Links on Leon Mika

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:25:01 +1100

I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill.

I’m almost certain that the devs at Apple are not happy with shipping software that doesn’t match this quality threshold. They’d fix all this issues with Tahoe and iOS 26 if they could (well, the one’s that are not just bad designs). They just don’t have the time to do so.

Hardware takes months to setup, and once the lines are ready, it’s expensive to change them. So there’s huge resistance to change it near the end of the release cycle. Software’s malleability, in this respect, is a blessing and a curse. So easy to change, meaning that those making the decisions don’t see a cost in making these changes in the 11th hour. After all, it’s “just” software. But established software products are also resistant to change, and adding more cruft on the top just makes the change harder. Rather than fix things, devs spend all their time trying to get the bodged code working in concert while trying to meet the deadlines set from those that need features to sell. The result is lower quality software.

There’s no escaping the “scope, quality, time: pick two” maxim.

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:16:28 +1100

🔗 Steve Yegge: You Should Write Blogs

An oldie but a goodie.

The last big problem I grapple with is biting off too much for a single blog. I find that if I can write a blog in a single sitting, it’ll usually seem worth publishing, at least at the time. […] If I can’t write it in one sitting, I feel like I don’t have something concrete enough to say. […] I can only do that with coding, not writing.

Yeah, I suffer from this too. I need to hit publish soon after writing the first draft, otherwise the resistance to finishing it gets too great.

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:13:50 +1100

🔗 Six Colors: Apple’s Creator Studio has a rough App Store roll-out

But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense [sic] to the user experience?

I was a little worried that Apple would put ads in the version of Logic Pro I bought and paid for a few years ago. Fortunately that isn’t the case (points for restraint, I guess). But it sucks they’ve decided to do this in software that’s bundled with the OS. Getting ideas from Microsoft, maybe.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:23:13 +1100

🔗 LMNT: Interface Sound Effects

Playing Nintendo games […] makes me wish macOS was flooded with lots of interface sound effects. For clicking down, up, resizing windows, minimizing windows, zooming windows, dragging windows, clicking buttons and checkboxes and radio buttons, dragging sliders, etc.

The most notable interface sound I can remember was Windows 98, which made a mouse click sound when double clicking a folder in the explorer. This was when tapping on trackpads to simulate a mouse click were becoming a thing, so this was probably meant to be more utilitarian than whimsical.

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:59:21 +1100

🔗 Steve Yegge: Software Survival 3.0

Interesting post from Steve Yegge about the qualities of software that could survive in a world of agents. Seems more geared towards their fitness for agent use, but there were some notes about human use too. Food for thought.

(Oh, and Steve, I’m glad you’ve settled on a blogging platform but did it have to be Medium?)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:48:22 +1100

🔗 TawakiCam Live

Live penguin camera stream set-up on Antipodes Island (for now). For anyone who likes penguins, which I think is everyone.

Via: @georgepenney.bsky.social on Bluesky

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:03:32 +1100

🔗 Greg Morris: Envy: The Only Sin That Never Feels Good

Someone’s life looks better than yours on Instagram and suddenly you’re either tearing yourself down or posting something designed to make them feel worse about theirs. You see someone’s project launch and instead of starting your own, you either convince yourself you’re not good enough or you start picking holes in what they’ve built. Both responses come from the same uncomfortable place. Neither helps you.

Yep, envy sucks. It comes unbidden and leaves you feeling crappy. This resonated with me.

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:00:48 +1100

🔗 Wikipedia: Rubber-tyred tram

Some follow-up on my speculation of how this one-rail tram vehicle that I saw in Italy works. Turns out that the single rail is used for guiding the vehicle, and the one pantograph variant does use the rail for the return current. But there is a two trolly-poll variant that only uses the rail for guidance, and can disconnect from it to form a bog standard trolleybus. Bit weird to consider the rail at all at that point, but still quite intriguing.

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:52:48 +1100

🔗 Steven P. Wickstrom: Over 300 words to use instead of SAID

Filing this for later when I want to write some fiction (it could happen).

Via: summeroakes.bsky.social on Bluesky

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 08:32:47 +1100

🔗 Simon Willison: How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”

Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious […] Rob got a 100% AI-generated email credited to “Claude Opus 4.5 AI Village” thanking him for his contributions to computing. He did not appreciate the gesture.

Got a lot of emotional swings while reading this: outrage that someone would use AI agents to send spam like this, understanding as to what actually happened, then distaste with those responsible in their belief that the time wasted receiving emails like this is an acceptable external cost.

But really, the whole experiment seems irresponsible. I can understand the want to see what these models could do, but come on: don’t given them access to a computer open to the Internet without any supervision. Rob Pike, a notable computer scientist that would be known to all these models, is right to be outraged. I would be too if I received this sort of unsolicited slop.

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 07:51:10 +1100

🔗 Weird Medieval Guys: How birds got human names

Magpies were originally known simply as “pies” until the nickname “Mag”, short for Maggie, short for Margaret was added to the front sometime in the Middle Ages. Before it began to be treated as a single word, it was rendered as “Mag Pie”, a sort of fanciful full name for the creature.

Fascinating. This is, shall we say, the “money” quote of the linked post, but the rest is still quite an interesting read.

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:26:30 +1100

🔗 (AI) Smells on Medium

Just in case you need another reason to avoid Medium. Apropos of nothing, the post also includes some links about writing blog posts for developers which look interesting.

Via: lobste.rs

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:43:26 +1100

🔗 LinkedIn: Games

That’s right, LinkedIn Games. For those that love their professional networking cum. social networking cum. messaging app but felt it needed more features. I’ve not tried these yet, I’ve only learnt about it today. But some might be enjoyable.

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 08:47:48 +1100

🔗 Andre Franca: Small Web, Big Voice

Really enjoyed this post from Andre. I agree that some may view having a blog in 2025 as being irrational. I guess the belief is that it’s harder to get the exposure or virality with a blog than it is by simply posting on the socials (as if reach or cash is the only reason to do anything online). I’m not sure I agree, but even if that were true, it depends if that’s something you want. If it’s just to have a place that you can call your own, then I’d argue having a blog, even in 2025, makes total rational sense.

Via: Kev Quirk

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:19:20 +1100

🔗 Nikita Prokopov: Needy Programs

A thought provoking post.

And even if you give up and create [an account for a program that requires one], they will never leave you alone: they’ll ask for 2FA, then for password rotation, then will log you out for no good reason. You’ll never see the end of it either way.

The topic of passkeys came up at work yesterday. A colleague made the suggestion that passkeys should be mandated across everything, with very few exceptions. The reasons he gave are decent, of course: protecting accounts from unwanted intrusions. Yet I didn’t really agree with him. I know for myself I find them a little annoying, and knowing a few people who aren’t as steeped in technology as I are, I do wonder how well they would receive such a mandate. Probably in a similar way to Nikita here.

And it’s a tricky balancing act, because they are more secure than passwords. And so is asking for 2FA, and password rotations, and logging you out after a while (that’s to avoid a session token from leaking and falls into the wrong hands, and being usable for ever). And sometimes they’re necessary: there are a lot of arseholes out there. But they are annoying, and when it comes to authentication, it’s usually the default position of any developer to say “lock down all the things,” without considering tradeoffs.

So yeah, I don’t have a good answer here. Not even sure there is one.

Via: Manton Reece

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:18:07 +1100

🔗 Android Developers Blog: Android developer verification

Under the heading “Empowering experienced users” (emphasis original):

Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified.

In other words: side loading should be possible without verification. This is good.

Via: Hacker News

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:55:49 +1100

🔗 Raph Koster: Game design is simple, actually

I’m only half way through this, but I’m finding this post on the theory of game design absolutely riveting. I’ve already got a bunch of linked posts ready to go, marking this one as the entrance to a good ol’ blogging rabbit hole.

Via: Simon Willison

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 08:27:06 +1100

🔗 Birchtree: Browser agent modes are fucking stupid

The demos seem designed for people who don’t book their own plane tickets, who aren’t concerned with cost when doing anything, and who haven’t been grocery shopping in a decade.

