-
Home Screen Of 2024
It’s just turned 3:00 in the afternoon, and I was alternating between the couch and the computer desk, racking my brain on what to do. With no ongoing projects — a few ideas have been bouncing around, yet none has grabbed me so far, and I had nothing else in a state where I could just slip on some music or a podcast and work on — and seeing a few others make similar posts on their blogs, I’d figured I talk about my home screens. Continue reading →
-
2024 Song of The Year
It’s Christmas Eve once again, which means it’s time for the Song of The Year for 2024. Looking at the new and rediscovered albums for the year, there are quite a few to choose from. The runners up are pretty much all from Lee Resevere, a new artist I’ve started listening to, and includes: Should I Run, by Kristen Martell, arranged by Lee Rosevere Miles Wide, from Synths Working Overtime, by Lee Rosevere We’ve Been Here Before and Hide Your Heart, from Stationary Loops, by Lee Rosevere But there can only be one winner, and this year it’s Oxygene, Pt. Continue reading →
-
That Which Didn't Make The Cut
I did a bit of a clean-up of my projects folder yesterday, clearing out all the ideas that never made it off the ground. I’d figured it’d be good to write a few words about each one before erasing them from my hard drive for good. I suppose the healthiest thing to do would be to just let them go. But what can I say? Should a time come in the future where I wish to revisit them, it’d be better to have something written down than not. Continue reading →
-
A Summer Theme
Made a slight tweak to my blog’s theme today, to “celebrate” the start of summer. I wanted a colour scheme that felt suitable for the season, which usually means hot, dry conditions. I went with one that uses yellow and brown as the primary colours. I suppose red would’ve been a more traditional representation of “hot”, but yellow felt like a better choice to invoke the sensation of dry vegetation. I did want to make it subtle though: it’s easy for a really saturated yellow to be quite garish, especially when used as a background. Continue reading →
-
Delta of the Defaults 2024
It’s a little over a year since Dual of the Defaults, and I see that Robb and Maique are posting their updates for 2024, so I’d thought I do the same. There’ve only been a few changes since last year, so much like Robb, I’m only posting the delta: Notes: Obsidian for work. Notion for personal use if the note is long-lived. But I’ve started using Micro.blog notes and Strata for the more short-term notes I make from day to day. Continue reading →
-
Looking At Coolify
While reading Robb Knight’s post about setting up GoToSocial in Coolify, I got curious as to what this Coolify project actually is. I’m a happy user of Dokku, but being one with magpie tendencies, plus always on the lookout for ways to make the little apps I make for myself easier to deploy, I thought I’d check it out. So I spun up a Coolify instance on a new Hetzner server this morning and tried deploying a simple Go app, complete with automatic deployments when I push changes to a Forgejo repository. Continue reading →
-
Cropping A "Horizontal" PocketCast Clip To An Actual Horizontal Video
Finally fixed the issue I was having with my ffmpeg incantation to crop a PocketCast clip. When I was uploading the clip to Micro.blog, the video wasn’t showing up. The audio was fine, but all I got for the visuals was a blank void1. For those that are unaware, clips from PocketCast are always generated as vertical videos. You can change how the artwork is presented between vertical, horizontal, or square; but that doesn’t change the dimensions of the video itself. Continue reading →
-
WeblogPoMo AMA #3: Best Music Experience
I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb: Hiro @hiro@social.lol @gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far? 2:40 PM • November 1, 2024 (UTC) Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it. Continue reading →
-
WeblogPoMo AMA #2: One Thing I Wish I Could Change About Myself
Here’s my answer to another question asked by Annie for WebogPoMoAMA. This was previously answered by Keenan, Estebanxto, Kerri Ann, and Lou Plummer: If you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be? My answer is that I wish I found it easier meeting new people. Not only am I quite introverted, I’m also really shy, and I find it extremely hard to introduce myself to new people in social situations. Continue reading →
-
Phaedra, The lmika Track Arrangement
I recently learnt that the version of Phaedra I’ve been listening to for the past 15 years had not only the wrong track order, but also the wrong track names. This is not entirely surprising, given how this version was… ah, acquired. But after learning what the order and names should’ve been, I think I still prefer my version. And yes, that’s probably because I’m use to it, but if the official album were to have these names and this order, I think it would actually work really way. Continue reading →
-
My Favourite Watch
Seeing all the nostalgia for digital watches of the ’90s and early 2000s, following the release of retroest desk clock shaped like a large Casio digital watch, it got me thinking of the watches I owned growing up. I started off as a Casio person but I eventually moved on to Timex watches. I was pretty happy with all the watches I owned, but my favourite was the Timex Datalink USB Sports Edition, which stood head and shoulders about the rest. Continue reading →
-
Why I Keep Multiple Blogs
Kev Quirk wrote a post yesterday wondering why people have multiple blogs for different topics: A few people I follow have multiple blogs that they use for various topics, but I don’t really understand why. […] I personally prefer to have a single place where I can get all your stuff. If you’re posting about something I’m not interested in, I’ll just skip over it in my RSS feed. I don’t have to read everything in my feed reader. Continue reading →
-
On Panic, iA, and Google Drive
