Leon Mika Profile Photo

Leon Mika

Software Developer and occasional writer of music. Based in Melbourne, Australia.

Long Form Posts

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    A Rambling Thought About The App-Only Social Networks

    Re-reading this post got me wondering how much traction Hive and Post are getting from the Twitter exodus. I am aware that Hive had to deal with a vulnerability and had to shut down while they fixed it. I don’t know much about Post apart it being another VC backed social network. But unless you’re a gamer attracted to Hive, and… 🤷1 heading to Post, is there anyone else using them?

    I’m wondering how much traction these app-only services will actually be able to get in this day and age. One huge advantage that Mastodon has is that it’s a web service first, and doesn’t require an app to use. This makes sharing things outside the network quite easy. Don’t have the app? Just open this link up in your web browser.

    If Hive and Post cannot do this, I don’t see how you can get people unaware or uninterested in the service to sign up. You might be able to share a link which will prompt people to download and sign in the app. But would they actually do this? I feel that we’re beyond the days of just trying out new services unless you know for sure you’ll get value for it, and you probably won’t know this unless you can see what’s being shared without having the app.

    While we’re on the subject: my curiosity got the better of me a few minutes ago, so I took a quick look a Post.news to see what it’s like. It’s backed by Andreessen Horowitz which means that I was expecting to see a few things that I’d find disagreeable. I was not disappointed.

    There was a website — styled by someone the same level of design skills that I could muster (that’s not a compliment). And it wasn’t just a sign-up page either: there was a “discover” feed of sorts. Lots of US news, politics, and screenshots of posts from other social platforms (and not just the major ones). I don’t know if/how they curate the posts that appear there but the ones I saw did not entice me to sign up (not that I have any interest in signing up anyway).

    I hope A18Z feels like got their money’s worth for this. Not sure that I would if I was backing them.

    1. Not sure who would sign-up to Post other than those that know/like the VC backers themselves. ↩︎

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    My 2023 Word

    I think I’ve settled on my 2023 word of the year: generous. Specifically (although not exclusively) generous in the projects I work on. I’m always working on some form of software in my spare time, but most of the time I keep this software just for myself. I want to do less of this, and start sharing it with others. You could say that I want to get better at shipping, but shipping to me is making the software usable for what it’s designed for, and for many of the projects I build, it’s only designed for me and my needs. Shipping’s for myself is no longer enough, I want to start shipping for others.

    This word ties in nicely with the words over the last couple of years. Last year my word was finishing: following through on delivering something that goes beyond just the merely usable. The year before it was sharing: not being afraid to talk about it. Both of these desired qualities are still a work in progress, but I feel like I’m getting better at these. But the focus has been on solving my own needs. I think now’s the time to start looking at the needs of others.

    Like last year, this word is not one from Nicholas Bate’s list of words, although if it were to be closest to anything, it will probably be entrepreneur. In fact, my 2023 word was originally going to be entrepreneur, but I wasn’t fully onboard with this. Someone approaches me and says “I want to be an entrepreneur,” I immediately think that person wants to start a business, get VC funding, go for growth, etc. and that’s not something I’d like to do at this stage (maybe at any stage, but I don’t want to speak for future me). And maybe those feelings are unfair. Maybe a better way to look at it is thinking of terms of entrepreneur as someone who solves the problems of others. You read the works of Seth Goden or Nicholas Bates and you’re more likely to associate those qualities with that word.

    But, whatever. I’ll start with generous for the moment and we’ll see how we go.

    The word 'generous' at the bottom of an Android lock screen
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    Updates To My Online Presence

    Making some changes to my online presence.

    The first is moving my knowledge base site from a set of HTML pages generated from a bespoke tool to one managed by Hugo. I wrote about that already so there’s nothing new to report here, apart from changing the domain name: I guess I finally fell out of love for “tecknow.space”. The new domain is simply technote.wiki. I originally wanted “technotes.wiki” — note the S — but I ran into a few problems trying to set this up in Netlify. While waiting for help on this, I gradually grew to like “technote.wiki” as a domain: not only does it contain notes about technology and development, it alludes to the phrase “take note”, which I find cute (although part of me is wondering if it’s time to stop looking for “cute” domain names).