I’ve not used any AI browser agents, mainly because I have no personal need of them, so I can’t lay claim to how relatable these demos are. But it is amusing to consider the people coming up with these demos being so out of touch that they would benefit from getting out more often than I do. And this is from someone who doesn’t get out that often. 😀

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 07:54:12 +1100

🔗 Annie’s Blog: Duck duck duck dichotomy

I was a bit late in coming to this one but this post really resonated with me.

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:08:32 +1100

🔗 ByteSauna: AI can code, but it can’t build software

When you look at the code these people send you, you realize that “making the app production-ready” really means torching the whole thing and starting from scratch.

I do use GenAI in my personal projects occasionally, but I wouldn’t describe what I do as vibe coding. I know what I want done and how I would do it, which helps in knowing whether the generated code is any good. The thought of doing this for an entire software project without the knowledge of what good code looks like doesn’t give me confidence that these vibe coders would see much success for long. Pretty soon, someone who knows what they’re doing will eventually need to come in and clean up the mess.

The fact that I get these requests says something about software engineering. I mean, if software engineering was automated, no one would be looking for technical cofounders.

Indeed.

Via: Birchtree

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 18:40:41 +1100

🔗 Anil Dash: Founders Over Funders. Inventors Over Investors

Enjoyed this post from Anil Dash; although being a tech practitioner, that probably wouldn’t be too surprising. But I don’t think it makes it any less true.

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:48:27 +1100

🔗 The Guardian: Tawny frogmouth named 2025 Australian bird of the year winner

Runners up include the gang-gang, which would’ve been my vote between the two. But still a worthy winner. Congrats, Tawnies. 🏆

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:19:24 +1100

🔗 Alex Edwards: A modern approach to preventing CSRF in Go

Have we finally reached the point where CSRF attacks can be prevented without relying on a token-based check (like double-submit cookies)? Can we build secure web applications without bringing in third-party packages like justinas/nosurf or gorilla/csrf?

And I think the answer now may be a cautious “yes” — so long as a few important conditions are met.

This looks interesting, and I like how this middleware is included in the standard library. Filing this to look at later.

Via: Simon Willison

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:41:20 +1100

🔗 Martin Hähnel: Write Like You’re Ron Jeffries

The meandering pace of solving a problem, of how ideas develop and how people create are not replaced by the slick surface of the perfect how-to in which everything seemed to have worked on the first try, was clear from the beginning. Jeffries’ texts […] document the doing in the making, learning in the making. It makes it obvious that that which is presented is very often not how it was derived.

It would be nice to do more of this style of writing.

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:55:38 +1100

🔗 Brandon’s Journal: Save Your Writing

Some good advice about saving your previous creations, even if you feel you’ll never look at it again. Maybe you won’t, but if it’s writing, what’s a couple of megabytes in this world swimming in storage? Move it out of sight if you must, but don’t delete it.

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:11:37 +1100

🔗 Robert Birming: The world’s worst blogger

I moved my blog from Bear to Micro.blog because, as I put it, it “started to feel limited”. I had begun creating photo albums, a status log, and some other stuff. It became harder and harder to manage…

So I moved [to Micro.blog]. A place with great features for adding photo collections, logging books, writing both long posts and short ones without titles. All just a click away…

Now that I have all these possibilities, I can’t seem to do it. No matter how I try, it never feels right to mix things up. And when I tried running two blogs on the same platform, it just got confusing.

I can’t pretend to fully understand Robert’s feelings, but I that I’ve gone through similar feelings myself: wondering if this bit of content should be on this blog, or that one should be there, etc. And always looking at the next shiny thing glittering on the horizon: a new CMS I haven’t tried, a fresh theme. There’s always something else to look at.

And I think much of this is all a distraction from a worry that took me a while to acknowledge: is what I write of interest to anyone? If I were to write about this, will they get upset or board? Who am I to waste their time on writing about topics that are of no interest to my readers?

I’m trying to get better at not worrying too much about this. Although I can’t fully know what others are thinking, I have at least one data point that can provide me an answer to this, which is being a reader of blogs myself. And I’m aware that not everything I get from my feeds is going to interest me. That’s fine, I’ll just skip over that one post and wait for the next one. I’d probably prefer that over someone splitting their posts across multiple feeds and knowing that I’m only getting part of what they’re writing.

So if I were to provide some advice to Robert, it’s to try and simplify. Have a single site that others can subscribe to and write everything there. The hassle of deciding where to write isn’t really worth the worry. Plus your simplifying things for your readers, who want to read stuff from you. That’s why they’ve subscribed.

Anyway, like I said, I can’t pretend to fully understand the feelings. I definitely don’t think Robert is the “world’s worst blogger.” I enjoy reading his posts and I look forward to seeing them pop up in my RSS reader. I just hope this helps in some way. And I know how much easier it is to give advice than to follow it yourself. Go through my archive where I’ve spun out topics into separate blogs/CMS myself. All in all, keeping things simple is probably good advice for both of us.

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:25:58 +1100

🔗 Steph Ango: File over app

The files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

This is excellent advice, and one that I’m trying to practice better. I’d also argue that this can be extended to a software design principal, which is to assume the data will outlive the system. Therefore, prefer a data scheme that will be long lasting, and worry less about the systems that operate over it. This is why I found it distasteful to offload schema designs to ORMs.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:38:14 +1100

🔗 Ditch those words!

Liked this post by Robin Rendle.

Folks will spend so much time adding fancy illustrations and making sure the icons aren’t blurry but when it comes to words and actions in interfaces they seem to gloss right over them.

It’s a well known trope in UI design that the user generally doesn’t read things. So I can forgive those who feel that words in UIs are not as important as icons. But I do occasionally wonder if the pendulum has swung too far. More than once I’ve encountered a UI with icons, without any description, that I didn’t understand, and it had an effect of my ability to use it.

Every word in a UI needs to act like a hammer, with each successive word the interface should become clearer, more easily understood. If you put a word like Explore in an interface it might make sense but now add another navigation item like Discover beneath it and now both words make no sense. The UI has collapsed into meaninglessness and folks are forced to click and think and furrow their brows to understand the difference between the two.

I didn’t even consider the case where words could interact with each other this way, like elements in a chemical reaction. But seeing it described like this, it makes total sense.

The cynic in me worries that the folks who made this interface don’t want me to read the popup or modal or alert or web page or list of settings or whatever and they really just want me to click a button. The words are designed to be longwinded and confusing. They just want the click.

I think it’s easy to read this as the UI design being intentionally obscure, just to herd the user through specific interaction flows that benefit the company. I’m sure there’s a bit of that. But I also think that some designers are simply trying to help the user trying to achieve what they want out of their software. It may be that they just haven’t got the right words to explain it, being someone who’s working on the software every workday. And I don’t know how this could be improved. Adding more words for the user to not read doesn’t seem to be the solution. Maybe more user testing? Some way to better understand how the user thinks the software works.

Anyway, very interesting post.

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:37:53 +1100

🔗 Rebooting the blogosphere

Under the heading Don’t be shy:

Tell everyone you see. Be a nuisance.

I find the hardest part of blogging is telling people I have a blog. 🙂

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:58:15 +1100

🔗 Manuel Moreale: On em dashes

What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance.

My feelings exactly. To stop using em dashes because of AI chatbots seems ludicrous to me.

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 09:32:03 +1100

🔗 HN Comment by IanCal in a discussion about RDF (emphasis added):

Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem: The correct modelling depends on the questions you want to answer. Our modelling had good tradeoffs for mapping academic citation tracking. It had bad modelling for legal ownership. There isn’t one modelling that solves both well.

That may be why I was turned off by RDF all those years ago. One seeks to model a domain, but domains can be extremely complicated, and even if you cover everything, it’s still only one domain. But the biggest crime is assuming that the model is necessary for all use cases. And it just isn’t. Does every website that tracks books need to know the full legal name, publisher name, the legal entity of the company that supplied the typesetting? Simplify, man.

Via: Simon Willison

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:19:16 +1100

🔗 Dave Winer: We Make Shitty Software

We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it’s a process. We’ll make it less shitty. Just watch!