I see that Panic is shutting down their Google Drive integration in their Android app, much like iA did a few weeks ago. This doesn’t affect me directly: even though I am a user of both Android and Google Drive, I regret to say that I don’t use apps from either company on my phone (I do use a few things from both on my Apple devices). But I do wonder why Google is enacting policies that push developers away from using Drive as general purpose user storage. Continue reading →
-
Passing
Three nights ago, and two months before her 94th birthday, my Nonna, my maternal grandmother, suffered a stroke. She’s now in palliative care and there’s no telling how much longer she has left. Over the last few years she was slowing down, yet was still quite aware and was able to do many things on her own, even travel to the shops by bus. She had a scare over the weekend but was otherwise in reasonably good health. Continue reading →
-
Tools And Libraries I Use For Building Web-Apps In Go
I think I’ve settled on a goto set of tools and libraries for building web-apps in Go. It used to be that I would turn to Buffalo for these sorts of projects, which is sort of a “Ruby on Rails but for Go” type of web framework. But I get the sense that Buffalo is no longer being maintained. And although it was easy to get a project up and running, it was a little difficult to go beyond the CRUD-like layouts that it would generate (or it didn’t motivate me enough to do so). Continue reading →
-
Micro-fiction: Get A Horse
Trying something new here. I came up with the concept of this short-story while riding home on the tram yesterday. The rest of it sort-of fell into place when I woke up at 5AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. Hope you enjoy it. Josh was riding the scooter on the city footpath, not trying super hard to avoid the other pedestrians. He was going at a speed that was both unsafe and illegal, but it was the only speed he knew that would prevent that horse from showing up. Continue reading →
-
Select Fun From PostgreSQL
Using PostgreSQL these last few months reminds me of just how much fun it is to work with a relational database. DynamoDB is very capable, but I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s kinda boring, actually. Not that that’s a bad thing: one could argue that “boring” is what you want from a database. Working with PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has been fun. There’s no better word to describe it. It’s been quite enjoyable designing new tables and writing SQL statements. Continue reading →
-
Rubberducking: Of Config And Databases
It’s been a while since my last rubber-ducking session. Not that I’m in the habit of seeking them out: I mainly haven’t been in a situation when I needed to do one. Well that chance came by yesterday, when I was wondering whether to put queue configuration either in the database as data, or in the environment as configuration. This one’s relatively short, as I was leaning towards one method of the other before I started. Continue reading →
-
About Those STOP Messages
John Gruber, discussing political spam text messages on Daring Fireball: About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. Continue reading →
-
My Home Computer Naming Scheme
I enjoyed Manton’s post about the naming scheme he uses for Micro.blog servers. I see these names pop up in the logs when I go to rebuild my blog, each with a Wikipedia link explaining the origins of the name (that’s a really nice touch). Having a server or desktop naming scheme is one of those fun little things to do when working with computers. Growing up we named our home desktops after major characters of Lord of the Rings, such as Bilbo, or Frodo, but I never devised a scheme for myself when I started buying my own computers. Continue reading →
-
Go Feature Request: A 'Rest' Operator for Literals
Here’s a feature request for Go: shamelessly copying JavaScript and adding support for the “rest” operator in literals. Go does have a rest operator, but it only works in function calls. I was writing a unit test today and I was thinking to myself that it would be nice to use this operator in both slice and struct literals as well. This could be useful for making copies of values without modifying the originals. Continue reading →
-
A Follow-Up To Mockless Unit Testing
I’m sure everyone’s dying to hear how the mockless unit tests are going. It’s been almost two months since we started this service, and we’re smack bang in the middle of brownfield iterative development: adding new features to existing ones, fixing bugs, etc. So it seems like now is a good time to reflect on whether this approach is working or not. And so far, it’s been going quite well. The amount of code we have to modify when refactoring or changing existing behaviour is dramatically smaller than before. Continue reading →
-
On the Easy Pit To Fall Into
From Matt Bircher’s latest post on Birchtree: One of the hard parts about sharing one’s opinions online like I do is that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of mostly complaining about things. This is something I also think about. While I haven’t done anything scientific to know what my ratio of posting about things I like vs. things I don’t, I feel like I’m getting the balance better. Continue reading →
-
A Tour Of My New Self-Hosted Code Setup
While working on the draft for this post, a quote from Seinfield came to mind which I thought was a quite apt description of this little project: Breaking up is knocking over a Coke machine. You can’t do it in one push. You gotta rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over. I’ve been thinking about “breaking up” with Github on and off for a while now. Continue reading →
-
Zerolog’s API Mistake
I’ll be honest, I was expecting a lot more moan-routine posts than I’ve written to date. Guess I’ve been in a positive mood. That is, until I started using Zerolog again this morning. Zerolog is a Go logging package that we use at work. It’s pretty successful, and all in all a good logger. But they made a fundamental mistake in their API which trips me up from time to time: they’re not consistent with their return types. Continue reading →
