cockatiels: they sneeze, or do something that can be described as sneezing. Either way, I didn’t …

Sep 25, 2022: Back in Canberra with Ivy and Archie, my sister’s cockatiels. 🦜

Sep 24, 2022: Overlay Composition Using Bubble Tea Working on a new feature for Dynamo-Browse which will allow the user to modify the columns of the table: move them around, sort them, hide them, etc. …

Sep 24, 2022: Same time and place as last week. Different species of bird.

Sep 23, 2022: Tried something different today, by recording a how-to video of a project I’m working on. Must say that I now appreciate the effort of those that work …

Sep 22, 2022: Tax return done. Was in danger of forgetting to do it so deceided to get it out of the way today. Relatively painless: took probably 20 minutes. Let’s …

Sep 21, 2022: To any Stratechery or Dithering subscribers that have seen no new posts since Monday: you may need to get new feeds from Passport. Ben just launched …

Sep 20, 2022: 🎉

Sep 20, 2022: I must say, Feedbin does a good job making Twitter threads actually nice to read. I haven’t seen it work for every thread, but when it does, if …

Sep 19, 2022: 🎙️ Really Specific Stories, featuring yours truly. Had the privilege of being a guest on @martinfeld’s excellent show about podcasting. Check it …

Sep 19, 2022: Currently binging on Epic Engineering Failures from the Great Courses. The details of the failures are interesting, but the course also covers a lot …

Sep 18, 2022: Google, please; fix the locale detection logic in Sheets. Every newly created spreadsheet has the wrong locale set by default, and I always need to …

Sep 17, 2022: Spotted this morning as I was walking to breakfast. 🦆

Sep 16, 2022: Intermediary Representation In Dynamo-Browse Expressions One other thing I did in Dynamo-Browse is change how the query AST produced the actual DynamoDB call. Previously, the AST produced the DynamoDB call …

Sep 16, 2022: Did a cleanup of all the half-finished posts I had lying around as drafts. Many of them have been cluttering up the Draft section for a few months …

Sep 15, 2022: Dinner at The Mint. This is my table, which is the same table I sat at last time I was here, in January 2020. Feels like a bit of a bookend in a way.

Sep 15, 2022: Along the boundary of Melbourne Port.

Sep 14, 2022: 🎙 Dithering: 13 Sept 22 - Discord AI Enjoyed the discussion on Midjourney and AI images, but it was the final two minutes on the UIs of Slack and …

Sep 14, 2022: Sunny day today. Might need to bring out the hat once again.

Sep 14, 2022: Really tired this morning. Work up last night due to a production incident. Must say that nothing goes out to prod quicker than a 3 AM change you hope …

Sep 13, 2022: Letting Queries Actually Be Queries In Dynamo-Browse I spent some more time working on dynamo-browse over the weekend (I have to now that I’ve got a user-base 😄). No real changes to scripting yet. …

Sep 13, 2022: I miss working on monoliths. Micro-services are just so painful to test. So many moving parts you need to get working before you can even start. Then …

Sep 13, 2022: Saw someone at work use Numi to show some maths so I’m giving it a try. Only just started using it but I already like it. Feels very similar to …

Sep 13, 2022: Absolutely incredible seeing how far AI image creation has come. I know this was years in the making, but with all the recent launches, it feels like …

Sep 11, 2022: At least one photo will be taken at this event (well technically the setup of the event).

Sep 11, 2022: Discovered that I can use a URL shortener to grab a link from my Android phone and open it on my iPad. I guess that means I’m finally up to speed on …

Sep 10, 2022: My whimsical side might be developing a little. I’m starting to come round to the wiggly seek bar in Android.

Sep 10, 2022: Rail works.

Sep 9, 2022: The Australian Republic Question With the passing of Queen Elisabeth II, the talk of whether Australia should become a republic will probably start making the rounds once more. I …

Sep 9, 2022: Flags at half mast at the school today to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

Sep 8, 2022: Those worried about video-centric podcasts ruining the format can allay their fears. The killer feature of podcasts is that you can listen to them …

Sep 8, 2022: I’ve been tinkering around with Pico-8 game development recently. I like how limiting it is. Expectations are not too high, which helps given …

Sep 6, 2022: And while we’re on the subject of tests: make it easy for me to launch tests quickly from the IDE. Refusing to run a test because a particular …

Sep 6, 2022: The unit test I’m working on uses so many mocks it’s infuriatingly difficult to change anything. I wonder if a better approach is to just …

Sep 6, 2022: Finished version 0.0.3 of Audax Toolset yesterday. The code has been ready since the weekend, but it took me Sunday morning and yesterday (Monday) …

Sep 5, 2022: 🔗 emperror.dev/errors Drop in replacement for the github.com/pkg/errors package. The original package is archived as there’s a plan to change …

Sep 5, 2022: Detecting When GetItem On DynamoDB Returns Nothing I was trying to remember how best to detect when a GetItem call to DynamoDB returns no values. That is, when there’s no item with that key in …

Sep 5, 2022: Some Photos of The Yarra Trail Went for a very short walk of the Yarra Trail around Heidelberg on Saturday. The evening light was really lovely so I though I’d take some …

Sep 4, 2022: Milestone For a while, I’ve been trying to maintain a writing streak. I need to write at least one blog post or journal entry a day. Today that streak has …

Sep 3, 2022: It could be that I’m just an old fogie that doesn’t like whimsy, but chalk me up as someone who doesn’t like the wiggling seek bar …

Sep 3, 2022: Currently reading: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition by William Zinsser 📚 Only a few chapters in, but so far a great read. Via Rec Diffs #188

Sep 2, 2022: I make something and not share it with anyone, I become frustrated. I make something, share it with others, and they don’t use it, I become …

Sep 2, 2022: Knocked off some merge requests from my inbox and about to start work on a nicely sized development task. Looking to be a good Friday for coding. 🧑‍💻

Sep 1, 2022: I’ve been using Dynamo-Browse all morning and I think I’ll make some notes about how the experience went. In short: the command line needs …

Sep 1, 2022: Found a service this morning which was sending HTTP requests with a timeout of 1 second. This was causing problems in the service it was calling, …

Aug 31, 2022: You can tell I’m bored at work when I spend time building stupid little utilities for myself instead of actually doing the task I should be …

Aug 31, 2022: Thinking About Scripting In Dynamo-Browse I’ve been using the scripting facilities of dynamo-browse for a little while now. So far they’ve been working reasonably well, but I think …

Aug 30, 2022: Some Things I Found Out While Browsing a Substack Newsletter in The Wayback Machine I did a quick search for that blog post in the the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t find the post but the Substack newsletter was there. I guess …

Aug 30, 2022: Over the weekend, I wanted to revisit a Substack post I read several months ago. Unfortunately, the newsletter was shutdown and the post is no longer …

Aug 29, 2022: Can’t believe it took me this long to get a headset. Knowing that a mic is only a couple of centimetres from my lips makes a huge difference in …

Aug 27, 2022: Follow-up on my phone issue. I think the problem relates to 5G connections. The drop-outs seem to have stopped after I’ve switched 5G off. Still …

Aug 26, 2022: Rebinding Keys For Quickly Resolving Conflicts in GoLand I’m dealing with a lot of conflicts today as I try to clear a backlog of Git rebases in my to-do pile. I’ve been using GoLand to do this, …

Aug 26, 2022: Those “Accept Yours” & “Accept Theirs” buttons in GoLand’s conflicts dialog are a bit of a tease. Might be that …

Aug 26, 2022: Oof, spent all morning updating and rebasing out-of-date pull requests. Only got through half of them so far. This project is pretty fast pace at the …

Aug 25, 2022: Here’s today’s instalment of Why Didn’t I Think of This Sooner™. I’ve got into the habit of squashing commits before I push …

Aug 25, 2022: I’m moving the posts I had on my wiki to this blog and I’m shutting the wiki down. I never really used the wiki a lot — in fact, the last …

Aug 24, 2022: 🔗 A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes A great reference site I stumbled along when I was trying to find the …

Aug 24, 2022: Dynamo-Browse: Using The Back-Stack To Go Forward More work on Audax toolset. Reengineered the entire back-stack in dynamo-browse to support going forward as well as backwards, much like going forward …

Aug 23, 2022: Second breakfast time.

Aug 23, 2022: Breakfast time.

Aug 22, 2022: One thing I miss about working in Java is that the JVM comes out of the box with an interactive debugger. With just a few switches, you can enable a …

Aug 22, 2022: I wonder if people who say they hate bagpipes are actually saying they don’t like the music traditionally played with bagpipes. I’m not …

Aug 21, 2022: Went to the Union Club Hotel, in Collingwood, with a few friends for dinner tonight. Apparently quite popular with footy fans, which I did not know: …

Aug 21, 2022: Off to breakfast this morning. Met some locals on the way.

Aug 20, 2022: Day One needs a “this time one day ago” section, where you look at the entries from yesterday, realised you’ve made all these spelling and grammatical …

Aug 20, 2022: Adding Copy-To-Clipboard And Layout Changes In Dynamo-Browse Spent some more time on dynamo-browse this morning, just a little bit. Got one new feature built and merged to main, which is the ability to copy the …

Aug 19, 2022: Turning Off Shared Command History in Oh My Zsh TL,DR: add “unsetopt share_history” to your .zshrc file I’ve been using Oh My Zsh at work for a few months. As far as terminal …

Aug 18, 2022: The last hold-out.

Aug 17, 2022: Discovered something cool on the ATP website. If you play old shows while logged in as a member, you actually get those from the members feed instead …

Aug 16, 2022: I started seeing job ads for “Blockchain Engineer” on LinkedIn recently. I have no interest in such roles. But I was curious, so I clicked into one to …

Aug 16, 2022: 🔗 NYC Subway Track Map Dad and I have been watching YouTube cab-rides of the NYC subway system recently. Part of the fun is trying to understand the …

Aug 15, 2022: I had the opportunity to meet up with someone I use to work with at the Bureau of Meterology this morning. I left the Bureau about five years ago, and …

Aug 14, 2022: Adding A Back-Stack To Dynamo-Browse Spent some more time working on dynamo-browse, this time adding a back-stack. This can be used to go back to the previously viewed table, query or …

Aug 13, 2022: 🔗 Waking Up In Geelong Facinating website for the casual Melbourne train buff. A lot of great photos of rail infrastructure, plus what appears to be …

Aug 12, 2022: The electrification of large vehicles is continuing. For the first time, I just saw and not heard an EV bus. Must say that seeing a bus accelerate out …

Aug 12, 2022: It’s funny seeing marking images of devices intended for “work”. There’s always one shot featuring either a graph or a spreadsheet.

Aug 11, 2022: Just had an hour long Slack call with someone who was drafting a huge list of tasks in a single Slack message. Thank goodness Slack didn’t fall …

Aug 11, 2022: MacOS’s virtualisation framework looks interesting and I’d like to get my hands on it. Problem is that I have an Intel mac and it only …

Aug 10, 2022: More On Scripting In Dynamo-Browse Making some more progress on the adding scripting of dynamo-browse. It helps being motivated to be able to write some scripts for myself, just to be …

Aug 10, 2022: Currently enjoying the sound of an eastern rosella singing it’s heart out, helping to make a long tiring week just that little bit easier to …

Aug 9, 2022: It wasn’t that long ago where a Google search would return useful results that were not found by either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. That’s …

Aug 9, 2022: Trying to find which countries require 3D Secure for online payments is annoying. Each website only list two or three countries as examples: …

Aug 8, 2022: For the past several weeks, these two have been foraging in front of my place. They’re quite skittish, and will fly off when anyone approaches …

Aug 7, 2022: Evening walk, with the wattles in full bloom.

Aug 6, 2022: Kyneton Botanical Gardens Went to Kyneton with Mum and Dad today. While they went off for a bike ride, I had the opportunity to go for a walk around the botanical gardens. This …

Aug 6, 2022: Kyneton Railway Station.

Aug 5, 2022: Work was the reason I was unable to go for an afternoon walk last two Fridays. The wet weather was not going to be the reason why I was unable go for …

Aug 5, 2022: This week’s ear-worm: The Songs Of Distant Earth by Mike Oldfield 🎵 Not necessarily a new one in my rotation, but I’ve been listening to …

Aug 4, 2022: In this new work-from-home world we now inhabit, it’s coming to the point where my productivity is directly proportional to how many good …

Aug 4, 2022: DynamoDB JSON Attribute Types Quick Reference Because apparently it’s too difficult for AWS to provide an easy way to find this information. Atomic Types Type JSON Value Binary B String …

Aug 3, 2022: Scripting In Dynamo-Browse Making some progress with adding scripting capabilities to dynamo-browse. I’ve selected a pretty full-featured JS interpreter called goja. It …

Aug 3, 2022: Coming up with a naming convention for things like metadata keys, customer HTTP headers, or log tags; and not writing it down and sharing it with …

Aug 2, 2022: I discovered Goomics by Manu Cornet this morning after reading this Ars Technica article. There are some pretty amusing comics there about “life …

Aug 1, 2022: I started writing a comment in GitLab today for a pull request I was working on. I left the comment unfinished to do something else. I was planning to …

Jul 31, 2022: A little hard to get through my regular Sunday routine today. I’ll do my best to keep at it though. It won’t solve all my troubles but …

Jul 30, 2022: Useful tip I learnt today about screenshots on MacOS: you can take a screenshot of a window without the drop shadow by holding down the Option key …

Jul 30, 2022: Release Preparation & Next Steps Finally finished the website for the Audax toolset and cut an initial release (v0.0.2). I’ve also managed to get binary releases for Linux and …

Jul 30, 2022: My Nonna bought me a set of winter gloves. This is actually my first ever set, and I can’t believe it took me this long to get a pair. Made from …

Jul 29, 2022: I really want to write something on my blog today, but the things going on right now are just making me annoyed. I don’t want this blog to be …

Jul 28, 2022: It’s good getting stuff released to production, so that users can get their hands on what you’ve been working on. Unless it’s stuff …

Jul 27, 2022: Covid-19 is making the rounds at work at the moment. A number of people have come down with it, posting photos of their positive RAT tests on Slack. …

Jul 26, 2022: Working on large software projects — complete with Jira boards, code coverage requirements, and peer reviews — it’s sometimes easy to forget …