It’s true. Speaking for myself, I too make shitty software. Probably have my entire career. It’s only today that I’ve internalised it. And it’s a hard thing to admit. How hard? Well, try four attempts at posting this declaration publicly.

Via: Coding Horror

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 09:56:27 +1100

🔗 GitHub: Gopher Hawaiian Shirts

Patterns for printing Hawaiian shirts with the Go gopher. I think I’ve found what I’ll be wearing to work in the future. 😄

Via: Golang Weekly

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:19:15 +1100

🔗 PCjs Machines

Virtual machines of early PC operating systems, such as Windows and OS/2 1.0, that run in the browser. For anyone else who’s interested in a nostalgic kick. Don’t forget to check-out the list of included software installable via the virtual floppy drive.

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 10:11:48 +1100

🔗 Ludipe: Intro to Puzzle Design

Filing this under good tips for game development.

Via: GMTK weekly digest.

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:30:01 +1100

🔗 Wikipedia: White-winged chough

I’ve seen this bird before and I had no idea what they are: black, white tips on the wings, red eyes, and an interesting call. Their presence in a random YouTube video I was watching revealed the answer.

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:00:22 +1100

🔗 The Monospace Web

A very nice exploration of webpage design using a monospace font. The first thought I had when I saw this was that this would work great for online man pages, which never look as good online as they do in the terminal.

Via: Robb Knight

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:25:29 +1100

🔗 How we built Bluey’s world: tales from original series art director, Catriona Drummond

As someone who knows absolutely nothing about animation, I found this fascinating. Some nice bits of theory in this, such as the “language” of shapes:

Circles are round, friendly and soft. No hard edges!
Triangles are sharp, aggressive and evoke pain.
Squares are sturdy, steady and firmly planted.
Then on top of that, even directional lines have implicit associations! Horizontals are calm, verticals awake and upright, and diagonals off balanced.

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:49:44 +1100

🔗 Aresluna: Frame of preference

This walk through the various preference windows of MacOS is amazing. The way they integrate Infinite Mac alongside it: genius. Best explored while listening to ATP Overtime.

Via: ATP #650: Whatever It Takes to Get the Laundry Folded

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:23:32 +1100

🔗 Daring Fireball: Microsoft Introduces ‘Copilot Mode’ in Edge

Some follow-up from my recent pondering about chatbots in browsers. From Gruber:

I think something similar is behind Microsoft trying to make Copilot front-and-center in Edge, and Google’s concurrent move to junk up Chrome with AI-generated suggestions. Their goal is to make their web browsers chatbots faster than OpenAI can make ChatGPT a web browser.

Okay, that’s plausible. If it’s just a fight for mindshare than I can understand this. Still not sure what OpenAI’s motivations are, but it does look like these other companies are just reacting here.

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:22:06 +1100

🔗 Daring Fireball: Google Chrome Adds AI-Generated Store Summaries

Now browsers themselves will be adding their own layers of distracting cruft atop the websites. The entire premise of Chrome — the reason for its name — is that it was originally designed to simplify the UI of the browser app itself, the “chrome”, at a time when Internet Explorer and even Firefox were increasingly cluttered and confusing.

I’m confused as to why Google and all these AI companies are so gun-ho about adding AI agents to browsers. What do they get out of this deal? Is it just a way for them to win users and get data from their browsing habits? Is it protection against Google potentially dissuading these users away from using their chat-bots? These are not problems Google has, so why are they doing this?

They seem like features designed to turn the dial up on Google’s slice of commissions from web transactions.

Maybe, but how can they collect? If they run AI over the web-pages that a user visits, when the user converts, how are they going to tell the website owner that they help “bring in the eye-balls” thanks to AI and have earned X% off the top? Maybe they’ll only run these AI agents on sites that “opt-in” in some way, either by using Google Pay or paying more for Google ads. I can see that happening.

All very strange. In either case, I’m glad I’m rocking Vivaldi these days.

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 09:04:00 +1100

🔗 Manuel Moreale: Why this matters

Manuel Moreale celebrates and reflects on reaching the 100th People and Blogs. Congratulations, Manuel! Here’s to many more.

We’re entering the 3 digits era of People and Blogs, and the next milestone is going to be the beginning of the 4 digits era, which will arrive in the year 2042. […] I’m not even sure if blogs will still be a thing by then.

Oh, I bet you they will be a thing.

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:00:46 +1100

🔗 MacSparky: A Remarkable, Unremarkable Thing

We often talk about how people can’t put their phones down while in line at the market, but what about during moments of joy? When taking in a theme park with your family, at the beach, or on vacation? Those moments are found solely in your immersion in the now.

A thought-provoking post.

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 09:47:26 +1100

🔗 Simon Willison: Identify, solve, verify

No matter how good these [coding LLMs] get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. […] It’s also about 80% of what I do as a software developer already.

Hey, I’m a software developer too. And I acknowledge that my job is more than just typing things into an IDE. In fact, it’s probably closer to what Simon Willison does, where I’m identifying problems, and writing Jira tickets for others to fix rather than do it myself. And it might be that with the introduction of coding LLMs, software development will simply be more of this going forward. It certainly the direction things look to be going.

But I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be disappointed to see all these coding tasks go away, and all my job description reduced to finding problems and verifying fixes. Like some sort of… manager 😖. I got into software development because I like to code. And part of this is finding problems, but I only get the dopamine hit after fixing them. I get nothing if I simply tell someone (or something) else to fix it.

And okay, we’re talking about a job here. And I’ve reached the age where I recognise one doesn’t always achieve a fulfilling life from their careers alone. So might be that this is something that I just need to recognise that sometimes jobs suck and identifying problems is all I’ll ever do in the near future.

But I would tell employers thinking of outsourcing all coding tasks to LLMs to consider this: if I’m faced with two employment opportunities, and one has 0% coding tasks, and the other has >0% coding tasks, I’d take the latter any day of the week.

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:51:46 +1100

🔗 LMNT: I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet

It’s one thing for QuickTime UI to “get out of the way.” Please, do. I’m watching a video. I don’t need a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window, you know? But wait a minute, why is there a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window anyway? That’s not how it used to be.

I don’t always agree with Louie Mantia but he’s absolutely right here. When did hiding UI or moving it out of various bars become synonymous of “getting out of the way of content”? Slapping UI over the content is not getting out of the way. In fact it’s the exact opposite.

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:04:30 +1100

🔗 CSS Minecraft

Pretty impressive to see what’s possible with CSS nowadays. Viewing the page source is quite illuminating.

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 10:43:30 +1100

🔗 Search Engine Land: What 1,000 food blog audits has taught me about SEO

I’m wary about posts on SEO but I found this one discussing the techniques attempted by recipe bloggers quite interesting. In short: cargo cult thinking around SEO myths is resulting in many bad food sites.

Via: Pixel Envy

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:24:32 +1100

🔗 Spyglass: Apple Lives Long Enough to Become the Ad Villain

People pay a lot of money for these devices from Apple. And part of the implicit bargain is that they won’t have adware or ads themselves shoved at them in every direction.

Now I’m no marketing expert, but I do know that understanding one’s customer base is important for success. And I understand that Apple’s is generally made up of people who pay a premium for a good user experience. I wonder if Apple understands this. I also know that generally pissing people off with stunts like this will not get them to come to your party.

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:22:34 +1100

🔗 Omer: you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand

they don’t just ship features anymore, they ship vibes. onboarding becomes a performance. the ui is the brand. the founder’s blog post is the manifesto.

it’s not about what the software does.it’s about who it’s made for.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. Software construction is like any other human endeavour, where the person making it puts a bit of themselves into it. How can they not? But I enjoyed how this essay explored this phenomenon.

Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:54:50 +1100

🔗 Nicholas Bate: The Greatest Productivity Tips, 159

Simply because we do not affix a postage stamp to our e-mail does not mean it is free. That mail has a huge cost in productivity terms: for us, in did we craft it correctly first time? For others in lack of certainty perhaps of what is required of them. For others in being cc’d without need.

No, mail isn’t free. It’s extraordinarily expensive.

So true. I would add that Slack is just as expensive, only that you’re making micropayments over the course of the day instead of one lump sum.

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:12 +1100

🔗 82MHz: Blogs are still a thing

One more for the “blogging’s not dead yet” list everyone’s keeping.

Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing […] But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it’s not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn’t commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich.

That’s why I like it too. It’s a slow, quiet, and comfortable form of online interaction.

Via: Mastodon boost by Brent Simmons

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:22:06 +1100

🔗 MOR10: Blogging is dead. Long live ephemerality.

This ended up being quite an insightful piece, particularly around how much better the authoring tools are in Instagram and other social media apps.

Via: Juha-Matti Santala

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:21:14 +1100

🔗 Robert Birming: Blog Inspiration

Very nice collection of links to blogging resources — from ideas and inspirations through to colour and icon packs — from @birming. This stuff is cat nip for me, so I’m sure to enjoy browsing these links.

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:55:26 +1100

🔗 You’re not a front-end developer until you’ve… - Nic Chan

Scored 17 in this little quiz. Not bad for a backend developer, although many of the questions universally apply.

Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 22:46:08 +1100

🔗 Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia

Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up.

Amazing.

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:29:41 +1100

🔗 Dan Sinker: The Who Cares Era

This post has been doing the rounds in the online circles I travel in. I finally got around to reading it, and I think the author is right: caring about something in a world where others don’t is a radical idea. I know it’s an area where I could be better.

Oh, and I’m sorry, but I find the term “Instagram mini-essay” to be an oxymoron. The original poster’s quip of this Instagram essayist being another victim of the Who Cares Era are my feelings exactly. I mean, come on: don’t use frickin’ Instagram for your think pieces. Put a frickin’ URL on it next time.

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:19:41 +1100

🔗 Inessential: Retirement Day

I stopped working this day in 2025, almost 41 years later, as a senior engineer (which is surprisingly a lot like busing tables — lots of cleanup and setting the table just right for the customers to have a great time).

This line made me laugh. I’ve never waited tables, but as a senior dev myself, it often feels that my job has become less about coding and more about fixing problems and getting out of people’s way. So it goes.

Congratulations, Brent Simmons, on your retirement.

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:59:21 +1100

🔗 Jim Nielsen: Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”

What really resonates in his step-by-step process is how, as problems present themselves, you see how much easier it is to deal with performance issues for stuff you wrote vs. stuff others wrote. Not only that, but you can debug way faster!

The understanding that comes from the code you wrote yourself is grossly underrated in my opinion. Choosing to use a library for something is not free. There’s an exchange involved: speed now for understanding later.

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:08:43 +1100

🔗 Flamed Fury: Monthly Recap: May 2025

I found the bookmarks from this monthly recap to be really interesting.

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 09:41:01 +1100

🔗 Simon Willison: No build frontend is so much more fun

If you’ve found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here’s something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system. […] The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.

None of my frontend projects are used for “real” things, so I’m not speaking from authority here. But I don’t care: I still think the worst part of frontend development are all the crummy build tools. Remove them all and web development can be really fun.

Thu, 29 May 2025 09:37:30 +1100

🔗 Birchtree: Apple copies Samsung 😉

It has been fundamentally strange that Apple currently has OS’s with the same features that rarely share a number, so numbering them by year makes sense.

Wait, I was under the impression that Apple’s practice of trying to jam the same features into their OSes at the same time had a detrimental effect on quality. And they’re going to synchronise all their OS version numbers? Wouldn’t that just solidify user’s expectation on what’s in those OSes? Why not avoid that by keeping individual version numbers, and just ship features when they’re ready?

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:57:01 +1100

🔗 Inessential: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers

I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.

As someone who has only worked in mid-sized businesses (and government) I appreciate Brent Simmons — a developer who I admire and whose software I use every day — candour here. Admitting your biases is not easy.

I know the indie life is romantic. Believe me, nary a day passes where I don’t romanticise about it. But speaking for myself, I think people’s reluctance to go that route is less to do with ability and more to do with the non-technical side, like security, confidence, thinking you have a good idea (not to mention being simply being in a position to take that opportunity). I wonder if some day the stars will align and I’d be in a position to take the plunge. Time will tell, I guess.

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:35:52 +1100

🔗 Pixel Envy: The Future of British Television in a U.S. Streaming World

The BBC has problems, but it matters to people. If a country values its domestic media — particularly public broadcasting — it should watch the future of British media closely and figure out what is worth emulating to stay relevant. The CBC is worth it, too.

I’d add that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Cooperation) and SBS are worth it too. Culturally speaking, it’d be a sad day if those were to go away.

Sat, 10 May 2025 09:47:31 +1100

🔗 NY Mag: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

Two thoughts on this. The first is that I think these kids are doing a disservice to themselves. I’m not someone who’s going to say “don’t use AI ever,” but the only way I can really understanding something is working through it, either by writing it myself or spending lots of time on it. I find this even in my job: it’s hard for me to know of the existence of some feature in a library I haven’t touched myself, much less how to use it correctly. Offloading your thinking to AI may work when you’re plowing through boring coding tasks, but when it comes to designing something new, or working through a Sev-1, it helps to know the system your working on like the back of your hand.

Second thought: TikTok is like some sort of wraith, sucking the lifeblood of all who touches it, and needs to die in fire.

Via: Sharp Tech

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 07:29:17 +1100

🔗 How to Work Better

Sage advice from Kev Quirk. I feel like I’m struggling a little at work recently, like things are slipping. Like Kev I can’t multitask, and I know I’ve got to get better at doing a single thing at a time. But unlike Kev, I need to care more about making an effort.

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:49:37 +1100

🔗 cathoderay.tube

Yes.

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 07:48:59 +1100

🔗 Prefer Numbered Lists to Bullets

Good arguments for using numbered listed instead of bullets in chat communication. I don’t disagree with any of them. I will say that tend to preferred bulleted lists simply because the chat apps I use tend to make using numbered lists more difficult than it should be. Slack, for example, only starts a “real” numbered list when it detects you type 1.. And once you’ve started, there’s no way to skip ordinals within the same numbered list.

Note that "1. This" the only "real" numbered list, and has a different appearance.

Even Obsidian’s implementation is not perfect. Despite making it easy to start a numbered list at an arbitrary ordinal, it’s still not possible to skip ordinals.

It’d be simpler if they didn’t try to automatically make “real” numbered lists at all.

Via: Jim Nielsen

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:14:45 +1100

🔗 We are destroying software

We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.

Wheels are not the same. If I need a wheel for a wheelbarrow, I don’t want to use a wheel for a tractor just because it exists. The same is true for software. If all I want to do is minify some JS without all the transpiling crap that comes from using React or Typescript, why not eschew Webpack for my own handwritten build scripts?

Via: Simon Willison

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 13:53:54 +1100

🔗 Animating Rick and Morty One Pixel at a Time

Using OpenGL Shading Language, which is apparently supported by browsers, to produce an animation of Rick from Rick and Morty. I’ve yet to go into this post in any great detail, but it certainly looks very interesting.

Via: Simon Willison

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 10:54:31 +1100

🔗 Mastodon Bookmark RSS

Generates an RSS feed of all the toots you bookmark. I’ve been using it these past couple of weeks and it’s been fantastic. Mastodon bookmarks are front and centre now, thanks to them being in my feed reader.

Via Robb Knight

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 07:49:06 +1100

🔗 We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

Liked this piece by Joan Westenberg. I occasionally see this cynicism myself, which is frustrating as they usually come from builders. Surely they know how hard it is to come up with a solution to a problem, only have it torn down. Granted, there might be some ego involved in these feelings.

Via Pixel Envy.

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:49:28 +1100

🔗 100 quotes that helped me write

Wish I could remember where I saw this so I can give them a HT. But there are some excellent quote here in this list prepared by Austin Kleon.

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 07:02:46 +1100

🔗 Curve boards

For anyone else interested in the trackside signage of Victorian railways. What got me looking was learning about coast boards. Seems to be instructions to the driver on what to set the train’s power output.

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:30:40 +1100

🔗 How to Write Docs People Read

Some interesting ideas on documentation from Allen Pike. I know for myself I tend to turn towards how-tos when I need to reference something. I’d be curious to know how this could work with technical documentation, which is usually dry and out of date.