    I also tried setting up a site to track Go packages I find useful, or may find useful in the future. This was only up for about a day, mainly because I fell into the same trap as I did before. I went down the bespoke tool path again, building a web-app that will read these packages from an OPML file and produce a single page site that will present them as cards. It was mildly interesting working on this but as soon as I put it up, I felt nothing. No real sense of accomplishment or feeling that I’ve delivered value to others or myself. Worst than that, I couldn’t find a way to write about it without feeling like I’ve just wasted my time. In hindsight I probably should have taken that “mild interest” during development as the escape from boredom that it was. I guess I can count myself lucky that it was only a few hours, and not being able to write about it was good sign that I’ve made a mistake of sorts. All this building just for myself is something I’ll probably write more about in day or so.

    Anyway, those packages are now on the knowledge base site as well. Not as cards at the moment: just a plain old table. But the foundations are there, and I’m getting quite comfortable in using Hugo to do all this now, meaning that there are even fewer reasons to build something bespoke for static web pages.

    Another thing I’ve been doing online is putting together a travel blog. I’ve been debating with myself on how best to write in detail about the trips I’ve taken in the past. I wasn’t comfortable posting them here. This blog is more for the up-to-the-minute events that are happening, and many of the trips I hope to write about happened a long while ago. I guess I could’ve written something like “nine years ago, I went to…”, but then should the date stamp be today, or the date of the trip? If it should be the date of the trip, why would I say “nine years ago?” Better to just keep them separate, at least for the moment.

    Anyway, I’ve published the blog, which I’ve called Untraveller. There’s only one trip on there at the moment: my recent trip to Las Vegas. I’ll be adding more over time. It’s also built as a Hugo site hosted in Netlify. The pictures are hosted in R2, Cloudflares new object store. This is my first use of this, and so far it’s been fine. Serving the images are a little slow: maybe I should stick a CDN in-front of them.

    These updates have now been reflected in my omg.lol page as well.

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    Hand-made, Home-cooked

    “Here, buy this sandwich. It’s hand-made.

    “Well, it’s machine made. But hands made the machines.

    “Well, hands made the machines that made the machines.

    “But it’s a home-cooked receipt.

    “Well, it’s a home-cooked inspired recipe. We did have to get some input from nutritionists and focus groups. And a few of our stakeholder had to approve the list of ingredients we used. But we think it’s close enough.

    “Anyway, enjoy.”

    (There’s no real point to this. This just came to me while I was at the supermarket.)

    ∞

    Hustle Writing

    There was one other thing that was a bit distasteful about those posts on how you can further your career by being a technical writer, and it had to do with how they formatted their writing.

    Many of them were not afraid to include a lot of emphasis. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. As it whole phrases or even entire sentences. They did it quite often. Sometimes in bold. Actually, quite often in bold. And once or twice, they even used both bold and italics.

    This was mixed in with prose that included a lot of tweets, liberal use of emojis 🧑‍💻, and block quotes as call-outs to something that was just said a few sentences ago.

    Because block quotes stand out from the body text, and are easy to do in Markdown. 🔥

    I see a lot of this writing in tech newsletters or blog aggregators, and I’m always a little suspicious of them. I doubt it’s mealy to highlight a point, like a typical Coding Horror blog post. I think the motivation for all this emphasis is different. They could be just trying to make the article look fun and approachable, or trying to make it stand out. Does it work though? I suspect it’s harder to stand out if every other post on the site looks like this. You’re more likely to stand out if you don’t include any formatting or emoji at all.

    I wouldn’t be to fazed by this if was a personal blog and that was just the author’s style. But these posts are trying to inform or persuade, and it all feels a little like the hustle equivalent to writing — “hustle writing” if you like — as if it’s trying to get me jazzed on a subject that I totally should be on board for. But if the content is good enough, or your argument compelling enough, does it need all this embellishment?

    Maybe I’m just a cynic — when all the web3 stuff was blowing up this time last year, I saw many a Substack newsletter touting NFTs or d-apps (remember those?) written in this style. Or it could be that I just don’t like fun, and that I’m just a stuffy old man. And yeah, there might be something to that. I took a look at my archives this morning and many of my older posts were… well, I wouldn’t say “bad”, but they were pretty dry and boring. So it might simply be that my personality just doesn’t jell with this style of writing.

    Even so, I wish there was less of this.