Jul 25, 2022: I’ve been seeing this message an awful lot recently when I’m trying to use mobile data. I originally thought it was Telstra, but now I …

Jul 24, 2022: A New Name for Audax Tools (nee AWS Tools) I think I’ve settled on a name for the project I’ve been calling “awstools”. “Settled” is probably a good word for …

Jul 23, 2022: More Complaining About Autocorrect on MacOS Earlier this morning: Me: (writing in my journal) Nonna, my 91 year-old grandmother… Autocorrect: Did you me “Donna”? Me: No, undo …

Jul 22, 2022: I’d be curious to know if a brand new user to Facebook would be able to get any value from it. Looking at screenshots of their app redesign, the whole …

Jul 21, 2022: AWS Tools: Documentation & The Website Worked a little more on “awstools” (still haven’t thought of a good alternative name for it). I think the …

Jul 20, 2022: Write It Down I am feeling some very minor after-effects from the booster I took yesterday (nothing serious, just the expected cold-like symptoms). I was curious as …

Jul 19, 2022: Boosted. 💉💉💉💉 (also muffined up once again 🧁)

Jul 19, 2022: 🔗 Publishing your work increases your luck (via Github’s The Readme Project) I found this very inspiring. Given where it was published the …

Jul 18, 2022: Had sprint review today. Overall, it went really well. Much better than last time. We didn’t quite clear the board but that was mainly because …

Jul 17, 2022: Newsletter Reminder Emails I subscribe to a newsletter that sends “reminder” emails if I skip an issue. If I don’t open one of the email newsletters I receive, then a few days …

Jul 17, 2022: Trying a new cafe this morning. I drive past this place all the time, and I keep telling myself I should try it. Fortunately it’s only a 15 …

Jul 16, 2022: Listening to the ATP #491 discussion on code formatting right now. I guess I’m not the only one that converted from BSD braces to K&R …

Jul 16, 2022: This is how I usually spend my Saturday mornings. One difference today was that a train-replacement bus drove by roughtly every 10 minutes or so …

Jul 16, 2022: AWS Tools Dev Diary A little more work on “awstools” today, mainly on a bit of a cleanup spree to make them suitable for others to use. This generally means …

Jul 15, 2022: A lot of Slack messaging and organising calls with others today in order to get something finished for next week. These sorts of days are exhausting: …

Jul 14, 2022: Shutting Down Blogging CMS Ditching the CMS I was using for this blog is actually quite liberating. It means I don't have to spend any time trying to bridge the feature gap for …

Jul 14, 2022: Had an excellent design session meeting this morning, but after 1.5 hours of talking, my voice is absolutely horase. Might need to consider improving …

Jul 13, 2022: Moving my work journal over to Micro.blog. That blog has been bouncing around CMS’s for a while now, and there’s always one or two things …

Jul 12, 2022: 🔗 Mentality This might be a good one to bookmark and come back to occasionally.

Jul 12, 2022: 🔗 Stop checking the news before you do deep work Yes! I always fall into this trap.

Jul 11, 2022: Trying my Pixel 6 caseless for a little while. It was starting to interfere with swipe gestures which was getting a little annoying. Might be some …

Jul 10, 2022: Went to see Hamilton at Her Majesty’s Theatre last night (a little ironic, I know). I’ve seen the Broadway recording, so I didn’t come in “cold”. But …

Jul 9, 2022: How is it that I can make a change in one area of an Android app, like add a new fragment, and a completely unrelated area of the app (the DB models) …

Jul 8, 2022: I’ve turned off analytics for this site. It’s been more than a hinderance than anything else. It got to the point where I actually stopped …

Jul 7, 2022: The Feature Epic (Featuring the Epic Feature Branch) Here’s what’s been happening at work with me recently. I write it here as an exercise in how I can learn from this. They say that writing …

Jul 6, 2022: Given how often I’ve been typing it recently, you would have thought I’d know how to spell “Los Angeles” by now.

Jul 6, 2022: Hmm, the folio keyboard I’m using for this iPad is starting to flake out occasionally. Sometimes when I unfold it, the iPad doesn’t recognise it and …

Jul 5, 2022: Got offered a free sample of a “lamington scone” at the bakery I went to today. Tastes pretty much as you’d expect. 😋 Good to see …

Jul 5, 2022: Spent all frickin morning in meetings. Hardly got any work done — ironically the type of work the business is hounding me to get finished ASAP. Going …

Jul 5, 2022: Woke up to my devices being unable to connect to the WiFi. It must have gone out during the night somehow. First time that’s happened in a …

Jul 4, 2022: End of sprint ceremonies today. Could have gone better. We failed the sprint quite hard. Not entirely our fault: we actually got a lot done, but we …

Jul 3, 2022: I’ve been finding myself using Day One for general note taking, like ideas, things to remember, etc. I think the reason is because it’s on …

Jul 2, 2022: 🎙️ No Mercy / No Malice: All Ears First one of these newsletters that I actually listen to in podcast form, and I really enjoyed it. Happy coincidence …

Jul 2, 2022: 🔗 Google loses two execs: one for Messaging and Workspace, another for Payments Two thoughts I came away with after reading this. The first is an …

Jul 1, 2022: I’m personally a bit of a fan of unit tests (at least when it comes to writing code for work — for my own stuff… not so much), but I can …

Jun 30, 2022: The amusing thing about turning 37 today is that it felt like I’ve been 37 since maybe September last year, so all in all I don’t feel so …

Jun 29, 2022: I’m finding that more and more of daily workload in my job is less software development and more about making sure a team of people can get …

Jun 29, 2022: Arriving Late I’m going to have to tell my boss today that the stuff my squad has been working on is going to arrive late. To much needs to be fixed or reworked, …

Jun 28, 2022: Just got a flu shot. I asked about getting a second COVID-19 booster but I’m not in any priority group so that was a no-go unfortunately. Even …

Jun 28, 2022: Here’s an idea for a competitive sport: a race to see who can first merge two Git branches that have diverged significantly. The difficulty can …

Jun 27, 2022: Wrong Number Got called three times this morning by mistake from an old woman in NSW trying to contact her son who had a very similar phone number to mine. First …

Jun 27, 2022: List and Delete All Docker Containers A useful command I occasionally use. This will list all Docker containers, and delete each one regardless of whether it’s running or not. Good …

Jun 25, 2022: Idea for a website: you submit two TV shows or movies, and it shows you the cast members that are in both.

Jun 25, 2022: One fallout from Google’s terrible messaging situation is not just the fragmentation of all the various messaging “apps”, but the shoddy design and …

Jun 24, 2022: I’ve been seeing something strange with an Android app I’ve built for myself. When I deploy it to my phone using Android studio; the app …

Jun 24, 2022: Getting spam emails with corrections about previously sent spam emails now. 😒

Jun 23, 2022: Here’s another photo of Archie and Ivy from a couple of weeks ago. Ivy’s discovered that the tissue box is the one thing nearby that I …

Jun 22, 2022: Ugh, why do I even read the news? 😒

Jun 22, 2022: You know that feeling where you just got off on-call, and that evening there was a widespread production outage that you had no idea happened until …

Jun 21, 2022: One thing I must remember: if the options before me are to go for a walk or not, very rarely is not going the better option. Sure, there are times …

Jun 21, 2022: Someone I worked with shared this tweet with a video of a musical number falling off the rails, which I found incredibly amusing. Enjoy. The ultimate …

Jun 20, 2022: Been watching The Orville a fair bit recently, on SBS On Demand. I must say that I like it a lot. I’m not a watcher of Star Trek, but — and some may …

Jun 19, 2022: Just enjoyed a set by Guy Montgomery in a familiar stomping ground (the Comedy Republic) with an unfamiliar Stomping Ground (the pale ale). All three …

Jun 18, 2022: Heading back to Melbourne today after my 2.5 weeks in Canberra. Going to have to say goodbye to these two for a little while. Must say that my stay …

Jun 17, 2022: Discovered the Causality podcast after listening to an episode of Reconcilable Differences. The subject matter — engineering disasters and what caused …

Jun 16, 2022: Got blocked on how I to fix a problem encountered with the current task I’m doing for work. Always helpful to go back to the approach of …

Jun 16, 2022: 🔗 Internet Explorer was once synonymous with the Internet, but today it’s gone for good So long, Internet Explorer. We sadly knew you all too well. …

Jun 15, 2022: Got to –4.5°C last night. As you can imagine, things were pretty frosty this morning.

Jun 13, 2022: Honour, Democracy, and Galati: A Day in Canberra Since being in Canberra, I haven’t really done anything “touristy”. Given that today was a public holiday, I figured it was as good …

Jun 12, 2022: Ivy’s discovered the vessel I drink from and wants in on it. P.S. Ivy doing this actually reminds me of this post from @martinfeld.

Jun 12, 2022: I’m toying around with the idea of building something to help me upload multiple photos to Micro.blog and easily produce a gallery. I’m …

Jun 11, 2022: Afternoon Walk Around Lake Ginninderra Went for an walk around Lake Ginninderra this afternoon. Well, not “around” the lake: that walk would have taken a while. But I did walk …

Jun 10, 2022: Archie loves head-scratches. In fact, when I reach my hand into the cage to let him out, he doesn’t immediately perch on it. Instead, he bows …

Jun 9, 2022: My Evening So here’s how I spent my evening: Watching the WWDC state of the union until the DNS resolver konked out in the WiFi router, causing the Chromecast to …

Jun 8, 2022: This is a little embarrassing, but it was only just yesterday that I learnt that tanukis are an actual species of animal. And they look adorable.

Jun 7, 2022: Writing documentation for your project can be a bit of a humbling experience. You encounter all the holes in your functionality, maybe find out that …

Jun 7, 2022: The names for GitHub Codespaces are randomly generated, but I kinda like the one chosen for this website repo. Seems fitting in a way.

Jun 7, 2022: I gotta admit: the most exciting announcement I saw from WWDC 2022 was the FreeForm app, with the ability to share boards with others. Hopefully now I …

Jun 6, 2022: I’m always torn between using a tool I wrote to draw sequence diagrams for work vs. using the “built-in” diagramming tool of the …

Jun 5, 2022: These little fellas just love going for the keyboard and mouse when they’re out with me. Maybe, with a bit of training, I might be able to get …

Jun 4, 2022: I will admit: at dinner tonight, I almost ordered a parmy and a middy, just so that I can say “parmy” and “middy.” …

Jun 4, 2022: The Powerline Track Walk Went on a walk of the Powerline Track, which I was personally calling the “powerline walk” (yes, I’m impressed at how close I was). …

Jun 3, 2022: Now that the May Photoblogging Challenge is over, I need to come up with my own topics to post about again. How did I do this in April?

Jun 2, 2022: Most of the magpies I see in my daily life are of the white-backed variety, which is the common subspecie in Victoria. So seeing one with a black …

Jun 1, 2022: Back in Canberra, looking after my sister’s cockatiels while she’s overseas for work. Say hello to Ivy and Archie.

May 31, 2022: Day 31: endurance I’m not someone that does endurance training, but I do enjoy a good bike-ride once in a while. It helps if the bike path is …

May 30, 2022: 🔗 How I Experience the Web Today (via Daring Fireball) I think most people have seen this. What got me to post it here, apart from bookmarking it, was …

May 30, 2022: Day 30: fish Haven’t got a good photo related to fish, so I figured a photo of a kingfisher would do. #mbmay

May 30, 2022: Working on another component design for work. Actually, it’s closer to augmenting an existing system to accommodate a new requirement. I’m …

May 29, 2022: Humour In Conference Videos — Less Is More It might be just me but I get a little put off with over-the-top attempts at humour in developer conference videos. I’m four minutes into a conference …

May 29, 2022: Day 29: stripes #mbmay

May 28, 2022: Day 28: fair Four people, two balls each. A fair game of bocce played on a fairly nice autumn day. #mbmay

May 27, 2022: 🔗 Don’t defer quality This resonated with me today. I’ve been thinking on how we can use what we’ve built a few months for something …

May 27, 2022: Day 27: written A page from my on-again off-again attempts at carrying a physical notebook with me. Surprising how much the phone case obstructs the …

May 27, 2022: New mug today. Not as large as the last mug-related merch I’ve received — that crown is retained by the Stratechery mug — but still a decent …

May 27, 2022: It was only after I switch to Ecosia that I realised how often I use DuckDuckGo’s shortcuts like !g. It would be nice if Ecosia had them as …

May 26, 2022: Day 26: schedule Made it to the bus stop on time. Fortunately, so did the bus. #mbmay

May 26, 2022: Listening to today’s Stratechery on Microsoft Build keynote. Sounds like Microsoft wants to offer AI-assisted developer tools to “keep …

May 25, 2022: I really enjoy using terminal UI tools, like Vim and K9S. They’re not easy to pick up, but there’s just something so satisfying about …

May 25, 2022: Day 25: mountain Warburton, taken in March 2020. #mbmay

May 24, 2022: Day 24: intricate #mbmay

May 23, 2022: Day 23: plain Although quite plain in appearance compared to other native birds, what the currawong lacks in pigments they more than make up with …

May 22, 2022: Day 22: textile Wool shopping with my Nonna about a month ago. Trying to decide the best colour and thickness for a blanket. #mbmay

May 21, 2022: Day 21: symmetry Okay, I’ll come clean. I have no idea what this is. It’s located in a park I usually walk through, and there’s …

May 21, 2022: The cafe that I go to on weekends is just across the road from a polling station, so it’s having a bumper of a day. A lot of people getting …

May 20, 2022: Day 20: beverage Enjoyed during the same meal I had yesterday: a mixed-berry smoothy. #mbmay

May 19, 2022: Day 19: indulgence Full disclosure: this isn’t the type of muffin I actually ordered. My goto is usually raspberry and white chocolate, but …

May 19, 2022: Booked flights yesterday for Canberra. Got my itinerary and confirmation email. Ok, good. Then got an email offering “ideas” of places to …

May 18, 2022: Day 18: random Tails. #mbmay

May 17, 2022: Day 17: hold Holding my reusable cup as it’s holding my morning coffee. #mbmay

May 16, 2022: WWDC Videos In Broadtail Some more work on Broadtail. This time, I added the ability to use it to download Apple WWDC videos. The way it works is based on the existing RSS …

May 16, 2022: Currently reading: Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell 📚 So far an excellent read.