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 07:28:33 +1100

🔗 Lens

A nice looking meta tag checker by Robb Knight. Finding a good meta tag checker that’s not riddled with ads is difficult. This might be the one I’ll use going forward. I also liked his blog post on how he built it.

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:33:39 +1100

🔗 If Not React, Then What?

Quite the condemation of React and “frameworkism” in frontend web development. I’m not a frontend guy, but I do poke through the code from time to time, and it’s mindboggling how complicated it is. And for what? Is it for any specific engineering decision that are relevant to us? Or is it just because “Facebook does it?”

Speaking of which, if you read anything from this post, read the “But” section. An excellent set of rebuttals for why React may not be a good default choice.

Oh, and also the first footnote. I had no idea that some of React’s design decisions came about because of IE 6. The ghost of Microsoft’s shitty browser continues to haunt us all.

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 07:43:53 +1100

🔗 How I ship projects at big tech companies

Good post, although a hard one to read while reflecting on my last few weeks at work, and just feeling that I’ve been falling short in what it takes. 😔

Via this post, found on this BlogFlock.

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 22:46:03 +1100

🔗 Thought Detox

Someone on Micro.blog posted a link to this little web-app years ago, where you can write your thoughts and they float away into the ether, never to be seen again. I didn’t grab a link to it at the time, which I regretted. Well, I’m not making that mistake twice.

Via Anil Dash

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:33:36 +1100

🔗 How I build things

This might be a good one for me to return to from time to time.

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:04:14 +1100

Also, hat tip to the “postrolls” which led me to the previously linked item. I’ve been enjoying these two over the last few days:

I’ll post any more that I find. 🔗

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 08:29:31 +1100

🔗 Thinking About Recipe Formats More Than Anyone Should

Just looking at the formats in the post, it’s a bit of a shame that they’re little more than lists of ingredients and instructions. But I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about that, given how varied recipes can be.

The one exception, Cooklang, looks interesting. It seems a bit limited in the types of recipes it could be used for. But sometimes the best languages are the ones with a small, yet deep, focus on a problem space.

And of-course there’s an XML version. I opened this post expecting there to be an XML version. 😄

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 08:25:09 +1100

🔗 Writes and Write-Nots

I have my doubts about this future being realised. Or it’s probably more accurate to say I rather that this future isn’t realised.

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 11:54:33 +1100

Some interesting links from linkage.lol that I want to note before accidentally closing my browser tab.

🔗 Blogging Resources Complements of Robert Birming
🔗 For Linkblog Fans

It’s also a site I’ve now subscribed to.

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:34:57 +1100

🔗 How to be confident

A great post by Annie Mueller. And pretty much spot on, based on my understanding of how to gain confidence.

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:32:35 +1100

🔗 Save the Web by Being Nice

Found this while browsing Dave Winer’s blog-roll on Scripting News. I enjoyed reading this post so I thought I’d take his advice and be nice by sharing a link to it.

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 06:49:06 +1100

🔗 Chris Arnade Walks the World

I’ve been enjoying this newsletter for the past month now. Chris is a good writer (understandable, given his profession) and gives wonderful descriptions of the places and peoples he visits. Worth looking at if you’re into blogger-travels-the-world style blogs.

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 08:48:58 +1100

🔗 Hire HTML and CSS people

Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”

I know bugger all about the world of front-end web development. But seeing how quickly it takes me to get changes made and deployed using just these technologies, verses dealing with the mountain of JavaScript for an SPA, leaves me convinced that those that embrace HTML and CSS have a significant advantage over those that don’t.

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:54:49 +1100

🔗 Private blogs on Scribbles

This excites me. One of the features that drew me to look at Scribbles was the possibility of private blogs. It’s great that this has been added now. I will definitely make use of it. Thanks, Vincent.

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 11:59:06 +1100

🔗 I Fucking Hate Jira

Real opinions from real people about a project management system which unfortunately is also real.

Love the tag line of this site. Also, spoilers, but Confluence makes a warranted appearance here as well.

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:55:57 +1100

🔗 Slop is Good

I agree with Craig Hockenberry here. The trust of any one site essentially depends on what is published there. And as more big-tech platforms embrace AI slop, the less you can trust those platforms to surface reliable information. It’s like that proverb of someone being only as good as their word. If one was to replace the concept of a person with a domain name, then I reckon you could say the same thing about websites.

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:45:48 +1100

🔗 Collective Nouns for Groups of Various Birds

Many of the ones I expected, but there are some interesting ones I’ve never heard of: a dole of doves, a kit of pigeons, a pandemonium of parrots.

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:09 +1100

🔗 Own Your Web – Issue 15: Home Sweet Home

It’s good to see Own Your Web is still going. I really enjoy reading this newsletter and I was disappointed for a time when issues stopped being published reguarily some months ago. Good thing I kept the RSS feed around.

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:48:22 +1100

🔗 AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name

“It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true. […] “People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.

Is the marketing in the domain name, or in the word of mouth about how much they spent on the domain name? Well, I guess they got me to talk about it. 😀

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:17:41 +1100

🔗 Never Tweet Your Heroes

I wonder if M.G. Siegler had anyone in mind when he wrote this.

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 08:47:57 +1100

🔗 Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters

Oof! I feel bad for all those Window sys-admins who’s weekend has just been ruined.

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 09:14:03 +1100

🔗 Marquee Element Tester

Test your browsers compatability of the Marquee element. No spoilers about whether it worked in mine. 😀

Via Scripting Notes.

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:17:55 +1100

🔗 On the origins of DS_store

An interesting tale on how .DS_Store — a regular in Git ignore files everywhere — got its name.

Via @Burk within the Hemispheric Views Discord.

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:17:04 +1100

🔗 txt.fyi

Thank you to the anonymous person who runs this. Something happened which left me ropeable, and I needed a place to scream into the void. I did it there. It’s now lost to the either, along with (most) of my anger. Hopefully time will fix what’s left.

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:56:27 +1100

🔗 Adding Github-Style Markdown Alerts to Eleventy

GitHub has alerts (aka callouts) Markdown support where the syntax looks like [Obsidian’s.]

So apparently, if we were using Github instead of Gitlab, I could’ve had it all. 😏

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:29:15 +1100

🔗 How the “Nutbush” became Australia’s unofficial national dance

It’s amusing to grow up thinking everyone did this up until a few years ago, when someone from overseas told me they never learnt this dance. Anyway, this is totally a thing. Last wedding I attended, we absolutely did the Nutbush. 😄

Sun, 19 May 2024 09:57:47 +1100

🔗 Finish your projects

If there’s ever an article I should print out and staple to my forehead, it’s this one.

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:50:36 +1100

🔗 Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

I’d like to avoid jumping on the “I have everything AI” bandwagon, but I agree that Slacks use of private message data to train their LLM is a pretty significant breach of trust. A lot of sensative data runs through their system, and although they may be hosting it, it’s not theirs to do as they please. Maybe they think it’s within their right, what with their EULAs and everything, but if I were a paying customer — of enterprise software, if you remember — I’d make bloody sure that data is the customer and the customer’s own.

It’ll be interesting to see how this will affect me personally. We use Slack at work and I know management is very sensative about IP (and given the domain, I can understand). Maybe I’ll finally get to try Teams out.

Fri, 10 May 2024 10:36:48 +1100

🔗 Goodbye to Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, the best iPad Pro accessory

I’ve never considered hoarding accessories before, but I might start. The Smart Keyboard Folio is perfect for how I use the iPad: a great stand and decent enough keyboard that doesn’t get in the way when I just want to read.

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:01:52 +1100

🔗 the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think

Igore the click-batey headline: this is quite a good post. Really enjoyed it. And, on the whole, I agree with the author. Via Jim Nielsen’s notes

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 08:50:33 +1100

🔗 Hiss!

Seeing @Miraz’s post about the Morepork reminded me of this poem by C. J. Dennis that was read to us as a kid. It was in this beautifully illustrated picture book, with thick borders full of, I guess, the illustrations of the subject’s imagination.

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:40:19 +1100

🔗 The Worlds of Podcasting

On it, their producer was lamenting not having somewhere to post a link to something being spoken about. No mention of show notes because I’m not convinced “big podcast” even knows they exist.