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    Froth and Bubble

    Woke up in the early morning with this poem in my head:

    In this world of froth and bubble,
    Two things stand like stone;
    Kindness in other peoples’ trouble,
    Courage in your own.

    I first read this in a young adults novel some good 25 years ago, and over the years it’s come back to me several times. I guess you can say it resonates.

    ∞

    Hammers, Nails, and Hugo

    Going through my hammer and nail phase with Hugo. Trying it out on my personal knowledge base to see if it could replace the tool I wrote to generate the site from a set of Markdown files.

    Hey, if you were to squint, that tool kinda looks like a pale imitation of Hugo. How about that.

    Such as it is with things like this. I first tried out Hugo a few years ago and did the bare minimum to get a few sites off the ground. Then I coasted on that knowledge for a while, using Hugo’s basic features, and doing only cursory explorations of the more advance stuff like layouts, short-codes, and taxonomies. When it came to the personal knowledge base, I knew in principal that I could use Hugo, but since I didn’t have a lot of experience in these advanced features, I decided to just hack this tool up.

    I guess that occasional explorations worked eventually, since I came to a point where everything “click” together. That happened last Saturday as I was trying out the largest amount layout changes I’ve attempted so far. And now, I can see how Hugo can be used several other things as well.1

    If I had all this knowledge before, I probably wouldn’t have hacked together that static site generation tool. I probably would have made it work with Hugo, seeing that they are so similar.

    Now I’m not going to beat myself up too badly over this. One characteristic I’ve noticed about myself is the need to go from an idea to something that works as quickly as I possibly can. If I don’t, the idea will die on the vine (I’ve lost many draft blog posts this way). I guess the trick is trying to balance that against that other characteristic I have, which is rushing to a solution using the knowledge I already have, before spending a bit of time looking at the alternatives.

    Hey, if you were to squint, the cognitive bias of that characteristic might the same one that I’m worthing through now. How about that.

    P.S. This is the second time in three days that I work up at 5 AM with the need to do something. This doesn’t normally happen to me, and I’m not sure how keen I am for this to become a habit, but I guess sometimes you just gotta feed that beast.

    1. One other thing favouring Hugo here was that I was facing some largish changes to this hacked up tool which I wasn’t too keen on doing. And yeah, these are changes I can theoretically do using Hugo layouts. ↩︎

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    On Posting Here Daily

    I sometimes struggle with the idea of trying to post here at least once a day. While perusing my archive I find days where my posts are cringeworthy or just not good, and part of me wonders whether it’s better to wait for a post to meet a certain level of quality before publishing it.

    I have also seen this argument from other bloggers as well. They post the rules they have that include things like “it should start a conversation” or it should be “distinctive”. I remember reading tweets from one who shuns the idea of posting on a schedule in favour of only publishing something that’s “good”. From looking at their site, there’s probably only a single new post every two years on average1.

    But reflecting on it now, I don’t think this works for me. Maybe it could if I was a journalist or a professional writer, but for me and this blog, I don’t see how holding back could help.

    For one thing, it will mean a lot less posts. Of course the response to this is that’s the whole point: “quality over quantity” after all. But I think if I did this, the post frequency will probably drop to the point where I’d be in danger of abandoning this blog together. I tried the minimum-level-of-quality approach when I first started this blog, and I think I got a total of 5 or 6 posts in the first 8 months. And they weren’t good posts anyway: the minimum level of quality I was shooting for was just getting something out there at all.

    That’s the reason why I joined Micro.blog2: writing smaller things more often. If I were to abandon this, I’d just be falling into old habits.

    And if that isn’t enough, there are plenty of anecdotes in how quantity leads to quality. You can spend a day, week or month trying to come up with the perfect blog post and not publishing anything at all, or publishing something that is mediocre at best. Publishing regularly forces you to practice: sure what you write today may not be considered “good”, but you’d be force to write it, publish it, and judge it with a critical eye. That can only force you to write better, even if the improvements are small like checking your spelling, or reading it once through before publishing. I can tell by personal experience that this practice has helped me.

    And let’s not even discuss the feeling of being accountable from publishing frequently. You know how often I read the blog of that person I mentioned earlier? Never. Why would I if I know there won’t be any new content for a year? When they do post something, it’s usually tens of thousands of words that feels so heavy to read. I set it aside for “later”, which usually means never.