May 16, 2022: Day 16: time My kitchen clock, which occasionally breaks in such a way that it’s not even right twice a day. #mbmay

May 15, 2022: Day 15: clouds Taken during the Summer, which is usually when we get our most interesting cloud formations. #mbmay

May 14, 2022: Watching the Google I/O presentation on Google Wallet reminds me of all the presentations I’ve watch over the years of products and frameworks …

May 14, 2022: Day 14: fence #mbmay

May 13, 2022: Day 13: community #mbmay

May 12, 2022: Cloud Formation "ValidationError at typeNameList" Errors I was editing some Cloud Formation today and when I tried to deploy it, I was getting this lengthy, unhelpful error message: An error occurred …

May 12, 2022: 🔗 A New Hope for Object Storage: R2 enters open beta I’ve been looking forward to giving R2 a try for a while.

May 12, 2022: Is it really necessary for Amazon to prefix AWS services with “Amazon” or “AWS”? It’s not SQS, it’s Amazon SQS. It …

May 12, 2022: Day 12: tranquility Part of a walk I occasionally do, near Macedon. There’s nothing special about this particular spot, but I always feel at my …

May 12, 2022: It’s developer conference video watching time again! 🙌 The Google I/O videos are starting to come out, so I’ll be switching my TV viewing …

May 11, 2022: Failing to keep things simple in the software designs I’m responsible for seems to be a problem I keep running into. I’m always coming up …

May 11, 2022: Day 11: maroon #mbmay

May 10, 2022: Day 10: pot The plastic pot I received at the Ballarat Beer Festival in February. #mbmay

May 9, 2022: Feed Rules In Broadtail Generally, when there’s a video that I’m interesting in watching, I take a look at Broadtail to see if it’s available. When it is, I go ahead and …

May 9, 2022: This week’s ear-worm: TUNIC (Original Game Soundtrack) by Lifeformed × Janice Kwan. Favourite track: To Far Shores. 🎵

May 9, 2022: Day 9: bloom A bunch of bloomin’ wattles. #mbmay

May 9, 2022: I use to enjoy reading tech blogs, like the ones from Slack and Shopify, that talk about some new framework or how they solved a certain problem. But …

May 8, 2022: Day 8: union Had some trouble with this one today, so I thought I’d hit it up in the textbooks. #mbmay

May 7, 2022: Managed to setup Wireguard VPN on my home network this morning so I can remote in when on the road. Very simple setup at the moment: only a single …

May 7, 2022: Day 7: park The park in Benalla, taken last month during our drive to Canberra. #mbmay

May 6, 2022: Imagine that there’s an open source project that has some modest traction but only one maintainer, and that maintainer wants to make a small …

May 6, 2022: Day 6: silhouette Photo taken by my boss in 2014 while we were in the Cook Islands for work. #mbmay

May 5, 2022: Day 5: Earth One of the first photos from Himawari-8, a JMA weather satellite that went online while I was working at the Bureau of Meteorology. The …

May 4, 2022: The Podcast Favourites App In today’s issue of “useless apps that nobody but me would want to use”, I’ve managed to get a version of the Podcast Favourites app built …

May 4, 2022: Day 4: thorny This plant was less thorny than it once would have been, although there’s at least one thorn that those dethroning it missed. …

May 3, 2022: Day 3: experimental An experimental Arduino sketch, built using Tinygo, to see if I could get something displayed on the LCD. #mbmay

May 3, 2022: Have finally got an approach for producing signed and notarised MacOS apps that is invokable from the command line and that consistently produce …

May 2, 2022: Those that say “keep your user documentation up to date, not only for others but for yourself in the future,” are absolutely correct. You …

May 2, 2022: The pièce de résistance of media with dynamic ad insertion (podcasts/streaming services/etc.) is being presented with same ad twice in a row. As much …

May 2, 2022: Part of me is wondering whether it makes sense giving Mastodon a try, maybe setting up a domain and instance hosted by Masto. The only thing stopping …

May 2, 2022: Day 2: photo The only photo of mine that I have on the wall. #mbmay

May 1, 2022: Day 1: switch I usually sit at that table. But today, I decided to switch to the other side. #mbmay

Apr 30, 2022: Our council has started using electric garbage trucks for collecting waste from park bins, which I think is a great move. If I had one suggestion, it …

Apr 29, 2022: GitLab Search Subscriptions with NetNewsWire I’m working (with others) on a project that’s using GitLab to host the code, and I’m looking for a better way to be notified of new …

Apr 28, 2022: Woke up at 5 AM this morning for an early coding session today. Really want to fix this process of notarising a Mac app from the command line so that …

Apr 27, 2022: Arbitrage. That was the word I was trying to remember.

Apr 27, 2022: Dealing with identities and notarisation is a huge pain. You make an archive in Xcode, notarise it, Xcode says it’s notarised successfully, you …

Apr 27, 2022: Thinking about Twitter and newsletters during my morning walk, I wonder: did Twitter actually do anything with Revue after they bought it last year, …

Apr 27, 2022: Didn’t sleep well last night. Why? Because it was the first night of on call that I’ve had in a while, and I was afraid of being woken up by …

Apr 26, 2022: I went to the dentist a few weeks ago (for the first time in five years 🙈) and the dentist asked if I was grinding my teeth. I said “no” …

Apr 26, 2022: What Would Get Me Back to Using Twitter Again Congratulations, Elon Musk, on your purchase of Twitter. I’m sure you’ve got a bunch of ideas of how you want to move the company forward. …

Apr 25, 2022: Thinking about that last post a little more, maybe it’s just a matter of framing. After all, if others didn’t post about what …

Apr 25, 2022: I sometimes wonder, during days where I have very little to say, if it would be better to talk about something “trivial” like a new TV …

Apr 23, 2022: For want of a new tool, Xcode command line tools needs to be upgraded. For want of upgraded Xcode command line tools, Xcode needs to be upgraded. For …

Apr 23, 2022: Oh, I hope not.

Apr 23, 2022: A few people I know are isolating due to Covid-19, so I stayed in last night. I rewatched Helvetica by Gary Hustwit. Last time I watched it was at the …

Apr 23, 2022: Started reading: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It was page 2, when I read the name of the mobile app the protaginst was working on, …

Apr 22, 2022: During the last four days, I drove home from Canberra (not a bad thing), my job went live with the project I’m working on, I intended the …

Apr 20, 2022: Just got my new passport today. Shortest six weeks of my life. 😉

Apr 20, 2022: 🔗 Facebook on 30 Percent Platform Fees: ‘Hold Our Beer’ Meta talking about platform fees for the metaverse feels to me like a school rock-band talking …

Apr 18, 2022: Went to the National Gallery of Australia today. Must say that I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I didn’t think of myself as someone who …

Apr 17, 2022: Trying to use GitHub Codespaces on an iPad. It sorta works. When it does, it works quite well. But there are times when the Enter and cursor keys just …

Apr 16, 2022: Good morning from Canberra. Photo’s taken just a little after 7:30 this morning.

Apr 15, 2022: Dad and I will be driving to Canberra today to spend some time with the family over the Easter long weekend. Estimate travel time is 6.5 hours, so the …

Apr 14, 2022: Really enjoying the newsletter Speaking Tech by Michael DeHann. It reminds me a lot of Steve Yeggi’s Drunken Blog Rants.

Apr 13, 2022: The thing about Severance is, while it may be the case that those on the severed floor at Lumon are living through a mega-corp workplace dystopia, at …

Apr 13, 2022: Started watching Severance yesterday and I got to say, it’s pretty good. Certainly something that grabbed me early, which is probably the reason …

Apr 12, 2022: A Case For Mocking in Unit Tests Here’s a short account of a realisation I had this morning on the occasional usefulness of mocks in unit tests. I’ve never been a huge fan …

Apr 12, 2022: Love this remark from Gruber about the comment from Twitter about Musk’s board seat: The first thing I’ll note is that Agrawal had to share the “brief …

Apr 11, 2022: Passport renewal forms filled in and sent away, along with new passport photos. Apparently there’s a bit of a backlog, and it will take six …

Apr 10, 2022: Finished reading: Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece. Great read, especially about all the work the Indyweb is doing, and the principals behind …

Apr 10, 2022: Went for a walk this afternoon and came home to two deliveries of online orders, which was quite surprising. Guess I wasn’t the only one working …

Apr 9, 2022: Fired up Logic Pro for the first time in a while. Trying a rearrangement of Passion for Exploring from the VVVVVV Sound Track. Got the chorus sounding …

Apr 9, 2022: Had a drinks with friends and watched a comedy set at Comedy Republic last night. Nice place for a catch up. Managed to get a table before it got …

Apr 8, 2022: On the subject of Twitter’s edit button announcement, I find it amusing that they tweeted about it on April 1, only to tweet again a few days …

Apr 8, 2022: I don’t know how people on Twitter live without an edit button. I’m always posting something, then a minute later finding either a …

Apr 8, 2022: Testing modern systems is the worst. It feels like half the time is spent either logging into something, or troubleshooting the various layers of …

Apr 7, 2022: After a hard day of work, it’s great to live a little vicariously by listening to the story of how John Siracusa chose the indy life on …

Apr 6, 2022: Something I wonder about these web3 and NFT projects: if the wealth aspect was removed, and there was no possibility of material gain, how many people …

Apr 5, 2022: Just started Safari up for the first time on this laptop and I was greeted with the new “tabs” they were working on last year. Can’t …

Apr 4, 2022: It’s the end of the day and I’m struggling to think about what to write here. All I can think about is work and some personal stuff going …

Apr 4, 2022: Doing a small weekend/week-long project at the moment to track favourite moments in a few podcasts I’m listening to. This is something that …

Apr 3, 2022: Walked a little of the Castlemaine to Maldon bike trail today, which runs besides the tourist railway line. Usually a steam train travels along it, …

Apr 2, 2022: I was compelled to try the Substack app this morning after wanting to make a comment on a post. I might use it to read the few newsletters I’ve …

Apr 1, 2022: Two new awstool commands: one for browsing SSM parameters and one for simply viewing JSON log files. The SSM parameter one was especially handy, as I …

Apr 1, 2022: 🔗 Not an April Fool: Dyson announces apocalyptic filter-headphone combo Yes, the product is weird, but what prompted this link-post is the remark …

Mar 31, 2022: Even after 18 years of use, I still get blown away at how amazingly useful the command line can be for doing anything slightly non-trivial with text …

Mar 31, 2022: An amusing thought came to me after reading Gruber’s post on Facebook and TikTok. Here’s Facebook hiring a strategy firm that is considering mediums …

Mar 30, 2022: Scene: work. Team: here’s the tasks we need to do, here’s how long they will take, and we’ll probably get it done on 24 April. …

Mar 29, 2022: I’ve been racking my brain trying to best work out how to organise the code for awstools. My goals are to make it possible to have view models …

Mar 29, 2022: Credit to Apple for the work they did to get x86 working seamlessly on the M1. It’s only just now, after 6 hours of use, that I realised I …

Mar 29, 2022: My theorem regarding email: the chance of me reading an email from a sender is inversely proportional to the number of messages received from that …

Mar 29, 2022: 🔗 Stay on the bus The subject here is photography but I think it can be applied to any other creative endeavour out there. Resonated for me as well.

Mar 28, 2022: Meetings really take it out of me. I had 4 hours worth of meetings today and now I’m really drained. And it’s not just because they were …

Mar 27, 2022: More work on the AWS tools, mainly rebuilding the UI framework. Need to rip out all the Operation type stuff, as BubbleTea already does this using …

Mar 27, 2022: Doing a lot of terminal UI app development recently. It’s not easy but I’ve forgotten how much fun it is. Requires a fair bit of thought, not only to …

Mar 26, 2022: More work on Broadtail this morning. Managed to get the new favourite stuff finished. Favourites are now a dedicated entity, instead of being tied to …

Mar 25, 2022: An idea for that micro-bulk-image tool: instead of prioritising uploads, maybe prioritise processing of already uploaded images. Things like cropping, …

Mar 25, 2022: New AWS Tools Commands For a while now, I’ve been wanting some tools which would help manage AWS resources that would also run in the terminal. I know in most circumstances …

Mar 25, 2022: Woke up expecting today to be long and annoying, but it turned out not to be as annoying as I anticipated (or as long). I guess the lesson here is not …

Mar 25, 2022: Got my copy of Bloch’s Effective Java out today for the first time in years, in order to prepare for an interview. As far as books about …

Mar 25, 2022: No day trip to Warburton this year: too much to do at work unfortunately. I’ve got a day in leau owed to me so we’ll see if I could make it in April.

Mar 24, 2022: Wondering if there’s a way where I could quit my job and spend my waking hours building text-based UI applications. Not sure there’s a lot …

Mar 23, 2022: Doing some tool smithing at work to make my current task a little easier. Using Bubble Tea to build a TUI-based SQS message browser. Early days so far …

Mar 22, 2022: Even more work on Feed Journaler. Still trying to tune the title removal logic. Will probably require a lot of testing.

Mar 22, 2022: The “Explore Repositories” sidebar on GitHub’s home page (if you’re logged in) is a bit strange. Why am I getting recommendations for projects that I …

Mar 21, 2022: Hmm, I’m wondering if Broadtail needs a mode for downloading the audio of a video only, and uploading it to a podcasting service like …

Mar 21, 2022: Showing Only Changed Files in Git Log This technique shows only the changed files in a git log call without having to show the entire patch: git log --name-only ...