I’ve complained about this before and I haven’t seen any improvements. It’s as if the concept of making show-notes or even a website containing the links you mention on your podcast never cross these producers minds. That it’s perfectly okay to read URLs aloud and expect people to remember. It’s such an odd phenomenon.

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 09:15:53 +1100

🔗 Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

A really great read.

I’ve never been on a cruise. This, plus the many jokes I’ve heard from comedians that have worked cruises, is probably the closest experience I’ll ever get to cruising. After reading it, it’s definitely not for me.

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:32:56 +1100

🔗 Insanity in the Air: The crash of Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303

A facinating post. One of those posts where you know the writer knows what they’re talking about, and has clearly done a lot of research for the piece. Will definitely take a look at their other posts.

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:53:35 +1100

🔗 Doing Weeknotes

This is probably worth trying. I know for myself that I get lost in the day-to-day activities of work that I loose a sense on what we’ve accomplished during the week. Besides, Confluence has got this blogging feature which never seems to get used.

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 08:02:22 +1100

🔗 The internet used to be ✨fun✨

Lot of interesting posts here about the personal web, both current and old school. I’ve been ducking in and out of this for a week now. Via the HV Discord.

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:19:58 +1100

🔗 Most People Won’t

Via A Learning a Day by Rohan. It resonated with me as well.

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 07:23:55 +1100

🔗 RS.S Joy

This was shared in the Hemispheric View Discord a few days ago. A lot of really good blogs listed (enrolled? As in blogroll?) there. I took a look at it yesterday and was just ducking in and out of blogs for ages.

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 08:06:58 +1100

🔗 Pika

Seeing this makes me want to try it. I think I have a problem: I want to try all of the blogging CMSes. But I have no need for it now, so I’ll just keep a link to it here for later.

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 08:24:33 +1100

🔗 The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more

Ingenuity has been an incrediable achievement. The engineers at NASA should be so proud of themselves. It’s sad to see this chopper grounded now, but seeing it fly for as long as it did has been a joy. Bravo!

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 08:20:29 +1100

🔗 Let’s make the indie web easier

Inspiring post. I will admit that while I was reading it I was thinking “what about this? What about that?” But I came away with the feeling (realisation?) that the appetite for these tools might be infinite and that one size doesn’t fit all. This might be a good thing.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 07:42:00 +1100

🔗 Please, Own Your RSS Links

All you have to do is dream up a good URL at your domain and redirect it to the feed’s URL provided by whatever service you use to host your stuff. And then that’s where you tell folks to subscribe.

It’s easy to forget (like I do) that there’s nothing magical about an RSS feed. It’s just one more thing served by HTTP at a URL. And thus, is useable with the real magic here which is HTTP redirects.

This is a brilliant idea. The only thing I’ll add is just to make those RSS feeds discoverable.

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 07:33:20 +1100

🔗 Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 Ban Takes Effect; Apple Appeals

The ITC’s ruling was subject to a potential veto by U.S. President Biden by December 25th, but today, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a statement that it has decided against vetoing the ITC ruling, meaning that the ruling is now final.

It seems odd to me that Apple was expecting a reprieve from the White House over this patient dispute with Masimo. Issuing a veto looks like choosing one US company over another. Doesn’t seem like good political optics to me. Maybe it seemed to Apple it was worth a shot. 🤷‍♂️

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:14:17 +1100

🔗 Hardcore Software: //build It and They Will Come (Hopefully) (paywall)

I remember this Build conference. I was using Windows 7 at the time and it was exciting to see Windows 8 previewed like this. It was a major departure from what I was used to, and I was eager awaiting the Ars Technica reviews of the OS, the apps, and how things like contracts will work for developers.

But… it was an excitement I had for others. I was less than excited about the idea of seeing the desktop take a backseat to this brand new world of Metro and touch based interactions. I guess I was not the only one.

It’s quite a shame really. The devs at Microsoft clearly put a lot of work into re-enginerring the entire OS.

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 08:47:31 +1100

🔗 Link previews or ads

It’s thoughtful posts like this that keeps me on Micro.blog.

Also, chalk me up as one who’d rather keep link previews out of the timeline. I posted a link in Discord and the preview was so obnoxious I wish I could hide it (really Discord? Why can’t I hide it?).

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:56:21 +1100

🔗 PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries

The realization has forced people to more deeply scrutinize their digital media purchases and subscriptions and how they value digital content. It’s also leading to calls for investment in hard copies of media.

I still believe that it’s possible to have a (semi-)perminenant representation of media in the digital realm. You just need to make sure it’s in an open, non-DRMed, file that exists on your file system. I know, easier said than done. But it might be time for me to be better here than I have been.

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 09:28:12 +1100

🔗 Hardcore Software 065. SharePoint: Office Builds Our Own Server (link pay-walled)

Yes, believe it or not, I’m reading about how SharePoint was built. I never had a lot of experience with SharePoint myself: although I did work at places which used it, I tried to stay away from Office documents as much as I could, sticking to things like wikis. And yes, I can understand why others may find it pretty crummy (the post gives a few examples of how crummy). But I did find some ideas SharePoint had quite interesting, such as the “everything is a list” concept. I do appreciate this consistent through-line in the product design, much like Unix’s “everything is a file” philosophy. I also like the fact that this extends to user-defined lists, like a very simple database.

Anyway, this paragraph caught my eye:

The idea of Office extended by a website for each Office user and team was incredibly important simply because it made using Office better. It was also a vision we had from the time we acquired FrontPage—everyone should have their own place on the web where it is easy to keep their work and share it with others. We were clearly too early. As we will see it was not just that the world was not ready, the world was anti-ready. SPS fit with the products of the era that remained top-down, complex, and under the full control of IT.

I yearn for the day when organisations make it easy for any employee to whip up an internal webpage for their team. Documents and wikis are nice, but they’re just so limiting in how they show information. The freedom to use real web technologies to present something as best you think you can, while also keeping the data “in house” (password protected, stored on servers the company controls, etc) is just an area on office tech that’s missing.

Case in point: I would love to be able to build a website showing the the status of backlog items that I can share with my team. I don’t want to manage the raw data myself: that’s all being tracked in Jira anyway. But Jira sucks, and it’s really difficult to show an overview of work, especially when they span multiple epics. Having something like a simple dashboard which will pull Jira ticket status and display them as maybe progress bars would be great.

But where am I to host this? Probably not best to do so on the open web.

See also the idea of small databases.

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 07:48:24 +1100

🔗 DOS_deck

Experience classic games with modern convenience at DOS_deck. With full controller support and a carefully curated game collection, enjoy timeless classics and hidden gems, readily available for instant play in your web browser on devices you already own.

Filing this away to try later. Also interesting to see they’re using JS-Dos for this, the same thing being used by F5 To Run, which is cool.

Via Ars Technica.

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 10:16:01 +1100

🔗 So Many Default Apps

Seeing everyone blog (yes, actually blog) about their default apps over the last two weeks has been absolutely wonderful. Robb has been doing a fantastic job maintaining an index of these posts, and has now added a network graph showing the links between them. Works great.

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 07:50:14 +1100

🔗 Please, Expose your RSS

100% this!

It was only a year or so ago that I found out that RSS discovery was a thing (coincidentally-but-probably-not-really it was also a year or so ago when I first read Manton’s book which mentions this).

Before that, if there was a site I wanted to subscribe to, and there was no RSS link on the page itself, I wouldn’t bother. Apart from thinking that I needed the link to the RSS feed to subscribe, I also got burned so often by sites that didn’t even have RSS that I just defaulted to assuming there was no way to read their site in my feed reader.

Browsers are getting better at surfacing this though. Vivaldi now shows an RSS indicator in the address bar when it detects that the site has one. But it’s small, and I’m usually not looking at the address bar after entering the URL, so it’s easy to miss. Really, nothing beats putting a link on the site itself.

Now, if you escuse me for a second, I just need to check that I’ve got a link to an RSS feed on my site…

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:10:40 +1100

🔗 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. But it’s also concerning because there’s now one major place to keep your data that Google might one day abandon.