    The blogs I do read regularly? The ones that post daily, or weekly, or even a few times a month, with updates that range from a few sentences to several paragraphs in length. And the quality of the writing or the topic really doesn’t matter to me. It was good just to get an update on what they’re thinking.

    And if this piece hasn’t convinced me yet, I’ll end it this way. If you want to keep a record of your days, or improve the clarity of your thinking, you’ll need to write. There aren’t many ways around that. And if you want to improve you’re writing, you need to practice. And to keep you honest, you need accountability, even if it’s just being accountable to yourself, and the best way to be accountable is to write in public.

    So that’s why I’m sticking with writing daily. If that’s not enough of a reason to maintain this goal, I don’t know what is.

    1. No, it’s not hypercritical.co. ↩︎

    2. Well that, and the social aspect. ↩︎

    ∞

    2022 Year In Review

    I’ll be honest: these year in review posts feel like going to the dentist. I generally hate doing them, but I know that it can be good exercise to reflect on the past year. I think one thing in my favour is that I’ve actually kept my blogging — and to a lesser extent, my journalling — up to date so I’ve actually got something that I can refer back to.

    So here’s a brief summary of how my year went.

    Career

    I’m a little bit disappointed on this front. It feels like I’m in a bit of a rut, and lately things have been a little boring. I have been promoted to a squad lead, which I guess is some form of progression. But just like other times I’ve been asked to lead a team, it’s not something I feel I’m good at or like doing. And yet, I really cannot see any progression here other than leading bigger teams (apart from changing jobs).

    That said, a few good things have happened. The project I was working on went live earlier in the year, and while it was a stressful couple of weeks (around Easter time as well), it was generally well received and no major issues came up. Plus, I got to learn a lot about Stripe, which has been on my goals list for a while.

    Family And Friends

    Sadly, there’ve been a couple of deaths this year. My grandfather passed away in March, after suffering from a spate of aliments like stomach cancer and emphysema. This was obviously quite sad, but I take solace in the feeling that he’s finally found some peace and relief from his suffering. The second was in February, when a friend of the family that my Mum was very close to passed away. Neither of these felt like they came too soon, which is some consolidation, but it was not a great start to the year.

    Oh, and in December, after 2 years and 9 months since March 2020, I got Covid-19 for the first time. I just glad that I was up to date with my vaccination: I couldn’t imagine how worse it could have been if I wasn’t.

    Projects

    One new project this year that I actually managed to release: Dynamo-Browse. I’m actually quite happy that this tool exists. It’s been on my wish-list for a couple of years and the moment came around to finally bite the bullet and work on it. I’m also quite please that I put some effort into the finish of it, so that I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to share it with others.

    For a while I was working on another project called Broadtail which downloaded YouTube videos and made them available in my Plex server. This was before I got YouTube premium, and as soon as I did, this project fell to the wayside. It’s still around and I’ve modified it to download WWDC videos, so I may dust it off come next June.

    There were various other things here or there that aren’t really worth any comment. Again, I’m wondering if I’m focusing on too much and only half-finishing things.

    Travel

    Wow, after a few years of not travelling at all (this is not just because of the pandemic), there was a fair bit of it this year.

    If there was one destination that was top of list this year, it was Canberra. We went once as a family during Easter to see my sister’s house, and her new cockatiels. I’ve returned to Canberra three other times this year to look after them while she was overseas for work. The whole work from home revolution has made this possible, and I’m glad I was able to do this.

    The other location of note was travelling to Las Vegas to attend AWS re:Invent, and although I became ill during the trip, and was generally overwhelmed by the size of the conference, it was still good to be able to travel overseas again. Good thing I got my passport renewed.

    By the end of the year, the amount of travelling I was doing was exhausting. 2023 is shaping up to be a big travel year as well, and I’m a little concerned it may be too much for me. I guess we’ll see this time next year.

    Apps

    Not much on this front.

    This was the year I really got into Obsidian. I started the year trying to carry around a paper notebook, and although I used it a few times to write notes, it was a little uncomfortable in my pocket. Later in the year, I gave Obsidian another try and since they’ve now got mobile apps, it’s become my go-to place for all my notes.

    Another good app discovered this year was Numi. This has been very useful during sprint planning sessions, when I need to calculate velocity and projected capacity. If there is one feature I wish I could add to this, it’s the ability to turn off iCloud syncing. I don’t like seeing my work stuff showing up on my personal desktop.