Mar 21, 2022: If there’s anyone else out there using Buffalo to build web-apps, I just discovered that it doesn’t clean up old versions of bundled …

Mar 21, 2022: Showing A File At a Specific Git Revision To display the contents of a file at a given revision in Git, run the following command: $ git show <revision>:<filename> For example, to …

Mar 21, 2022: 🔗 A big bet to kill the password for good Lot of talk about getting the user experience/OS compatability right, which is good. But I see no real …

Mar 20, 2022: I may need to shake up my podcast listening habits a little. I subscribe to several tech-based podcasts which I regularly listen to. But because I am …

Mar 19, 2022: A snapshot of the indie-web style project mentioned yesterday: This is just static HTML and JavaScript at the moment. The idea is that each of these …

Mar 19, 2022: We were hoping for a game of bocce in Argyle Square, which has a bocce pitch. But alas! Beaten there by some Grand Prix event. 🙁

Mar 18, 2022: Code Review Software Sucks. Here's How I Would Improve It This post is about code reviews, and the software that facilitates them. I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of code reviews, so a lot of …

Mar 18, 2022: Revising the micro-bulk-uploader project. I’ve been reading a lot about IndieAuth and Micropub formats and I got really excited about it. I …

Mar 18, 2022: I forgot that yesterday was St. Patricks Day. But I did wear a green polo, listened to some Celtic inspired music, and watched a few episodes of Derry …

Mar 17, 2022: Sometimes I wish I had the patients (and the hardware) to play some of the video games indies have been releasing. After reading about them, or …

Mar 17, 2022: Reading the chapter on Microformats in Indie Microblogging brought me back to uni where we were taught about the Semantic Web. I tell you, I feel …

Mar 16, 2022: An important tenet of software development that I don’t think is appreciated that much: make your software easy to test. This includes building …

Mar 16, 2022: 🔗 Go 1.18 Release Notes Happy “generics finally in Go” day. (I wouldn’t call myself someone who was itching for the Go devs to add …

Mar 15, 2022: Broadtail 0.0.7 Released Broadtail 0.0.7 about a week ago. This included some restyling of the job list on the home page, which now includes a progress bar updated …

Mar 15, 2022: Learning Through Video Mike Crittenden wrote a post this morning about how he hates learning through videos. I know for myself that I occasionally do prefer videos for …

Mar 14, 2022: 🔗 Kubernetes 101 A pretty good introduction about the fundamentals of Kubernetes, and also the post in question here.

Mar 14, 2022: I was ask today by someone at work1 if I knew of a good post describing the fundamentals of Kubernetes. I remember reading one several months ago …

Mar 13, 2022: Finished reading: Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod 📚 Another book full of thought provoking advice that could be read …

Mar 12, 2022: Hard to get out of old habits. I’ve started reading Indie Microblogging by Manton today. So far a terrific read — which natually means that I stopped …

Mar 11, 2022: This is by far the most useful quick action I’ve made in Automator. It generates a UUID, and places it in the pasteboard. I’ve got it …

Mar 10, 2022: I think it’s time to close the “Untitled Summer Project”, the service I was working on to upload files to S3 for publishing on Drummer. The goal …

Mar 10, 2022: Here’s another clip of the echidna, taken from the same 2 minute video I took yesterday. It’s also the third video of wildlife looking for …

Mar 10, 2022: Went for my afternoon walk yesterday, and saw an echidna looking for food. That doesn’t happen every day, so it seemed like a good subject for a …

Mar 9, 2022: Wondering if I could part with A$ 10,000.00 on a souped up Mac Studio. Very tempting, but that’s a fair bit of money.

Mar 8, 2022: I’m looking for a new CMS for my side-project journal, which is currently on Drummer and Old School. I’m looking at write.as as a possible …

Mar 7, 2022: My printed Day One journals for 2021 have arrived, much quicker than I expected. They came out nicely. I think paper covers are the way to go — they …

Mar 6, 2022: I was reminded about the post on streaming apps by John Siracusa when I was browsing Apple Maps today. Do you know that after a search, it takes three …

Mar 5, 2022: Some More Updates of Broadtail I’ve made some more changes to Broadtail over the last couple of weeks. The home page now shows a list of recently published videos below the …

Mar 5, 2022: We had a bit of rain last night so the Currawongs were out in force today. It’s always a pleasure listening to their calls, especially when they’re …

Mar 4, 2022: Super busy week this week. A couple of long days, with a bunch of long design and planning meetings that my voice is now hoarse. But only a couple of …

Mar 4, 2022: Slack’s not great for resolving arguments. I’m in one now at work. Nothing heated, just a disagreement about a certain design choice. But …

Mar 3, 2022: Two things in life there’s never enough of: time, and available USB ports.

Mar 2, 2022: Speaking of nice development experiences, I took a look at the Playdate SDK yesterday. Docs and tools are really well polished. Managed to get a …

Mar 2, 2022: Time and Money Spending a lot of time in Stripe recently. It’s a fantastic payment gateway and a pleasure to use, compared to something like PayPal which …

Mar 1, 2022: Nothing so focuses the mind like a deadline, and the mandate to keep it. The easy deadlines are the ones imposed by others. Much harder, and one that …

Feb 28, 2022: 🔗 Simulating Amazon DynamoDB unique constraints using transactions A technique to simulate a uniqueness constraint on a field not used in the key. …

Feb 27, 2022: Have finally got around to arranging the printed books of my 2021 Day One journal entries. Lot of entries last year, enough for two books actually. …

Feb 26, 2022: Looking at wiki software this morning to set up a personal wiki. Lots of great projects out there, it was difficult to choose. Deceided to try …

Feb 25, 2022: Little bit difficult to think about much else given the current news from Ukraine. Certainly doesn’t feel right posting about the trivial things …

Feb 24, 2022: A good indication that I’m not thrilled about doing something is when I start thinking of ways to automate it. Sure I could spend 5 minutes …

Feb 23, 2022: I’m trying a little experiment on myself where I carry a little notebook with me wherever I go. My goal is to see whether I’d get any …

Feb 22, 2022: Let nobody say that innovation is no longer possible in MacOS. One idea I have: making it possible to move windows, off-screen and out of reach thanks …

Feb 21, 2022: I went to the newsagents today to buy a ruler. It’s been a little while since I’ve been in one, and I always enjoy going, especially to …

Feb 21, 2022: Cling Wrap I bought this roll of cling wrap when I moved into my current place. Now, after 6.5 years and 150 metres, it’s finally all used up. In the grand …

Feb 20, 2022: Trip to Ballarat and the Beer Festival I had the opportunity to go to Ballarat yesterday to attend the beer festival with a couple of mates. It’s been a while since I last travelled …

Feb 19, 2022: Regional train trip today. Nice doing something different.

Feb 18, 2022: Finally, for the first time in roughly 2.5 months, I have the opportunity to do a real coding task at work. GoLand, I’ve missed you! 🥰

Feb 18, 2022: OS Vendors and Online Accounts Looks like the next version of Windows will require an online account, and while the reason for this could be something else, I’m guessing this would …

Feb 17, 2022: Currently reading: Persuader by Lee Child 📚 Yes, I know it’s like the fifth time I’ve read this, but I really like this novel. One of his …

Feb 17, 2022: The John Curtain Hotel, the pub my friends and I use to go to as uni students, is up for sale. It was a pretty good pub at the time — the $10 parmas …

Feb 16, 2022: Casey Newton published a great interview with the dev behind Web3 Is Going Just Great. The whole thing is worth a read, but she made this choice …

Feb 16, 2022: I’m wondering if the Apple Pencil would do well with a dedicated charging case. I only use my Pencil occasionally so I don’t keep it on the iPad, and …

Feb 16, 2022: Someone shared a great Q&A video with Seth Godin yesterday. I was hoping to listen to it at the gym but the video — which is hosted by Vimeo and …

Feb 15, 2022: My YouTube Watching Setup I’m not a sophisticated YouTube watcher but I do watch a lot of YouTube. For a while I was happy enough to simply use the YouTube app with a …

Feb 14, 2022: Apparently household solar panels are so prevalent in some states that it’s at risk of destabilising the grid. It’s a bit of a shame that …

Feb 13, 2022: I was entering a commit message in GitHub, when I was shown the following tip: ProTip! Great commit summaries contain fewer than 50 characters. Place …

Feb 12, 2022: It may not have cooled down quite yet but with the days getting shorter, Autumn is feeling really close now. Time to break out the Hot Cross Buns …

Feb 11, 2022: Reminder That Your Content Isn't Really Yours on Medium #3 Looks like Medium has had a redesign recently, with recommended posts now being featured more prominently. Instead of appearing at the end of the …

Feb 11, 2022: There’s nothing quite as deflationary as returning home from a holiday. After the drive and the unpacking, I always find myself having nothing to do …

Feb 10, 2022: I wish I had more to say today, on this, our last day of our summer holiday. So in leau of a better post, here’s a photo of a wallaby I saw on my …

Feb 9, 2022: Played golf for the first time in roughly 9 years. I’m terrible at the game but got a little better near the end thanks to my sister’s excellent …

Feb 9, 2022: 🔗 Why Simple Is Smart A collection of useful writing tips for journalists, but I think would also be helpful for anyone else writing online.

Feb 9, 2022: Last year, when we were on our holiday in Phillip Island, my parents suggested that I do the Churchill Island walk. I added that as a reminer in my …

Feb 8, 2022: I’m starting to think that the 1x zoom on this Pixel 6 might be a bit too wide. I was scrolling through some photos I took this morning, hoping …

Feb 7, 2022: Reading buddy.

Feb 6, 2022: These signs were up around town today. We went to the usual places they have markets but there was nothing there: no stalls or anything. It’s only …

Feb 5, 2022: Had the opportunity to play Ticket To Ride, Europe today. It took a little while to get my head around the rules, particuarily around how cards should …

Feb 4, 2022: I tried walking around with a notebook yesterday to… you know… be the type of person that carries a notebook. First attempt did not go well: got in …

Feb 3, 2022: I used the BBEdit diffing tool for the first time today, and I must say that it’s actually quite good. Shame I didn’t try it sooner. It …

Feb 2, 2022: The "Too Much Data" Error in Buffalo Projects If there’s anyone else out there using Buffalo to build web-apps, I just discovered that it doesn’t clean up old versions of bundled …

Feb 2, 2022: Signed up for an online course this morning, then browsing the web an hour later I found someone else offering another course on the same topic that …

Feb 1, 2022: I really dislike code reviews. I admit it. I don’t like doing them, and I don’t like having it done to the code I write. I know this is my …

Feb 1, 2022: 🔗 No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari (via Daring Fireball) I see nothing wrong with this. Apple has got their own priority backlog …

Jan 31, 2022: Watching a lot of vintage computing videos recently, it’s staggering how much system “software” was actually burned into ROM. The …

Jan 30, 2022: I’m feeling a bit stuck in my career at the moment, and I’m wondering if the thing that’s keeping me from moving to the next level …

Jan 29, 2022: A couple of months ago, I put my name down on a waiting list for an online course I thought would be useful for my career. I got an email last night …

Jan 28, 2022: It’s interesting. I’ve lived in Melbourne my whole life, and there are large, large swatches of the metro area that I’ve never seen …

Jan 27, 2022: One thing that has been lost from all this working from home is the ability to use things like whiteboards to sketch out an idea with a team. I bought …

Jan 26, 2022: Finished reading: The Dip by Seth Godin 📚 Short book: only took a few hours to get through it. Message is quite simple but will require some courage …

Jan 26, 2022: On Posting Daily I recently listen to an interview with Seth Godin on the Tim Ferris podcast. In that interview, Seth mentions that he writes up to five blog posts a …

Jan 25, 2022: At the cafe this morning, someone arrived with a dog that shares the same name as myself. It was surprisingly tricky not to respond to this person …

Jan 24, 2022: Boosted. 💉💉💉 Also bought a “Moderna muffin” to mark the occasion. (it’s just a chocolate-chip muffin from a nice bakery) 🧁

Jan 23, 2022: It’s amusing to see that Google is confident enough in their AI to tell me that I’ve received a SMS message that is spam, yet not quite confident …

Jan 22, 2022: I got a bit of a streak going so I was hoping to post something here today. Only trouble is that I had some nervousness and pessimism preventing me …

Jan 21, 2022: The Future of Computing I got into computers when I was quite young, and to satisfy my interest, I read a lot of books about computing during my primary school years. I …

Jan 21, 2022: Shut down one blog this week and moved all the posts into this one. There’s another blog that I haven’t updated for a while, but people …

Jan 20, 2022: I posit to you that the reason developers find it hard to do anything related with encryption is not because they’re in the weeds of how the …

Jan 19, 2022: I was looking for a simple timer this morning until I remembered that the Vivaldi browser actually comes with one. And sure enough, it works. The …

Jan 18, 2022: It might be time to unsubscribe from developer related podcasts that talk about new technologies and platforms. It’s stressful seeing all these …

Jan 17, 2022: 🔗 SpiceDAO wins a $3 million auction to buy an extremely rare storyboard book of Dune, only to learn that owning a book doesn’t confer them …

Jan 16, 2022: Bocce in Fitzroy Gardens. Grand final for the 2021 season (yes, my friends and I came up with the idea of grand finals for our little casual comp 😏).

Jan 15, 2022: It’s a shame that there’s a non-insignificant number of people and companies that I admire and appreciate for their contribution to tech, …

Jan 14, 2022: While poking around the Micro.blog XML-RPC documentation, I had a flashback about SOAP. I had some limited experience with SOAP and it was always a …

Jan 13, 2022: PGBC Scoring Rules I get a bit of a thrill when there’s a need to design a mini-language. I have one facing me now for a little project I’m responsible for, …

Jan 13, 2022: 🔗 Wordle and IP law: What happens when a hot game gets cloned I guess the moral of the story is that you might have the legal right to do something …

Jan 13, 2022: Wordle 208 6/6 ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 🟩⬜⬜🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Was close to missing it today. The winning guess was a bit of a fluke.

Jan 12, 2022: On the Moxie Marlinspike Post About web3 Today, I took a look at the Moxie Marlinspike post about web31. I found this post interesting for a variety of reasons, not least because unlike many …

Jan 12, 2022: Burnt Out on Design I’ve been doing a heap of design work at my job at the moment; writing documents, drawing up architecture diagrams, etc. I’d thought I …

Jan 12, 2022: I’ve been listening to, and buying, a fair bit of music from Anders Enger Jensen over the last few days. My current ear-worm is about half the …

Jan 11, 2022: One of the domains for a blog that I’ve since abandoned is coming up for renewal in a few days. Might be a good as time as any to shut it down.