It’s striking seeing this line in the first paragraph. I use Keep for my shopping list. It works well, and it’ll be a shame if Google were to shut it down. But there’s also a risk of them being too focused on the app, where they cram some useless AI feature into it. Notion does this, and I wish there was a way to turn it off.

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 07:57:29 +1100

🔗 Canada’s 84-year radio time check has stopped because of accuracy concerns

Interesting article about how Canada broadcasted timing information via radio. Reminds me of the 6 pips played just before the news on ABC radio when I was a kid. I’m guessing they served a similar role.

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 08:10:44 +1100

🔗 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. 🫣

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:34:32 +1100

🔗 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 them in some capacity, like some small web project. Unfortunately, the only things I can think of building right now are things for my job.

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 10:07:20 +1100

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 posts on my blog that are formal and impersonal. And I hate re-reading them: they’re super boring. On the flip side, seeing posts about my day (sans post about work), of photos and videos I’ve taken, are a joy to relive. I know these are posts I tend to prefer reading on personal blogs of others. I’ll try to write more of those.

Related: Nobody cares about your blog, via. Skoobs.

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 10:24:13 +1100

🔗 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 moving away from micro-services back to monoliths was making the rounds. A lot of the motivation towards micro-services can be traced back to Amazon’s preaching about them being the best way to architect scalable software. Having a team from Amazon saying “micro-services didn’t work; we went back to a monolith and it was more scalable and cheaper to run” is, frankly, a bit like the Pope renouncing his Catholic faith.

I didn’t say anything at the time as doing so seemed like jumping on the fad wagon along with everyone else, but I have to agree with this article that this following along with the crowd is quite pervasive in the circuits I travel in. I did witness the tail end of the XML fad when I first started working. My first job had all the good stuff: XML for data and configuration, XSLT to render HTML and to ingest HL7¹, XForms for customisable forms. We may have used XSD somewhere as well. Good thing we stopped short of SOAP.

The whole feeling that XML was the answer to any problem was quite pervasive, and with only a few evangelists, it was enough to drive the team in a particular direction. And I wish I could say that I was above it all, but that would be a lie. I drank the cool-aid like many others about the virtues of XML.

But here lies the seductive thing about these technology fads: they’re not without their merits. There were cases where XML was the answer, just like there are cases where micro-services are. The trap is assuming that just because it worked before, it would work again, 100% of the time in fact, even if the problem is different. After all, Amazon or whatever is using it, and they’re successful. And you do want to see this project succeed, right? Especially when we’re pouring all this money into it and your job is on the line, hmm?

Thus, teams are using micro-services, Kubernetes, 50 different middleware and sidecar containers, and pages and pages of configuration to build a service where the total amount of data can be loaded into an SQLite3 database². And so it goes.

So we’ll see what would come of it all. I hope there is a move away from micro-services back to simpler forms of software designs; one where the architecture can fit entirely in one’s head. Of course, just as this article says, they’ll probably be an overcorrection, and a whole set of new problems arise when micro-services are ditched in favour of monoliths. I only hope that, should teams decide to do this, they do so with both eyes open and avoid the pitfalls these fads can lay for them.

HL7 is a non-XML format used in the medical industry. We mapped it to XML and passed it through an XSLT to extract patient information. Yes, we really use XSLT to do this! ↩︎
Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. ↩︎

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 09:11:15 +1100

🔗 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.

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 08:51:58 +1100

🔗 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 this API fisaco is affecting the tools that mods use to keep the community spam free and happy should give them pause. That they don’t care is an indication as to how detatched they are from those “on the ground”.

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 16:34:26 +1100

🔗 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 a day, but occasionally can’t think of something to write about. Not that I know anyone like that.

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 11:28:30 +1100

🔗 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 big Google Reader user, and I still believe that the death of Google Reader was ultimately good for the RSS format. But I know how much people loved using it and how devastated they where when Google decided to pull the plug.

One thing that caught my eye was the executive’s comment about working on Google Reader being a waste of the engineers’ careers. Taking the comment at face value¹, it doesn’t seem like a waste at all. Sure there were “only” 30 million users of Google Reader, but it’s obvious that they were passionate users of the service. And it would’ve been an honour working on something that elicit such a strong emotional response from your users, let alone being the one that started it all with the original prototype. I can’t imaging getting that same buzz by one of the thousands working on Google Search or Google+.

I’m guessing the comment was slightly coloured by the fact that the person making it wasn’t too keen on Google Reader. ↩︎

Tue, 16 May 2023 08:09:45 +1100

🔗 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 over information about what you watch,[…] how much money your household makes, what food and brands you like, and your race and be subject to on-screen ads at any time, then Telly’s got the deal for you.

I understand that not everyone can afford a good TV, but the price here — tracking and a constant stream of ads — feels a bit too high. It occured to me that monitors can’t do this. If a company discovers that their monitor is tracking what the user is seeing, the manufacturer will get sued out of existance. Maybe having a monitor is the solution to a TV with zero tracking (they do need to be larger though). 🤔

It’ll also be funny to see how quickly people get into this and disable all the ad/tracking stuff. I’m betting it’ll be done within three months.

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 08:47:03 +1100

🔗 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 platforms so often it’s difficult to follow him (well I guess Twitter would have worked at one point).

Via: birchtree.me

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +1100

🔗 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 something like:
p[data-size] {width: attr(data-width, rem);}
I realize adding this would probably lead to someone creating a framework […] where all the styling is jammed into a million data-*attributes […], but we shouldn’t let that stop us.

Is it too late to vote for this? I’d love to be able to do this for background images. Relying on JavaScript to get the URL from the attribute and style the element is such a hack.

Via: Jim Nielsen

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:03:22 +1100

🔗 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 msn.com to have you tell it what topics you prefer.

Definitely not trying Windows 11. I hate software that pushes news onto you, unsolicited and with no easy way to turn off! I’ve have my news sources that I read and trust. I don’t want things pushed to me from sources with some commercial agreement that doesn’t have my interests in mind.

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:24:20 +1100

🔗 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 flunked the logo colour test, getting 1 out of 8. I guess a career of chromatology is out of the question for me. 😄

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 21:16:30 +1100

🔗 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 kid. Everything he wrote that I read (or watched), I enjoyed. It’s been a while, but I’m sure I’d still like it if I read it today.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:14:08 +1100

🔗 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 strength and act like the assassin for features or services. Don’t want to support something? Get Google to acquire you and inevitably shut you down. It’s such a unique niche that companies should be paying Google for this service.

I’m not a Fitbit user, but I know how it feels to be burned by Google’s obsessive need to shut down things I find useful, so I can understand all the upset over this.

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +1100

🔗 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 the graphical user interface, we have lost in efficiency.

[…]

What Microsoft just showed completely changes this calculation. Their LLM-based user interface is both incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to use. In fact, it’s so easy to use that there almost seems no point in even having a traditional GUI.

Swings and roundabouts. 😏

Honestly, it’s kind of exciting to see the two UI styles married this way. Point and click is fine, but sometimes, when I know what I want, I just want a way to “tell” the computer what to do, rather than go through the motions “guiding” it to my desired state. This is why I prefer the command line over a GUI for certain tasks. And yeah, Office has scripting but unless you’re in there constantly, you find yourself relearning it every time. Having a prompt like this might be where the sweet-spot lies.

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:55:07 +1100

🔗 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 appear when the capsule is expanded; the fact that the only thing it can display is the battery level since there’s nothing like Live Actions. The capper is the “90%” on the right side of the capsule, right next to the 90 in the battery indicator. You know, just in case you need reminding that the battery is at 90%. Champions indeed!

Hilarity aside, it’s a little sad seeing these Android OEMs doing everything they can to rip off Apple’s design. And it’s not just those in the long tail of OEMs either. Seeing Samsung half-arse features months after they debut on the iPhone, just to abandon them months later is really cringeworthy (anyone remember “AR Emoji”, their rip-off of Animoji). It’s past time they developed some taste on their own.

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 12:38:01 +1100

🔗 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 bit more doubtful of the post I wrote two days ago.

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 08:56:17 +1100

🔗 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 a directory. I’m perfectly capable of writing one myself, but that would mean poking through the ImageMagick docs trying to remember which of the several zillion arguments is used to reduce the image size. Having one written for me by ChatGPT saved about 15 minutes of this (it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I did need to tweak it a little).