    Writing And Online Presence

    I think this is the first year where I end up with less domains than I started with. There were a bunch that I bought in 2020 and 2021 which I never used for anything, and they were just sitting there, taunting me. It’s good to see them expire out.

    It’s also the year when I fell into a bit of a writing streak. This was a good one to have happened, and it drove me to write at least one blog post or journal entry every day. I like to continue this, and maybe refine it further by attempting to write at-least one blog post per day here.

    One thing that didn’t work for me was banking posts: writing posts days earlier in anticipation of days where I couldn’t think of anything to say. I got the idea from Seth Godin, and I tried it for a bit, but the Drafts section just piled up with half-finished posts that eventually grew too stale to publish. I guess the need to publish things as soon as I’ve started work on them is something I’ve learnt about myself.

    I’ve also settled on a CMS for my side-project work journal and have started a check-in blog. Both of them are hosted on Micro.blog and although I’m still working on the writing workflow, it seems to be working well for me so far.

    The not-using-Twitter streak has continued, and given the current direction of the platform, it’s very unlikely that I will return. I have started browsing around Mastodon a lot more, especially since Adam has launched social.lol. Mastodon felt like a bit of a ghost-town at first, but things are improving after many of those I used to follow on Twitter started posting there. I’m trying to avoid making the same mistake that drove me away from Twitter, so I continue to be very careful about who I follow and will not hesitate to hide boost from those that make me anxious. I’m also adhering to the idea of POSSE so most of my writing will continue to originate here.

    Books And Media

    I’m combining them in a single section because I really did not get a lot of reading done. I’d like to say that I’d like to change this, but I’m honestly not sure if I would be serious. Anyway, here are some moments:

    A lot of reading about creativity and self improvement this year. This includes The Dip by Seth Goden, and Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod. Both of these I discovered after reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.

    The books that I’ve started reading, but didn’t finished, were The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth by Tony Fadell, and 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. There’s a bit of irony in not finishing the last one.

    Things I’ve watched this year:

    • Severance: I didn’t watch this when this first came out but I eventually got to it and enjoyed this quite a lot. It was good to finally get all the Lumon references.
    • The Orville: I was expecting this to be a bit more satirical than it actually was, but in the end I found it to be quite a good watch. I haven’t got around to S3 yet.
    • Hamilton: I finally got to see this in person. I’ve watched the Broadway performance before, and I was familiar with the soundtrack, so I wasn’t going into it cold. But it’s a much different experience watching this on the real stage.

    I also made my podcast debut by being a guest on Martin’s Feld excellent podcast series Really Specific Stories. Honestly, if you’re interested in tech podcasts at all, you should absolutely be listening to this show. And I’m not just saying that because I was a guest. Feel free to skip the episode I was on, but make sure you listen to all the others.

    The 2022 Word

    The word for 2022 was finisher. The general goal was to stop splitting my focus and start following through on things all the way to the end. As I mentioned when I was talking about Dynamo-Browse, I think I’m improving on that front. It will be something that I’ll need to work on going forward, but the improvements are there.

    So overall, a pretty decent year. Probably one of the more eventful ones than the last few, but I’m pretty happy with this one.

    ∞

    2022 Song Of The Year

    For the past twelve years or so, I’ve been invited to play the organ at the children’s Christmas Eve mass at a local(ish) primary school. During the collection, while people are getting wallets or purses out, I usually play some soft, nondescript music on a muted organ with only a few soft pipes opened. It doesn’t matter what I play during this time so I usually take this opportunity to play a song that I felt was a favourite of mine throughout the year. I unofficially consider this my song of the year.

    For a song to be considered, it needs to meet these criteria:

    1. It must be a song that I’ve discovered during the year. A song that I’ve been listening to before Christmas Day the previous cannot be considered. This forces me to keep discovering new music, instead of falling into the rut of listening to the same thing over and over again. This doesn’t mean it needs to be released during the year. In fact, many of the songs I grow to like have been released decades ago.
    2. It must be a song that’s found it’s way into my general rotation. I need to have listened to it more than a few times, which generally means I need to like it enough to listen to it regularly.
    3. It must be a song that I can play softly on an organ. I can usually slow things down so this doesn’t mean that fast songs or songs with vocals are out of the running. But it needs to sounds good slowed down on a muted organ, which doesn’t apply to all songs I listen to.