Jan 11, 2022: The latest episode of Core Intuition (496) resonated with me, especially the discussion about settling and sharing creative works near the end. I know …

Jan 8, 2022: I think I’ve settled on my word for 2022: finisher. Someone who finishes what he starts. This is something that I’m not super good at. I …

Jan 7, 2022: 🔗 The Algorithmic Ad Monster Cometh for Podcasts I’m starting to hear more of these types of ads in the shows I follow, and I despise them. I …

Jan 7, 2022: It’s interesting to see the technical knowledge and priorities of a software development team come through in the product they work on. Case in …

Jan 6, 2022: Yet another reminder to myself to write things down when they come to me. I had the perfect word for a post, but when it came time to write it I …

Jan 6, 2022: There’s a lot I don’t like about all the “web3” stuff going on: bad actors and environmental impact being on the top of the …

Jan 5, 2022: I’m adding some photos to last year’s journal in preparation for turning it into a book. I’m honestly trying to avoid rushing it and just saying “ah, …

Jan 5, 2022: We haven’t had any decent rain for several weeks now. So with the Bureau predicting rain today, I’m looking outside and at the rain radar …

Jan 4, 2022: 🔗 Microsoft fixes harebrained Y2K22 Exchange bug that disrupted email worldwide Dates are hard, but it seems to me that treating the first two digits …

Jan 4, 2022: Back at work today, conceptually if not physically. The hardest part of coming back to work after some time off is the feeling that you never actually …

Jan 3, 2022: That silly maxination countdown site is live again as I’ve just booked my Covid-19 booster shot.

Jan 2, 2022: Wangaratta station. Took a V/Line train back to the city after helping someone with the drive to Canberra.

Jan 1, 2022: Happy new year. Time for the change of calendar.

Dec 30, 2021: I only just realised how good the company name Square was. It’s not just the shape of the RFC reader, it’s also in the saying …

Dec 29, 2021: I’m seeing many bloggers in my RSS feed talking about how they’re reading “Four Thousand Weeks.” I’m sure like many …

Dec 28, 2021: Photos Of Buildings Important To You Now that we have decent cameras in our pocket and virtually unlimited space, there’s no reason not to take as many photos (and video) of things …

Dec 27, 2021: Got around to releasing Feed Journaler v0.3. Headline feature: option to enable launch on login, so that there’s no need to remember to do so …

Dec 24, 2021: I wouldn’t call myself religious — I not someone who reguarily goes to church — but I do have a standing gig on my calendar: playing the pipe organ at …

Dec 24, 2021: Ugh, should’ve taken today off.

Dec 23, 2021: Well, I feel like a bit of a turkey. I just spent two weeks researching technologies that will help us aggregate messages at scale, only to have a 30 …

Dec 23, 2021: Only two more days of work left to go before the Christmas break. It’s only a week long, but it will still be welcomed.

Dec 21, 2021: I try to be careful about future-proofing the code I write, but I just did a weird thing when choosing the type of clock to use for seeding a random …

Dec 21, 2021: Still Off Twitter A little while ago, I stopped using Twitter on a daily basis as the continuous barrage of news was getting me down. Six weeks after doing so, I wrote …

Dec 20, 2021: I’ve been doing a lot of investigation work for my day job recently, looking for and evaluating tools and services to see if they can be useful …

Dec 19, 2021: Finished reading: The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau 📚 Shout-out to …

Dec 17, 2021: Yet another story about an Android app with malware. What I’d like to know is why these sorts of apps are getting downloads at all. They seem …

Dec 15, 2021: I’m starting to see year in review posts pop up in my feeds. My first thought is “it’s a bit early for that”. But now …

Dec 14, 2021: There are days when you’ve got your head down and are plowing through your tasks as everything you touch gets done. Then there are days when …

Dec 14, 2021: 100 Day Writing Streak I promise I won’t post about every single milestone that comes along, but I’m quite happy that I reached 100 consecutive days of at least …

Dec 14, 2021: 🔗 Woman lost @metaverse Instagram handle days after Facebook name change She had it for 10 years, and only got it back once the media caught wind of …

Dec 13, 2021: Saw this on my lunchtime walk today. I don’t often see cockatoos find food this way.

Dec 13, 2021: I’ve ordered a new desk lamp with a warmer light than the one I’m using now. But it also has the switch on the cord that could be …

Dec 13, 2021: Someone I work with shared a tweet claiming that Log4j, the logging library with the remote code execution vulnerability that was discovered late last …

Dec 10, 2021: My new Pixel 6 phone arrive yesterday, a full 40 days before the estimated delivery date. I’m now in the process of slowly setting it up. Most …

Dec 10, 2021: I tend to be indecisive, and during the last few days, a choice that I have to make at work has brought me to a standstill. I only just now resolve it …

Dec 9, 2021: A quote from Gruber about Spotify Wrapped: Me, personally, I still wouldn’t care a whit about it. My music taste is old and boring — I neither need to …

Dec 8, 2021: Follow up from yesterday’s post on the film crew working around my house, I found another notice from them in my letter-box. The production …

Dec 7, 2021: For the last couple a weeks, a production crew have been filming around my place. I wish I noted down the production they’re working on. It was …

Dec 7, 2021: Giving the email newsletter feature a try. I don’t have many long form posts so I’m going with weekly-emails-with-all-posts setting. …

Dec 6, 2021: I bought a new desk lamp over the weekend. After trying it last night, I’m not super happy with it. For one thing, the light is way too cool for …

Dec 3, 2021: On Treating Users As If They're Just There To Buy Stuff Ars Technica has published a third post about the annoying user experience of Microsoft Edge in as many days. Today’s was about a notice that appears …

Dec 2, 2021: Tip for anyone with an email newsletter: please include a link to the post online, or a link to the newsletter sign-up page somewhere in the email. …

Dec 2, 2021: 🔗 Write 5x more but write 5x less (via The Daily Graph) This post itself is interesting but what made me want to link to it here is that this is one …

Dec 1, 2021: It’s a bit of the shame that the best technique for projecting an iPad onto a monitor, for the purpose of sharing it in video-conferences, …

Dec 1, 2021: 🔗 Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge Oh, Microsoft. You spend all this time and effort trying to win back users to …

Nov 30, 2021: I used MacOS dark mode for the first time last night. An inoperable desk lamp has left my workspace quite dim in the evening, causing eye strain due …

Nov 29, 2021: Weekend In Mansfield Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to spend some time with my parents who were staying in Mansfield, in regional Victoria. We were staying in a …

Nov 26, 2021: Saved once again by Google Pay. I was almost at the cafe this morning, on my way to get some breakfast, when I realised that I walked out of the house …

Nov 25, 2021: FastMail’s spam filter has been a bit aggressive lately. I’ve seen a few emails show up in the Spam folder these last few weeks that were …

Nov 23, 2021: One of the hosts of a podcast I listen to mentioned buying a product from the company I work at, and briefly talk about using it on the show. This was …

Nov 22, 2021: I’m looking forward to the day when I can type python in any command line on any OS, and it will launch Python 3, rather than invoke some crazy …

Nov 21, 2021: Went out for breakfast again today. Wondered how long I could use my iPad without turning on my mobile hotspot. Lasted pretty well with just cached …

Nov 20, 2021: Morning walk. There will be a cafe breakfast at the end of it.

Nov 17, 2021: A podcast I was listening to mentioned a book that sounded interesting, so I checked the Kindle bookstore to see if I could buy it. Well, not only did …

Nov 17, 2021: Pro-tip for anyone using Vivaldi: you can unbind the “Cmd-Q” keyboard shortcut within Preferences so you don’t accidentally close …

Nov 17, 2021: Cookie Disclosure Popups Should be Handled by the Browser I really dislike the cookie disclosure popups that appear on websites. Ideally I shouldn’t be seeing them at all — I know that the EU requires …

Nov 17, 2021: You know those journals you see in movies where the writer is working on something, and they write down every single thing they do? I’m …

Nov 16, 2021: I wonder if there’s a way to replace MacOS’s pretty ordinary spellcheck suggestions with a straight up web-search for “define …

Nov 14, 2021: My Impressions of GitHub Codespaces The GitHub Universe 2021 conference started a few days ago and one of the features touted in the day one keynote was GitHub Codespaces. This is a …

Nov 13, 2021: Alto Catalogue Update I’ve really tied myself up in knots here. I’m spending some time working on Alto Catalogue, trying to streamline the process of uploading …

Nov 12, 2021: Today is starting out reasonably quietly. All the big development work is done and the only tasks left are the little annoying things, the …

Nov 10, 2021: A Tool That (Almost) Solved My Step Function Woes I reached the end of my tether at work today on the task I was working on. The nature of the task involved crafting an AWS Step Function with several …

Nov 10, 2021: Thinking over the NaNoWriMo short story I’m working on, there seems to be a lot scenes with characters just sitting around and talking. …

Nov 9, 2021: Really enjoying Succession season 3 at the moment, but I’m afraid I’m one of those viewers that gets a little lost in all the business …

Nov 9, 2021: Thought I’d give omg.lol a try this morning. My profile page. Looks a lot nicer than what I could come up with.

Nov 8, 2021: For the last month, I was having trouble installing software on my work laptop because I thought I lost admin privileges. But it turns out it was just …

Nov 6, 2021: Feeds In Broadtail My quest to watch YouTube without using YouTube got a little closer recently with the addition of feeds in Broadtail. This uses the YouTube RSS feed …

Nov 6, 2021: It’s a bit strange how the stopwatch on the NaNoWriMo site doesn’t automatically fill in start and end times. It knows when I start the stopwatch. It …

Nov 5, 2021: Some days I wonder why I ever considered being a software developer. 😒

Nov 5, 2021: It’s said that it’s a good idea not to blog while your angry. I think that’s good advice. After all, there’s already a lot of …

Nov 4, 2021: YAML and Accidental Programming Language Design I’m not a huge fan of YAML in general, but I do see it being useful for situations when a structured configuration language is needed. Something …

Nov 4, 2021: I’ve manage to get the first 1,000 words out of my NaNoWriMo-adjacent goal of a 10,000 word short story. I’m sure they’re pretty …

Nov 1, 2021: I really like to support independent software developers, but $150.00 for a file diffing tool is a bit much. The tool does a lot, like diffing images, …

Oct 31, 2021: Some Screenshots Of Broadtail I spent some time this morning doing some styling work on Broadtail, my silly little YouTube video download manager I’m working on. Now, I think …

Oct 30, 2021: I had the opportunity to go out for breakfast this morning. I was originally going to get it as takeaway, but it was such a lovely morning (if not a …

Oct 28, 2021: Well, it took almost a full 4 months, but I’ve finally got a solar system installed on my house. It’s not functional yet — it needs to go …

Oct 28, 2021: I was perusing my archives the other day and I’ve noticed that it’s been two years to the day since my first ever blog post. Also of note …

Oct 27, 2021: The popups for the admin password in MacOS needs a third button with the label “I wish I had the admin password, and believe me when I say that …

Oct 24, 2021: On a bit of a writing streak: 50 consecutive days of at least one blog post or journal entry. P.S. I wonder if writing an entry about this streak, …

Oct 23, 2021: More work on the project I mentioned yesterday, codenamed Broadtail. Most of the work was around the management of download jobs. I’m using a …

Oct 23, 2021: It’s good to see that Dave Winer is keeping a blog on Drummer change notes. I’m having some trouble publishing a post this morning, …

Oct 22, 2021: Start of Yet Another Project Because I Can't Help Myself One of the reasons why I stopped work on Lorikeet was that I was inspired by those on Micro.blog to setup a Plex server for my YouTube watching needs. …

Oct 22, 2021: It’s that time of year when I need to wear sunscreen if I’m going to be outside for an extended period of time. I really dislike …

Oct 22, 2021: I’ve rediscovered the joy of honey on toast. What a winning combination. Goes really well with the thickly sliced loaf of bread I had to buy (I …

Oct 21, 2021: Oh the irony. First weekend after Lockdown 6 and with plans for activities outdoors…

Oct 21, 2021: I only just realised that my Pixel 2 would be missing out of Android 12. I guess that means that I’ll be shopping for a new phone soon. The …

Oct 20, 2021: If anyone’s thinking of starting a company that extracts CO2 from the atmosphere, and you don’t mind it sounding a bit too Australian, …

Oct 19, 2021: I just finished reading through the Ars Technica live blog of the Apple event. I must say, their new chips look really good, especially the M1 Max. I …

Oct 18, 2021: Abandoning Project Lorikeet I’ll admit it: the mini-project that I have been working on may not have been a good idea. The project, which I gave the codename Lorikeet, was …

Oct 18, 2021: I try to minimise the number of regrets I will eventually have in my life, but sometimes they do happen. One regret I do have is only taking up …

Oct 17, 2021: I don’t understand people who would ruin their own website with popups thrown in my face the minute I start reading which are impossible to …

Oct 16, 2021: Two People There are two people, and each one has the same problem that they want to get solved. The first person chooses the option to pay $10 a month, and all …

Oct 15, 2021: I’ve never been someone that has their TV on all the time; but after working at home, by myself, on and off for the last 19 months, I can see …

Oct 14, 2021: My Stratechery mug has arrived. It now holds the enviable position of largest mug in my house, holding roughly 1.5x as much liquid as the mugs I …

Oct 13, 2021: The danger of playing around with blogging platforms is that you find yourself wondering which platform you should continue using. Do you split your …

Oct 13, 2021: I heard that Dave Winer has released Drummer so I decided to give it a try. Although I’m not fully sold on using an outliner to blog, I do …

Oct 12, 2021: Just arrived home from receiving my second dose of AstraZenica. Feeling pretty good about it. Not long now until full maxination. 💉💉

Oct 11, 2021: I’ve got a Shortcut on my iPad to save links to Pinboard. I want to get the page title when I save the bookmark, so I’ve added a Safari …

Oct 10, 2021: Just finished a lovely game of Wingspan with the Oceania Expansion set. It was nice playing the game with birds that I recognise.