I don’t know what the future holds with AIs like this, and I acknowledge that it has had an effect on some peoples’ living (heck, it may have an effect on mine). But I really can’t deny the utility it provided this morning.

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:01:53 +1100

🔗 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 semi-structured information in a spreadsheet or a wiki page comprised solely of tables. There’s always some loosely defined convention around how to represent it (use this colour to indicate this particular state) or when it should be changed (change this label to “In Review” until these people have seen it and then change it to “Confirmed”).

One example is how we manage releases: which services we’re pushing out and what commits they are, which environments it’s been deployed to or tested in, whether the other teams or the person on-call are aware of it and have signed off, etc. This is all managed in wiki pages that follow a standard layout, and it’s… okay. It was a convention that has grown out over time as we were working out our release procedure. And it made sense keeping it relatively informal as we were trying to work out our groove. But that groove has been formed now, and it would be nice to formalise the process. But doing so means that there’s a lot of manual labour keeping these release documents correct and up to date. And since it’s all in a centrally managed wiki, it’s difficult to automate away things that are managed by other systems like our code repositories.

A tool that can be hosted on-prem which will allow anyone to spin up a new document-base database (either for the team or themselves), define a very loose schema and some views, and put a very simple workflows and code macros would be great. The trick is trying to walk the line that separates something that basically is like a hosted version of Excel verses something that will require so much setup work that no-one will bother with it. I’d imagine that’s a tricky balancing act to follow.

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:46:56 +1100

🔗 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 chance to let the devs communicate this to their users. Nothing but cowardly silence. How utterly disrespectful!

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:46:57 +1100

🔗 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 tool a little more.

Via waxy.org.

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 07:42:07 +1100

🔗 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 occurred to me: you probably don’t even need PagerDuty if you can just hear about outages from the news.

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 14:12:23 +1100

🔗 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 myself opening and playing around with this over the last few days.

(via. podiboq in the Hemispheric Views Discord)

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 09:55:34 +1100

🔗 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 it on the full screen TUI app I’m working on and it worked flawlessly.

Now wondering if I could use it for automated testing. 🤔

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:52:49 +1100

🔗 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. Ars Technica)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 09:28:39 +1100

🔗 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.

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:44:12 +1100

🔗 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.

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:55:06 +1100

🔗 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 keep a new product around for more than a few years is insightful.

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:46:42 +1100

🔗 Google Kills Stadia

Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.

What’s there more to say? 🤷

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 16:46:33 +1100

🔗 Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement lacks crosswalks, checkboxes, Google

I wonder: if Google, as many suspect, is using CAPTCHA for image recognition training, how certain are they of the positive results? If everyone were to start clicking anything other than crosswalks, would that screw up their training data?

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 16:56:04 +1100

🔗 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 how Go handles errors. But not all of us are ready to adopt this yet.

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 23:45:52 +1100

🔗 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 perfect arrow to include in a webpage. Nice, clean, and quite comprehensive. No awful ads either, which is a breath of fresh air.

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:09:16 +1100

🔗 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 various track configurations and how the system operates. The size of the network never ceases to amaze.

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 17:37:38 +1100

🔗 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 routine “photos from 10 years ago” posts, which brings me back. Link via my dad.

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 09:32:38 +1100

🔗 Publishing your work increases your luck (via Github’s The Readme Project)

I found this very inspiring. Given where it was published the subject matter is about software, but I believe that it could apply to pretty much any creative endeavour.

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:44:41 +1100

🔗 Mentality

This might be a good one to bookmark and come back to occasionally.

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:39:24 +1100

🔗 Stop checking the news before you do deep work

Yes! I always fall into this trap.

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 09:27:06 +1100

🔗 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 attempt to understand how Google can think that they can put out anything — the version of US Google Pay app for example — and expect people to flock to it. I no expert, but I’m not sure why the physics of user adoption should be any different if you’re a multi-billion dollar company. People will use your software if it’s good, and they won’t if it’s not. And if you force people to change their habits because you want to completely throw out your existing version for “reasons”, you’re giving users an opportunity to choose whether they want to even continue using your stuff.

It happened to me when they shutdown Inbox. I had the opportunity to change to something else, which I did: Fastmail. Since I was forced to change my habits, I may as well have changed them for the better.

The second — and this is probably obvious — is that the a good indication of the health of one of Google’s app is how often they rebrand it. Since it’s launch, Gmail has always been Gmail. I can’t even name what Google’s messaging app is called now.

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 08:05:14 +1100

🔗 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.

Worth pointing out that support for an “IE compatibility mode” won’t be removed from Edge until 2029, so can we really say that IE is dead?

Mon, 30 May 2022 17:30:04 +1100

🔗 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 wondering how anyone with a real website like this expects visitors to stick around, let alone visit it again in the future.

Fri, 27 May 2022 14:57:10 +1100

🔗 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 new, and just how much easier it would have been if we’ve built it as designed, rather than rushed it out to meet a deadline. A perennial problem.

Thu, 12 May 2022 11:31:37 +1100

🔗 A New Hope for Object Storage: R2 enters open beta

I’ve been looking forward to giving R2 a try for a while.

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:08:00 +1100

🔗 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 about how they’d divvy up revenue from ticket sales before they get their first gig.

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 09:49:10 +1100

🔗 Not an April Fool: Dyson announces apocalyptic filter-headphone combo

Yes, the product is weird, but what prompted this link-post is the remark about this being a “perfect addition to your Mega Man cosplay project.” I believe in the games, you could always see Mega Man’s mouth.

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 06:56:54 +1100

🔗 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.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 07:13:00 +1100

🔗 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 indication on how they’re going to get the millions of app/website developers to switch to this. Hope they’ve considered that.

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:43:00 +1100

🔗 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 generics; but now that they are in the language, I’ll probably use them).

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:24:06 +1100

🔗 Kubernetes 101

A pretty good introduction about the fundamentals of Kubernetes, and also the post in question here.

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 16:21:59 +1100

🔗 Simulating Amazon DynamoDB unique constraints using transactions

A technique to simulate a uniqueness constraint on a field not used in the key. Came in handy for solving a problem I was having with DynamoDB today. I wrote more about it here if you’re curious.

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 08:21:32 +1100

🔗 Why Simple Is Smart

A collection of useful writing tips for journalists, but I think would also be helpful for anyone else writing online.

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 08:10:19 +1100

🔗 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 of work for Safari, but the fact that Safari is open source means that if others have different priorities, they have the ability to make these changes to the project directly, should they be capable of doing so. What these other contributors choose to do, and how they choose to decide this, is their business.

I’m not expecting regular users of Safari to understand this distinction between open-source project owners and contributors, but I’d had though that web-developers, whom I imagine deal with open-source software all the time, to know better. So it’s either that those complaining are not aware that Safari is an open-source project, or they do know and are just jumping on the rage bandwagon for whatever reason they may have. If it’s the latter, then I think they’re doing themselves a disservice.

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 09:03:21 +1100

🔗 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 copyright

My face is getting sore with all the palm prints on it. 🤦

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:21:00 +1100

🔗 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 like clone a game, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get off looking honourable doing so.

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 13:35:03 +1100

🔗 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 agree with the statement of the ads being part of the product. I tend to listen to host-read ads. I definitely skip the automated ones.

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 10:15:26 +1100

🔗 Microsoft fixes harebrained Y2K22 Exchange bug that disrupted email worldwide

Dates are hard, but it seems to me that treating the first two digits of a signed integer as the year when it’s so close to the overflow value is just asking for trouble.

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 07:58:22 +1100

🔗 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 the story. It’s possible that this was a mistake, but as far as I’m concerned, Meta has lost the benefit of the doubt here.

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:12:00 +1100

🔗 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 of those blogs where you can easily fall down a rabbit hole by following every link on the page (in a good way).

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 07:03:01 +1100

🔗 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 your browser, with some success. Then you disrespect them with a move like this? Not great.

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 13:45:00 +1100

🔗 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 file folders and directories, […], is gibberish to many modern students.

Kids these days. 😄