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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 Chromecast. Yes there were ads, but the experience was nice enough that I tolerated them. Recently, however, this became untenable. It started with Google deciding to replace their simple Chromecast target with a Google TV style app, complete with a list of video recommendations I had no interest in watching. Continue reading →
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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 post, they’re now in a right-hand sidebar, which doesn’t scroll, that is directly below the author of the post you’re reading. And let me be clear: as far as I can tell, these are not recommendations from the same author. They can be from anyone, covering any topic that I can only assume Medium algorithmically thinks you’d be interested in. Continue reading →
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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 JavaScript files. This means that the public/asset directory can grow to gigabytes in size, eventually reaching the point where Go will simply refuse to embed that much data. The tell-tail sign is this error message when you try to run the application: too much data in section SDWARFSECT (over 2e+09 bytes) If you see that, deleting public/assets should solve your problem. Continue reading →
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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 day. He just doesn’t publish them all. I guess that means that he has at least one or two drafts that can be touched up and published when he needs them. Although I don’t think of this blog as being anywhere near the quality of Seths, I think I’d like to start trying to publish on this site at least once a day. Continue reading →
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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 remember one such book that included a discussion about how computing could evolve in the future. The book approached the topic using a narrative of a “future” scenario, that would probably correspond with today’s present. In that story, the protagonist was late for school because of a fault with the “home computer” regarding the setting of the thermostat or something similar. Continue reading →
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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, which is maintaining a scoring site for a bocce comp I’m involve in with friends. How scoring works now is that the winner of a particular bocce match gets one point for the season. The winner for the season is the person with the most points. Continue reading →
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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 other posts on the subject, it was a post that was level-headed and was coming from a position of want to learn more rather than persuade (or hustle). Well worth the read, especially for those that are turned off by the whole web3 crap like I am. Continue reading →
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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 would like this sort of work but I realise now that I can only tolerate it in small doses. Doing it for as long as I have been is burning me out slightly. I’d just like to go back to coding. I’m wondering why this is. I think the biggest feeling I have is that it feels like I’m not delivering value. Continue reading →
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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 a post about it. Those six weeks have now become six months, and I can say I’m still off Twitter and have no immediate intention of going back. My anxiety levels dropped since getting off1, and although they’ve not completely gone, the baseline has remained low with occasional spikes that soon subside. Continue reading →
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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 one blog post or journal entry. Continue reading →
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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 when the user tries to use Edge to download Chrome. These are notices that are displayed by the browser itself whenever the user opens up the Chrome download page. Now, setting aside the fact that these notices shouldn’t be shown to the user at all, what got up my goat was the copy that appears in one of them: Continue reading →
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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 small cottage located on a hill, which meant some pretty stunning views, especially in the evening light. We didn’t do a heap during our trip, although we did manage to do the The Paps trail on Saturday, which involved a 700 metre climb. Continue reading →
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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 it, but I’m not a citizen of the EU so the regulation should not apply to me. But I’m pragmatic enough to know that not every web developer can or will selectively show this disclosure popup based on the geographic region of the visitor. Continue reading →
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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 development environment that is accessible from within your web browser. It’s based on VSCode, which is a popular and well-designed IDE that is already written in JavaScript1, and also provides access to a Linux shell running in the cloud, allowing you to do various things like build and test your code. Continue reading →
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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 individual tracks into a new album. This is a workflow that is absolutely not user friendly at the moment, and the only way I’ve gotten tracks into the catalogue is to run a hacked-together tool to upload the tracks from the command line. The reason why I’m addressing this now is that it’s slightly embarrassing to have this open-source project without having a nice way of doing something that, by all accounts, is quite fundamental (a good hint for when you’re facing this is when it comes time to write the end-user documentation: if you can’t explain how to do something in a way that doesn’t include the word “hack”, “complicated”, or “unsupported”, then something is missing). Continue reading →
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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 endpoint to list videos recently added to a channel or playlist. There are a bunch of channels that I watch regularly but I’m very hesitant to subscribe to them within YouTube itself (sorry YouTubers, but I choose not to smash that bell icon). I’m generally quite hesitant to give any signal to YouTube about my watching habits, feeding their machine learning models even more information about myself. Continue reading →
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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 it’s fair to say that I’m not a designer. And these designs look a little dated, but, surprisingly, this is sort of the design I’m going for: centered pages, borders, etc. A bit of a retro, tasteless style that may be ugly, but still usable(-ish). Continue reading →
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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. A few years ago, I actually bought an old Intel Nuc for that reason, but I never got around to setting it up. I managed to do so last Wednesday and so far it’s working pretty well. The next thing I’d like to do is setup RSS subscriptions for certain YouTube channels and automatically download the videos when they are publish. Continue reading →
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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 to provide a way to stream YouTube videos to a Chromecast without using the YouTube app. Using the YouTube app is becoming a real pain. Ads aside, they’ve completely replaced the Chromecast experience from a very basic viewing destination to something akin to a Google TV, complete with recommendations of “Breaking News” from news services that I have no interest in seeing. Continue reading →
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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 they have to do is sign up to a service that will solve the problem for them. The service they sign up for takes care of the rest. The second person chooses the option to pay $15 a month, 20 hours of work to get something built, and an ongoing commitment to keep it maintained. Continue reading →
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(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 Jobs, although such an event would probably not have been sufficient in itself. What tipped it over the edge was seeing the Ars Technica review of iOS showing up in my RSS feed on the same day. Pretty soon I’m expecting the MacOS review to drop as well. Continue reading →
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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: I’ve need to come up with a way to be notified when a user connects to, or disconnects from, a PostgreSQL database. This is not something that’s supported by PostgreSQL out of the box1, so my options are limited to building something that sits outside the database. Continue reading →
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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 seems to be taking on a bit of a different vibe at the moment. I am no longer religiously watching the daily press conferences as I did in the past. They’re still occurring as far as I know, and I do appreciate that the authorities are showing up every day once again to brief the public. Continue reading →
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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 my chest. It’s becoming a huge pain using Atlassian Confluence WISIWIG editor to create wiki pages. Trying to use Confluence to write out something that is non-trivial, with tables and diagrams, so that it is clear to everyone in the team (including yourself) is so annoying to do now I find myself wishing for alternatives. Continue reading →
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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. Releasing it to the major media outlets in such a way as to spin the guideline clarification as a concession to developers, even though nothing has actually change, is genius if true. I imagine that’s why Apple’s PR department get the big bucks. But I wonder if Apple has considered the potential blowback of this approach. Continue reading →