Oct 7, 2021: This is another post lamenting the fact that too many development blogs from companies like Netflix and Shopify use a CMS that don’t publish an …

Oct 7, 2021: A lot is said about AWS offering so many services in exchange for some of them being half-baked. I just wish they baked a few of the ones I’m …

Oct 7, 2021: I know how frustrating it is to work with JSON for configuring things, but sometimes YAML can be just as bad. Surely there are better configuration …

Oct 6, 2021: That feeling when you have to do something that you’ve not only done before, but you’ve actually written a blog post about; and you use …

Oct 6, 2021: (Hyper)critical Acclaim There were a couple of events that led me to writing this post. I’m sure part of it was seeing the posts on the 10 year anniversary of Steve …

Oct 5, 2021: The eternal struggle of an Android phone owner (based on a true story): Website: Hey, check out this cool new app. Me: Looks interesting. …

Oct 5, 2021: So Facebook has an outage and now every software engineer in the world knows a bit more about how the internet is put together as they read up on how …

Oct 5, 2021: One week to go! 💉💉

Oct 4, 2021: For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driving Confluence at work, doing investigations and writing them up. It’s nice getting these …

Oct 2, 2021: This week’s ear-worm: Who Can It Be Now by Men At Work 🎵

Oct 1, 2021: On Choosing the Hard Way Forward This is about work, so the usual disclaimers about opinions being my own, etc. apply here. I have an interesting problem in front of me at the moment: …

Sep 30, 2021: Apparently my phone carrier is pretty good at promptly sending SMS messages with “offers” or “deals”, but as soon as I need to …

Sep 26, 2021: There’s no better aroma than a freshly opened bag of coffee beans.

Sep 24, 2021: Small request to developers of command line tools: please do not assume everyone is using a terminal with a dark background. Light grey text on white …

Sep 23, 2021: Listening to podcasts with automatic ad insertion can be really jarring sometimes. You’re listening along to hosts with American accents, then …

Sep 23, 2021: 🔗 File Not Found Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of …

Sep 22, 2021: I enjoy using Tot for temporary working notes. I also enjoy using Boop for manipulating text without having to go to the terminal. What would be …

Sep 22, 2021: Well, not every day you had a 5.8 magnitude earthquake around here (was originally reported as 6.0).

Sep 22, 2021: I got a bit restless this morning and just eager to get my second vaccine shot, so I’ve put together a maxination countdown to show me how many …

Sep 20, 2021: I had the opportunity to play Wingspan yesterday. Still in the process of learning it — I don’t play a lot of these sorts of board games — but so far …

Sep 19, 2021: Some Notes About the Covid-19 Situation Now that the vaccines are here and are (slowly) being rolled out, and that Covid zero is no longer achievable in any realistic sense, the pandemic …

Sep 16, 2021: You would have thought that by working from home for a year and a half, and predominantly communicating through text, that my writing skills would …

Sep 16, 2021: It’s a real shame that the powers that be insist on keeping the arcane stupidity of country-based copyright restrictions with the move to …

Sep 14, 2021: AWS Lambda function names can only be 64 characters long. 23 characters are used for the stack name 25 characters are used for the Step Function name …

Sep 14, 2021: Hmm, UV index expected to reach 4 (moderate) today, and 5 in a few days time. Might be time to dig the hat out once again.

Sep 11, 2021: For the last two months, I’ve been working on a Mac app to automatically import my blog posts into a Day One journal. I think it’s now in …

Sep 10, 2021: If it wasn’t for the use of an all-caps style, this Daring Fireball post would be a perfect reference for which words to capitalise in a title …

Sep 10, 2021: About 5 years and 3 employers ago, I was working at a government agency building an admin console for a home grown messaging system. This messaging …

Sep 9, 2021: Abound two months ago, I started feeling some strain in my wrist with my old keyboard, so I replaced it with an ergonomic one. Good news is that …

Sep 8, 2021: Really not much going on at the moment. Just a whole lot of waiting. Waiting for my next vaccine shot. Waiting for the state to reach 70% vaccination …

Sep 7, 2021: On Confluence I’m sorry. I know the saying about someone complaining about their tools. But this has been brewing for a little while and I need to get it off …

Sep 6, 2021: Working on some JavaScript which is using ES modules (i.e. import) without needing Webpack to bundle it into a single, minified file. In fact, I …

Sep 6, 2021: On Apple's Media Release Gymnastics I started listening to the latest Talk Show, where John Gruber and MG Siegler discuss Apple’s media release of the class action settlement. …

Sep 3, 2021: If anyone else needs another reason why they shouldn’t use Twitter threads as a substitute for blogs, I only just discovered today that you need …

Sep 3, 2021: So glad it’s Friday today. It’s been a heck of a week, both at work and with the current Covid situation here. Unfortunately, due to the …

Aug 31, 2021: It’s hard coming up with a good name for something. There has only been a handful of times a name has felt right. Every other time, the name I …

Aug 26, 2021: My bad spelling is going to be the end of me someday. I’ve been racking my brain trying to find out why a test wouldn’t work, trying …

Aug 26, 2021: I know everyone is entitled to a break, and it’s probably just as well it’s happening now, with not much going on in the world of tech. …

Aug 25, 2021: It’s a sad reality that as the demands of software systems go up, and more libraries and services are available for you to use, your job slowly …

Aug 24, 2021: Post Of Little Consequence I’m wouldn’t call myself a regular poster on this blog. I don’t have a goal of writing a post a day or something. But I do want to …

Aug 17, 2021: Argh, thought I would have dodge the side-effect lottery for the AstraZeneca vaccine, but nope! This morning started OK, with just a headache and a …

Aug 16, 2021: First jab of AstraZeneca booked for today. I will admit, it would have been nice to get one of the mRNA vaccines, new technology and all that, but I …

Aug 15, 2021: I wonder if Apple’s spell checker should start including a reason as to why they are making a particular suggestion. I’d be curious to …

Aug 14, 2021: The browser I’m using is offering to translate a web-app I’m working on from French to English, even though there aren’t any French …

Aug 13, 2021: Currently watching Halt And Catch Fire on SBS On Demand. An enjoyable watch but the the plumber problem is certainly there 📺

Aug 13, 2021: I hear rumours of the JS alert() function being deprecated. I hope that it isn’t so. As annoying as it may be for browser vendors to maintain …

Aug 10, 2021: Throwing a link out to this service for anyone falling into despair about the latest IPCC report and want to do something about it. 60 EUR a month to …

Aug 7, 2021: This week’s ear-worm: DiscoVision by Anders Enger Jensen 🎵

Aug 6, 2021: I discovered a downside with using a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip: it runs so cool that I can’t use it to warm my hands in cold rooms.

Aug 4, 2021: Today I start my new job, and my new commute which, since it’s on the opposite side of the city to me, features a train and a bus. It would be the …

Aug 3, 2021: Yesterday, I had the pleasure of walking a new rail trail just outside Leongatha, in South-East Gippsland. The rails are completely gone but some of …

Aug 2, 2021: Six Weeks Off Twitter It’s been roughly six weeks since I’ve stopped using Twitter on a daily basis. I initially took a break to stay away from some anxiety inducing news, …

Aug 1, 2021: Too much coffee this morning. Feeling a little bit too wired and unfocused. Fortunately I’ve got some mindless housework that needs doing that …

Jul 27, 2021: Some significant lifting of restrictions here in Melbourne. Still unable to visit family at their homes, which is a shame. But at least I’ll be …

Jul 27, 2021: Second last day at my current job. Most of the coding work was finished about a week ago, and now it’s just making the last few touchups in …

Jul 26, 2021: I don’t know if it’s a weird quirk of mine, but whenever I’m working on a software project, I get more excited about building the …

Jul 22, 2021: Seeking Out Bad News Sometimes I wonder if I’m just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe it’s because I think that if I don’t, then a problem will go unaddressed …

Jul 22, 2021: It seems like every time I’m working on something where time is of the essence, a device or operating system decides that now is the perfect …

Jul 21, 2021: There’s exactly one week left in my current job before I leave. An email, which seems to have marked the occasion, has notified me that the …

Jul 20, 2021: I can’t understand how people post to Medium. I’m sure they have nice authoring tools, and you’ll get readers for your work, but the …

Jul 17, 2021: Wow, fresh off the acquisition of Day One, it looks like Automattic is acquiring Pocket Casts. That makes two aquisitions of apps that I use on a …

Jul 16, 2021: In today’s crazy ideas to get out of things I rather not do: as part of getting solar panels, I have to get a photo of part of my roof. …

Jul 15, 2021: It seems to be that the general advice for those under 50 looking at the AstraZenica vaccine is to speak with your doctor. I don’t know how it …

Jul 13, 2021: There’s no worst combination that anxiety and boredom. Having something on your mind, while also having very little to do, there isn’t …

Jul 12, 2021: Washing sheets in winter is the worst. You are so reliant on the forecast being perfect and you have to make the call early in the morning. And of …

Jul 12, 2021: A Year On Micro.blog It’s been a year since I’ve signed up to Micro.blog and written my first post, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it …

Jul 9, 2021: I’ve got to get into the habit of writing more about what I’m doing. I never think about it at the time because it always seems like a …

Jul 9, 2021: Trying my hand at logo design for something I’m working on. I’m aiming for something that looks like a mix between a bookmark, the letter …

Jul 8, 2021: Start of new project: organising solar panels for my house.

Jul 6, 2021: Finished reading: The Sentinel by Lee Child (yep, I’m a Jack Reacher fan). 📚

Jul 5, 2021: Genius me set myself a reminder on Friday to “update the doco”. The reminder has just shown up, and I have no idea what “doco” …

Jun 26, 2021: Why I like developing in Go vs. something like NodeJS: my development setup doesn’t randomly break for some weird reason. When it does break, …

Jun 24, 2021: Credit to Vic. DHHS for including more information about the origin of new Covid-19 cases alongside the daily tally. I appreciate that this feedback …

Jun 23, 2021: I’m seeing more and more apps these days being designed as the software equivalent of catalogues, and I’m finding it quite distasteful. This is not so …

Jun 21, 2021: When it comes to organising things, whether it’s a large transition or simply the events of my day, I tend to be quite rigid in my scheduling. I …

Jun 19, 2021: I wonder if part of my indecisiveness in making large decisions, such as changing jobs, has a lot to do with the need to make everyone happy. I know …

Jun 15, 2021: I was feeling a bit under the weather yesterday so I got a Covid-19 test. In July 2020, when I last had a test, it took me 5 days to get the results. …

Jun 14, 2021: Working On The Weekend I’ve saw a Tweets last night saying that the best thing a young person can do to help their career is to work on the weekend. The implication there is …

Jun 11, 2021: I’m wondering if Slack should add a feature which, on demand, will roll-up the last several messages in a thread or channel, delete them all, …

Jun 9, 2021: A walk in the rain, with no one else around other than the currawongs. Fair bit darker than what the photo suggests.

Jun 8, 2021: I feel like the only person in the world that prefers to catch up on the WWDC keynote by reading the Ars Technica liveblog over watching it.

Jun 7, 2021: Only took 5 failed CI builds today before I realised that there may be something wrong with the code I wrote.

Jun 5, 2021: For anyone who needs it, here’s a Tampermonkey script for hiding the trending topics and recommended topics/people from Twitter’s sidebar.

Jun 4, 2021: Congratulations to Ben Thompson on the announcement of Passport. Looks to be a very promising tool for creators aiming to make a living on the open …

Jun 4, 2021: It’s a bit of a shame that we couldn’t be using something like NFC for checking in to venues, rather than QR codes. The user experience …

Jun 2, 2021: FastMail needs to steal more features from Hey. One thing that would be nice: the ability to annotate messages or threads — I think they’re …

Jun 1, 2021: Stumbling Into the Concept of Narrating Your Work About a week ago, we had a retro. One of the things that was brought up was the sense that management felt that the team was not delivering as much as …

May 31, 2021: Sheets in the washing machine. Estimated time remaining is 17 minutes. This means that they should be done in just over an hour.

May 30, 2021: Argh, people really need to stop using Twitter threads as a substitute for blog posts. I don’t want to have to go to the Twitter website to read them, …

May 27, 2021: Interesting day in that I can legitimately say that the reason I’m watching YouTube videos of puppies is because of my job.

May 27, 2021: As difficult as it is going through another lockdown here in Melbourne, it’s actually kind of reassuring. I found all this will-they, …

May 27, 2021: There seems to be lacking an emoji for expressing being in an agreement in something while also being resigned to the fact. Happy or sad would be too …

May 25, 2021: If anyone is interested in watching the recorded sessions of Google I/O 2021, you can find the videos here. Google is usually pretty good at …

May 21, 2021: Mozilla’s MDN web docs are pretty good at indicating which browser supports which web feature. But it would also be nice to see which browsers …

May 16, 2021: On the Souring Relationship Between Apple and its Developers Listening to episode #430 of ATP yesterday, it was kind of shocking to hear the loss of good will experienced by the hosts towards Apple and their …

May 11, 2021: Feature request for Fastmail: the ability to setup a private RSS feed for a folder, so that emails within it can be read in a feed reader. Similar to …

May 8, 2021: Stephen Hackett on 🎙 Flashback #18: The Google Graveyard Draft: Never fall in love in a Google Service that’s not Gmail So true.

May 8, 2021: Started working on a website for a project I’m hoping to eventually open source. Found it a little difficult to write the section on why this …

May 5, 2021: Podcast Roll 2021 Yesterday, @Munish had the courage to share his podcast subscriptions1. Sensing an opportunity to talk about with what I’m currently listening …

May 2, 2021: I’m starting to get the emails from Hover warning me of auto-renew being turned off for domains I’ve bought but never used. Not too long before the …

May 1, 2021: On Basecamp I’ve been thinking about the incident at Basecamp for most of the week. I wanted to write something about it earlier, after hearing about the …

Apr 30, 2021: Early coding session this morning for a side project. Woke up at 4:45 am to work on a feature I just have to have. Manage to get just over an hour out …

Apr 24, 2021: Visitor at the back door. 🦎

Apr 24, 2021: I wish there was a song lyric website that’s not riddled with ads. I don’t know why all the right holders haven’t put one togeather that is fast and …

Apr 22, 2021: Some thoughts on Apple Subscription Podcasts offering You’ve probably seen the blog post outlining the details of Apple’s new Podcast Subscription offering. The latest post from Daring Fireball has a link …

Apr 19, 2021: I listened to a interesting podcast about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and how it could be used by police to make arrests safely and without the use of lethal …

Apr 17, 2021: My current bookmarking scheme is all over the place so I’m giving Pinboard a try in an attempt to make it a bit more organised. Might help with …

Apr 11, 2021: Nothing humbles someone who thinks they’re a reasonably good developer than picking up a brand new software platform, and trying to build …

Apr 8, 2021: Today is one of those rarest of days: a day with no meetings. There’s not even a stand-up, at least not one involving a video call. Just a day …

Apr 8, 2021: Surmounting The Hill Sometimes adding features to software is like cycling on a hilly road. You start off at the bottom of the hill, a little unsure of the hight and …

Apr 7, 2021: I really have to stop getting distracted writing tools to “help” me with the less than interesting aspects of my work, and just frickin do …

Apr 3, 2021: A thing about Clubhouse is that since it’s live audio, it requires listeners to be awake. Given that most hosts that I would be interested in …

Mar 29, 2021: Nearly every office I’ve been in that has a dishwasher have their own makeshift system for indicating whether the dishes in the machine are …

Mar 26, 2021: I’ve been really enjoying the posts that Jason Fried and DHH are making on HEY World, especially the ones on how they approach product design, …

Mar 25, 2021: I think one reason why the autocorrect in iOS is so frustrating is that, not only is it aggressive in thinking that it knows the right word, but that …

Mar 24, 2021: It took an hour navigating various Telstra phone trees, chat apps, and the website, but I’ve now got a static IP address for my home internet. …

Mar 23, 2021: One aspect of software development that I like is the research side of things: learning something new and interesting that will hopefully be useful …

Mar 22, 2021: There are many people around where I work that like “loud cars” of some sort, but I most certainly do not. This is one more reason why I’m looking …

Mar 18, 2021: There was a massive spiral wheel-shaped spider web in my backyard that I thought was abandoned. It was only after I took it down this morning that I …

Mar 16, 2021: I wish more podcasters realise that there are other podcasting players than just Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Mar 15, 2021: Thank goodness Micro.blog offers the ability to edit replies. It seems like I’m constantly making small spelling or grammatical errors in my …

Mar 13, 2021: Some photos of my time in Warburton yesterday, in the Yarra Valley. Went for a bike ride and a bit of a bush-walk. Lovely day for it, if a bit sunny.

Mar 12, 2021: A Year Under The Pandemic This was originally a journal entry but I thought I’d share it here as well. Today is the end of week 52, almost a year to the day that the pandemic …

Mar 10, 2021: I love the idea of HEY World, that you can publish a blog post simply by sending an email. They’ve also put a lot of care into the styling of the …

Mar 9, 2021: I’ve been writing a bit more on my development related blog recently so I’ve added the feed to this Micro.blog account. This means there …

Mar 8, 2021: It’s a public holiday today, meaning that instead of writing software for work, I could do almost anything else. But of course I chose to spent …

Mar 8, 2021: It’s funny how somtimes you make a mistake, then you make another mistake that relates to that first mistake, and they somehow cancel each other …

Mar 3, 2021: Request to all cafe owners: please ask the customer if they would like coriander in their sandwich before putting it in. I know many people who love …

Mar 3, 2021: It’s the middle of week 2 back in the office, and I’ve found myself falling back on most of the old routines that were put in stasis for a year. I’m a …

Mar 1, 2021: I had a Blot.im account that I was paying for but not using, so I’ve started a digital garden on software development. It’s mainly links …

Feb 28, 2021: The interesting thing about technology breakthroughs is how quickly the shift from the impossible to the banal actually is. An example of this is …

Feb 28, 2021: I’ll have to go clothes shopping today to get a new jumper. It’s hard to find them during summer, but autumn’s just a few days away, so I’m hoping …

Feb 25, 2021: Setting Package Variable When Building Go Project Here’s a technique for setting a variable in a Go project when building it. Say you have a global variable like the following: // Package …

Feb 25, 2021: Supporting HTTP/2 Without A tls.Conn In Go Go has support for both HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 in the web server available in net/http. Unfortunately, in order support HTTP/2, the net.Conn returned by …

Feb 25, 2021: It’s amazing, and perhaps a little shocking when you think about it, how much time spent on planning software development activities is actually spent …

Feb 25, 2021: Feature needed for news sites: a mouse-over for names in an article that quickly shows you who they are and how they relate to the reported issue. I …

Feb 25, 2021: Things I don’t miss about commuting to work: delays due to public transport interruptions. 😒

Feb 24, 2021: I only just learnt today that NetNewsWire on the iPad does not require an internet connection in order to read articles. They seem to be stored on …

Feb 23, 2021: I’m wondering if there should be a set of conventions for people on video calls to indicate acknowledgement without needing to speak or turn the …

Feb 22, 2021: Returning to the office today. Not sure if it will be full time, hopefully there will be opportunities to work from home going forward. But I’m …

Feb 20, 2021: Australia’s ABC News shot to the top of the App Store charts following Facebook’s news ban From the Verge: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC News app shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in Australia over the course of the …

Feb 19, 2021: Some uninformed thoughts about the ACCC Media Bargaining Code Yesterday, when the news about the news and Facebook was making the rounds in Australia, I have been wondering about my position about the whole …

Feb 17, 2021: A $2000.00 Smartphone with Ads I just learnt today that the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has ads. I’m generally not that interested in Samsung phones, but the idea of putting ads …

Feb 17, 2021: Communication Among Stimulus Controllers From the time I’ve started playing around with Stimulus, I’ve been thinking about the best way that controllers can communicate with each …

Feb 16, 2021: On the Facebook Watch Ron Amadeo, from Ars Technica, on Facebook considering an Android Watch: The Information says Facebook’s smartwatch push is part of a larger …

Feb 16, 2021: It only felt like a week ago when I saw the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Yet here we are, days away from its arrival. Good luck to …

Feb 15, 2021: Viewing webpages with View Here’s a way to simplify the number of keystrokes when viewing things from the web using Vim. Previously, I was typing the following incantation …

Feb 14, 2021: Argh, stop with the popups for my email address while I’m trying to read your blog! How can I enjoy your content when I’m interrupted with these? It …

Feb 14, 2021: Qualcomm unhappy with Nvidia wanting to buy Arm From Ars Technica: According to CNBC, Qualcomm is one of many Arm licensees who continues to object to the acquisition. Although Qualcomm has so far …

Feb 14, 2021: Is there a way, in Android Studios, to configure the debugger so that pausing a Kotlin app at a suspended function call, and stepping into, or over, …

Feb 13, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 12: Sporg. Mind turning slowly into sporg as I try to chase down this bug.

Feb 13, 2021: Current status: looking at sqlite3 DBs of an Android app in development while waiting for XCode to update to build a project to write a post on the …

Feb 12, 2021: The interesting thing about the “out of date” messages from Google’s iOS apps is the fact that they have the ability to turn these messages off …

Feb 12, 2021: It’s a shame that we’ve had to go back into lockdown for 5 days, due to the highly infectious nature of the B117 variant. Hopefully …

Feb 12, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 11: Machine. My trusty Breezemaster has been pushing air for 25 years now, and is still going strong. Came in …

Feb 12, 2021: That last post courtesy of “Random Thought”; a simple Mac app I’m working on to publish quick blog posts like this to Blot.im. It’s still early days …

Feb 12, 2021: We’re using Google Meet at work at the moment. Apart from the logo, which looks indistinguishable from most of the other services of Google Suite, it …

Feb 10, 2021: Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting: The surprising thing? In a recent primary in New York, some people had trouble with the new method. It’s not that …

Feb 10, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 10: Energy.

Feb 9, 2021: Twitter, Subscriptions and Tweetdeck So, Twitter is now considering subscriptions and charging apps like Tweetdeck. I’m guessing the competition between Twitter and the juggernauts …

Feb 9, 2021: Getting Public IP Address from the Command Line There is a website at ifconfig.co which can be used to get your public IP address. This is a reasonably nice service, and a nice alternative to …

Feb 9, 2021: If someone has access to the AWS console, should it be right for them to also have access to the AWS API? What would be a suitable use-case for them …

Feb 9, 2021: Empty HTTP Headers in Go Here is a technique for checking for the presence of a HTTP header in a Go request, even if the header has no value. If there’s a header in a …

Feb 9, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 9: Muddy. It’s rare to find mud around here in February, along with grass this green. Usually everything …

Feb 9, 2021: I have all these personal projects that I want to start, but I need to check myself as I’ve got a habit of starting them, getting bored and never …

Feb 8, 2021: I watched Spirited Away last night. I really enjoyed it: it’s certainly a beautiful film. It’s taken me a while to appreciate the works of …

Feb 8, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 8: Hope. My new, soon-to-be activated Internet setup, courtesy of the NBN. I only hope that it’s as fast, …

Feb 8, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 7: Craving. Unfortunately, it’s what you’d expect.

Feb 7, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 6: Sports. This is probably the closest thing to sports you’ll see me do.

Feb 6, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 5: Pets Unfortunately no pets allowed on this walk.

Feb 4, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 4: Layers. This is a photo of the geological kind: an exposed cliff face of the coast of Sunderland Bay.

Feb 3, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 3: Comfort. POV shot of me sitting in a comfortable chair while holidaying in Phillip Island this week.

Feb 3, 2021: February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 2: Morning Beverage.

Feb 1, 2021: Micro.blog Photo Challenge. Day 1: “Close Up”. Not the best close up but any closer and they would have flown away.

Jan 31, 2021: Afternoon in the gardens just south of the Shrine Of Remembrance in Melbourne, taken yesterday.

Jan 29, 2021: Well, that’s a little terrifying. Turns out that coronavirus was mutating during Victoria’s second wave last year along similar lines to …

Jan 28, 2021: I gave Glitch a go for the first time today. I was sceptical that I would find any value in it, but it turns out to be a great environment for …

Jan 26, 2021: I just spent an hour and a half building what I thought was a simplified version of the R-Tree algorithm, until I came across a test case that …

Jan 25, 2021: In the summer months, if the outside air temperature gets warmer than 40°C, I treat myself to an ice latte as my afternoon beverage, in leau of a …

Jan 25, 2021: I was having a discussion with people at work about the approval process of the Covid-19 vaccines here in Australia. One person was raising questions …

Jan 23, 2021: A Feature Request for Twitter, Free of Charge It looks like Twitter’s product design team need some help. Their recent ideas, “inspired” by the features of other companies like …

Jan 22, 2021: Adding Blog Posts to Day One using RSS Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly …

Jan 22, 2021: It’s only just now that I realised I no longer need to brace myself whenever I see the headline “The President is tweeting”.

Jan 20, 2021: A Simple Source IP Address Filter in Go I’ve found that it’s occasionally useful to have something that allows through, or blocks, requests to your web application based on the …

Jan 20, 2021: Published two tracks last night: Taxonomy and Hazard. Both of these were made during the depths of the Melbourne Lockdown 2.0, although they’re …

Jan 19, 2021: It’s a little bit shocking, the minute you move to a position with a bit more leadership responsibility, how quickly your calendar fills with …

Jan 19, 2021: That feeling you get when you see a class or struct that was defined in another library that you’re using; and you wish you could change it, but …

Jan 17, 2021: Working on an album cover for some music I’m hoping to publish soon. Who knew that one the skills required for publishing music online is …

Jan 16, 2021: Apart from a small cluster that’s been contained a week ago, there’ve been zero locally acquired cases of Covid-19 in Victoria. That means …

Jan 15, 2021: If you’re looking for a way to edit long-form articles, may I recommend this technique from C.G.P. Grey. I’ve using it a few times for …

Jan 14, 2021: Some of these collaborative editing tools, like Google Docs or Atlassian Confluence, have a feature to allow reviewers to add comments to a document, …

Jan 13, 2021: It’s strange that the IETF, one of the principal foundations responsible for maintaining the standards of the web, are still publishing these …

Jan 12, 2021: Some thoughts on app permissions in macOS It’s funny how the casual meandering of your mind can be a source of inspiration. This morning, my mind casually turned to thinking about all the work …

Jan 12, 2021: Feedbin, the RSS reader I use, has the ability to add Twitter users as feeds. It works pretty well and has some nice features, like including article …

Jan 11, 2021: First encounters with GitHub (and Substack) All these new Substack newsletters that I’m seeing reminds me of my first encounter with GitHub. Back in 2009, I was checking out the source …

Jan 10, 2021: My understanding is that in Australia the “official” start of the week is Monday, but the iOS internationalisation settings for Australia …

Jan 9, 2021: Building Sets from Maps

In the various Go projects that I work on, there have been times when I have needed to store items in a set. Many languages have a set implementation …

Jan 8, 2021: One thing that needs to be clearly disclosed when signing up to anything — be it software, an energy company, or a newspaper — is what they try to do …

Jan 6, 2021: Thank you to the person on Micro.blog that recommended Music For Programming. Working from home alone can be a little hard when there is complete …

Jan 5, 2021: The standard audio and video player controls that browsers use for pages that don’t have their own UI really need to include both a 30 second …

Jan 5, 2021: I should be writing. I would like to write. I would like to like writing. But every time I think about it, I feel this imposing force in my mind, as …

Jan 4, 2021: I have the impression that browser vendors are trying to encourage web developers to use the native DOM API, instead of using wrappers like jQuery. …

Jan 3, 2021: I really appreciate the amount of hard work put in by those that run the ABC News Coronavirus live blog1. They have been running it almost every day …

Jan 2, 2021: Train trip from Wangaratta to Melbourne. First time travelling down this line.

Jan 1, 2021: A Quick Review of the Year Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” …

Dec 31, 2020: I’m really liking Stimulus for JavaScript development. The fact that it gives me an easy way to add frontend logic with server-side rendering, …

Dec 30, 2020: Bocce in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne

Dec 28, 2020: I’m interested in starting a daily log, similar to what Dave Winer and a few others I follow on Micro.blog are doing. I’ve tried starting …

Dec 27, 2020: I subscribe to a few blogs that are well known for posting daily. Today, one of them is late. “Why haven’t you posted today?”, I …

Dec 26, 2020: I took the plunge and purchased Logic Pro today. Although the purchase itself is not super interesting, the fact that I’m putting that much …

Dec 25, 2020: Follow on from the last post, I also had the opportunity to spot a few trains. Here’s one on it’s way to Bendigo, taken just outside …

Dec 25, 2020: Christmas Eve spent hiking around Macedon and Trentham in regional Victoria.

Dec 23, 2020: Today is the last day of work for the year, and although I haven’t got much planned for the break, it would be good to have some time off.

Dec 22, 2020: I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee ever imagined that we would be using the web as a replacement for things like phones, radios, and televisions.

Dec 18, 2020: A Tour of Domain Records for Email There are growing concerns, in the circles that I travel in, about the use of “free” email services like Gmail, that lock you into a …

Dec 17, 2020: Follow up from yesterday’s post about my non-reading habits, a colleague of mine shared this article about the topic. It looks like the …

Dec 16, 2020: Dealing With Errors in Go There’s a lot to like about Go, and I’ll happily admit being a huge fan of the language. But it will be dishonest of me not to acknowledge …

Dec 16, 2020: I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve got this annoying habit of seeing an article that looks interesting, and I decide to… …

Dec 16, 2020: Vivaldi - My Recommended Alternative to Chrome I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would …

Dec 13, 2020: Revisiting the decision to build a CMS It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an …

Dec 8, 2020: It’s a shame that more and more bloggers are moving to email newsletters in leau of RSS. Even for bloggers that don’t charge for their …

Dec 8, 2020: A Brief Look at Stimulus Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to …

Dec 2, 2020: Some uninformed thoughts about Salesforce acquiring Slack John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce: First, my take presupposes that the point of …

Nov 30, 2020: I love the idea of events like Microblogvember to help reinforce the act of writing frequently. I will admit it was difficult at times, but I …

Nov 29, 2020: It’s interesting how the activities that would have seen quite pedestrian before the lock-down, like going to a cafe, are quite novel after the …

Nov 28, 2020: It’s surprising how quickly you can get use to a mask outside when you’re required to wear one, and then get use to not wearing one …

Nov 27, 2020: My dilemma for today is whether to buy a blender, and which one would work for me. Something suitable for smoothies and that is easy to clean are …

Nov 26, 2020: Passed by what I think is a Norfolk Island Pine tree. Incidentally, Norfolk Island is one of the few places outside the US to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Nov 26, 2020: I’ve just setup a subscription to Climeworks, which is a startup building plants for capturing and storing CO2 underground. I could argue about …

Nov 25, 2020: Even in these Covid times when I’m home 95% of the time, deciding whether and when to go for a walk such that I’ll be home to receive a delivery is …

Nov 24, 2020: Several years ago, I had the opportunity to work at a federal government agency. There was a lot to like about the experience, but one negative was …

Nov 23, 2020: Sunset over the suburbs, taken 2 weeks ago. You can get some pretty nice sunsets around this time of year. It’s a shame my camera and …

Nov 22, 2020: During the second coronavirus wave in Melbourne, a “ring of steel” was imposed, encircling the metropolitan in an attempt to contain the …

Nov 21, 2020: One feature of living in the Southern Hemisphere is that you get to see winter decorations in shopping centres twice a year. First when it’s actually …

Nov 20, 2020: It’s getting harder to go on lunchtime walks without having to slap on sunscreen or a hat. I may need to move to evening walks, when the …

Nov 20, 2020: After dealing with Apple Developer Certificates and Provisioning Profiles for a single app for work, I feel for all the macOS and iOS developers out …

Nov 19, 2020: I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find all these online services that push you these A.I. driven “recommendations” of things …

Nov 19, 2020: Why I'm Considering Building A Blogging CMS I’m planning to start a new blog about Go development and one of the things that I’m currently torn on is how to host it. The choice look …

Nov 18, 2020: I have to keep reminding myself, when I’m building personal software projects, the costs of adding dependence to external modules. It’s …

Nov 17, 2020: There are people out there who love cars, boats and planes; but chalk me up as one who loves a good train. #mbnov

Nov 16, 2020: Occasionally, when I go to the ABC News site, it stirs up the memory of the mid 90’s ad campaign for the site. Being the early days of the web, …

Nov 15, 2020: It’s meant to be a warm, windy, 33°C day today, a perfect day for washing sheets. What I’m currently seeing now is a far cry from that: …

Nov 14, 2020: Today’s Microblogvember word is spooky. This is not something that I handle well. For example, I don’t like spooky movies. I think the …

Nov 13, 2020: I’ve switched from a Lenovo laptop back to a MacBook Pro for work, which means I no longer need this smart plug setup for extinguishing the …

Nov 12, 2020: I was asked to come into the office for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It felt strange to wear a shirt again, something that I …

Nov 11, 2020: While I did say that I might have gone Chromebook over iPad two days ago, I must also say that the new Macs with Apple Silicon look really exciting …

Nov 10, 2020: We’ve had zero new Covid-19 cases for several days now so I took a risked and visited my elderly grandmother. We were both very careful, we both …

Nov 9, 2020: The ads from Google are getting worse. I continue seeing an obviously fake one offering me advice on how to get rich (the claims of being an Aussie …

Nov 9, 2020: An anecdote regarding the removal of iSH from the App Store Around April this year, my old Android Nexus 9 tablet was becoming unusable due to it’s age and I was considering which tablet to move to next. …

Nov 8, 2020: If there’s something that I’ll take away from the events of this year, it’s that adversity can, in some circumstances, bind us …

Nov 7, 2020: I think my recent pattern of constantly refreshing web-pages is going to inflate my internet bill, as I seek news updates on the Coronavirus and the …

Nov 6, 2020: It’s puzzling but I’ve been finding myself having lunch earlier in the day than usual. I think it’s because I’ve joined a …

Nov 5, 2020: It’s cold and wet today. The steps leading to my front door, which I think is called a stoop in the US, can be pretty slippery on days like …

Nov 4, 2020: Passed by a kangaroo during my evening walk a couple of days ago. I was surprised by how unphased he seemed to be by my presence, given how near I was …

Nov 3, 2020: Tracking Down a Lost Album Here’s a short story about my endeavours to find an album that seems to have disappeared from the face of the internet. I’m a bit of a …

Nov 3, 2020: The events of this year have been enough to astonish anyone. I can only speak for myself, but I’m hoping that I can get a break from feeling …

Nov 2, 2020: I’ve had some difficulty coming up with today’s Microblogvember post. I’m finding it hard to concentrate today, probably because …

Nov 2, 2020: 📚 “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon. A great read and one of those books that can be read in a weekend (I read it in a day).

Nov 1, 2020: October has felt rather dreary this year. I know people that find this quite dissatisfactory, and they have been yearning for the warm weather that …

Oct 31, 2020: Offical support for file embedding coming to Go I’m excited to see, via Golang Weekly, that the official support for embedding static files in Go is being realised, with the final commit …

Oct 29, 2020: Advice to those working with annotations in Preview For those of you using Preview in macOS for viewing an annotated PDF, if you need to move or delete the annotations in order to select the text, be …

Oct 28, 2020: Seeing the photos in this article of an empty airport, especially one I’m familiar with, is somewhat haunting.

Oct 27, 2020: I’ve justed walked all the way to the shops before I realised I completely forgot my wallet. I didn’t come back with a coffee, but I did …

Oct 26, 2020: Doughnut Day 2020 Good day today. From a high of 725 Covid-19 cases in August 25, Victoria has just had 24 hours of zero new cases and zero deaths. This is during a …

Oct 25, 2020: It’s coming to the point where I think I need a custom text entry control on all my devices that, when I try to post something, throws up a prompt …

Oct 22, 2020: Over the last few weeks, while Melbourne has been under lock-down to drive the Covid-19 cases down, the government has been ramping up it’s …

Oct 22, 2020: Reflections On Writing On The Web I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole about writing and publishing online yesterday after reading this article from Preetam Nath and this article from …

Oct 20, 2020: It wasn’t until about a week ago, when I was looking very closely at the Robot Or Not show art, that I realised how cleaver the name and logo of …

Oct 15, 2020: I’ve removed Twitter my iPad and my phone. I’m starting to get a bit sick of it. It’s not doing anything positive for my mental health anyway. No more …

Oct 14, 2020: Daily walk after work, today through the forest reserve near my home. I didn’t think I had something to say until I started blogging, and the …

Oct 14, 2020: Unit Tests and Verifying Mocks I’m working with a unit test that uses mocks in which every method in the mock is verified after the method under test is called, even if it is …

Oct 13, 2020: Looks like Google Play music is no longer letting me play the music I’ve got stored on the device without setting up a YouTube music account, …

Oct 13, 2020: After moving from Mac to Linux for work 1.5 months ago, I’ve lost the abiliy to be remember keyboard shortcuts on both platforms. Just now …

Oct 12, 2020: Be forewarned: this might not be a happy post. I’m feeling a bit dispirited this morning seeing 15 new cases of Covid-19 in Victoria over the …

Oct 11, 2020: I don’t know how this keeps happening, but it feels like the Bluetooth stack on Android gets a little worse every release. Now with Android R, …

Oct 10, 2020: A Database Client Wishlist I’ve recently started a new job so I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to become familiar with how the relational databases are …

Oct 7, 2020: I’ve only just realised that the Victorian CHO Twitter account includes a daily Covid-19 case breakdown report. The Twitter client is such a …

Oct 6, 2020: Sharing links to private podcast episodes There have been times when I’ve wanted to share a link to an episode of a podcast that I pay for, but I’m hesitant to do so as the feed is …

Oct 4, 2020: Friday evening walk. The photo does not do justice to how lovely the evening light can be during this time of year.

Oct 4, 2020: We are potentially two weeks away from a significant reduction in restrictions, and this weekend is proving to be a bit of a test in Melbourne’s …

Oct 1, 2020: A good way to be reminded of all the services you’re currently subscribed to is to have credit card that will expire soon and have all these …

Sep 25, 2020: After reading the recent news articles, along with hearing what the founder prioritises, it’s looking like Nikola is just another money grab a. …

Sep 23, 2020: Let's hold the line, Melbourne. We've got this. Today is a good day. Melbourne’s 14 day daily Covid-19 case average is now 29.4, which is beyond the 30 to 50 band required to move to the next …

Sep 23, 2020: Ah, Day One. At least let me get through the day first.

Sep 22, 2020: I wonder if it’s possible to develop something like ambidexterity for Mac and non-Mac keyboard shortcuts.

Sep 21, 2020: 📚 “The War of Art”, by Steven Pressfield. An excellent book about the creative process. Very easy read as well, can get through it in a …

Sep 20, 2020: Good news is hard to come by recently, and the Stage 4 restrictions in Melbourne are anything but easy. But seeing 21 new cases yesterday, and 14 new …

Sep 18, 2020: I used iPad OS’s markup feature on a multi-page PDF for the first time this morning. It works reasonably well, except that there’s no way …

Sep 17, 2020: Getting screen capture working in Vivaldi on Fedora 32 Moving from a Mac Pro back to Linux for work, I’ve come to appreciate how well things just work out of the box in macOS. Things like Web RTC …

Sep 16, 2020: Now that we’re allowed to venture outside a bit more, I’d like to start my lunchtime walks again. However, the sun is starting to …

Sep 15, 2020: First Foray Into Home Automation After recently changing jobs, I’ve received a brand new Lenovo work laptop. As good as the laptop is, and it’s OK for a work laptop, it …

Sep 9, 2020: I wonder if Oracle’s first change to TikTok, should they ever buy it, would be to add 5 different screens asking the user to sign up to …

Sep 1, 2020: On Ordered Lists in Markdown One of the things I like about Markdown as a form of writing online, is that ordered lists can simply begin with the prefix 1., and there is no need …

Aug 26, 2020: If Google does this to the Pixel 4, just what do they expect for the Pixel 5? What is Google doing cancelling the Pixel 4 after 6 months? They spend $1.1 billion buying the HTC mobile division and state that they plan to start …

Aug 26, 2020: John Gruber’s comments, after quoting a piece from Ars Technica on the Pixel 5 being slower than the Pixel 4: If all of this is true, what phone is …

Aug 5, 2020: You can tell it’s August in Melbourne as the days start to get noticeably longer, the blossums are in blume, and you start hearing blackbirds in …

Jul 28, 2020: I’m beginning to wonder, after looking at all the services in IndieWeb Site Deaths page, if people will start to be more cautious about signing …

Jul 24, 2020: Idea for MacOS: an option to install system updates on shutdown. This can replace the “in 1 hour” option. That option is not useful to me, …

Jul 21, 2020: On Suppression vs. Elimination It was around the beginning of June, when the number of new Covid-19 cases for Victoria were around 10-20 a day, that there was a general feeling that …

Jul 14, 2020: Remarks on Go's Error Handling using Facebook's SDK Crashes As a Framing Device There are new reports of Facebook’s SDK crashing apps again due to server changes. The post above links to Bugsnag article which explores the …

Jul 12, 2020: I’ve just realised the irony of posting a 624 word article about posting smaller articles. It was meant to be smaller, but it felt good telling …

Jul 12, 2020: Signed Up To micro.blog I’ve signed up with micro.blog in an attempt to post to the blog more frequently than I have been. The last post I had on my existing blog was …

Jun 26, 2020: Features From Android In iOS 14, and The Enthusiasm Gap John Gruber on Daring Fireball, commenting on an article about features in iOS 14 that Android had first: Do you get the sense that Google, …

Jun 25, 2020: On Go’s Type Parameters Proposal The developers of Go have release a new draft proposal for type parameters. The biggest change is the replacing the concept of constraints, which …

Jun 25, 2020: YouTube Music and Uploaded Music Libraries Ron Amado, from Ars Technica: YouTube Music is really only for The Music Renter—someone who wants to pay $10 per month, every month, forever, for …

Mar 22, 2020: Don't Get it Now It’s scary times at the moment. The Corona Virus (SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19) is raging through Europe at this moment, with hundreds of people …

Feb 29, 2020: Reflections On Virus Scanners on Windows I was listening to Episode 277 of The Talk Show in which John Gruber was discussing virus scanners on Apple Macs with John Moltz. The discussion …

Dec 7, 2019: New Home of Steve Yegge's Rant About Google Services I’ve always enjoyed this rant from Steve Yegge about how Google differed from Amazon in how they develop their services. Not sure if it’s …

Oct 28, 2019: Five Common Data Stores and When to Use Them Very interesting post on the Shopify Engineering Blog on the difference between 5 types of data-stores available to developers, and under what …