    This Year’s Nominees and Winner

    Here are this years nominees. You will be surprised to know that not all of them are from Mike Oldfield (well, one isn’t at least… which is not all of them 😉).

    • The Tunic Soundtrack by Lifeformed × Janice Kwan. This was an early discovery and is now positively associated with Canberra, a place I’ve been to more than a few times this year. Favourite tracks are To Far Shores, Ocean Glaze and Mirror Moon.
    • Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield. Discovered after watching this video on progressive rock albums. I linked to the 2010 one but I must note that I prefer the original 1974 release, so if you can find a version of that, listen to that one.
    • Voyager by Mike Oldfield. I’ve been listening to a few tracks of this before 2022, but this year I actually started liking the rest of the album.

    And the winner for this year is: Part One, from Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield. 👏

    Hergest Ridge 1974 album cover. Copyright owned by Virgin records

    Well, I should say the first 10 minutes of Part One. Things seem to turn a bit near the end in the original 1974 release, where it becomes a bit of a rock song, then immediately turns on a dime back into the traditional progressive soft stuff with tubular bells (or maybe that’s just the version I’m listening on). But even so, Bravo! You have won the coveted privilege of being peformed on a small pipe organ in a Melbourne suburban church.

    Honourable Mentions

    These are the songs that I consider worthy of the title, but didn’t meet all the criteria (usually point 3). For this year, they are:

    • PPPPPP by Magnus Pålsson. The soundtrack to VVVVVV. An enjoyable listen, especially if you like the type of soundtracks play on the audio chips of retro 80’s hardware.
    • Retro Grooves Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 by Anders Enger Jensen. Much like Voyager, I’ve been listening to DiscoVision before 2022 but I started poking through the back catalogue of these two albums and they’ve been really good.

    Past Winners

    This might be the first year I’ve written about this little tradition but it isn’t the first year I’ve selected a song. The past winners, with the associated years if I could remember them, are:

    ∞

    RSS And Tumblr's Quote-Style Posts

    Tumblr needs to improve how they generate RSS items. Quote-style posts — in which the post consists of a quote from someone else, followed by a reply by the blog author — show up in my RSS reader with titles consisting of the “quote part” of the post. If the quote is more than just a handful of words, the title dominates the actual body of the item. An example:

    How quote-style posts look like in Feedbin

    I don’t know why Tumblr is generating RSS items this way. I can only imagine that it’s something to do with the mistaken belief that RSS items require titles. But even if that’s the case, has it not cross their minds just how ugly these posts would look in a feed-reader if the quote is more than a sentence long? Could they have done something like truncate the title? Or is it not a priority to them?

    In any case, if they do decided to fix this, may I suggest simply adding the quote part within a <blockquote> at the start of the RSS item, while leaving the title unset.

    An example of how these quote-style posts can be improved

    An arguably better reading experience for your RSS audience. Or at the very least, it would look closer to what the post would look like in Tumblr itself.

    ∞

    Half Measures

    I’m coming to realise that one of my shortcomings is not completely following through on a task. I’ve got a habit of only doing enough to get it done quickly, knowing that the work has cracks in it and just hoping that things won’t fall through them. There are a few reasons for this and there the one’s that you expect: laziness, boredom, pressure to get something finished, wanting to move onto something else, etc.

    As you can expect, I get burned by this. And over the last several months it got to the point where it was starting to becoming a noticeable problem. So, I adopted the following rule: “no more half measures”1. If I’ve got a task to do, the I do the whole task.

    I broke that rule a few days ago. With the pressure to get something out the door, I finished the work knowing that there existed a case where it wouldn’t work properly. I was hoping to address this over the next week or so, and was not expecting (or hoping, to be more accurate) that this shortcoming will show up.

    Well, today it did. Fortunately it was just in testing but sure enough the shortcut came back to bite me, and now I’ll need to fix it.

    I guess it’s a good opportunity to reset and take this rule seriously once again.

    1. HT to Hank in Breaking Bad. ↩︎

    ∞

    Day Trip: Macedon And Trentham

    I had the pleasure of taking the day off today and going for a few walks around Macedon and Trentham. Being someone that’s really into keeping with a routine, I try to do these walks at least once a year. It’s been somewhat delayed this year, due to work commitments, but with the public holiday tomorrow, I thought I was a perfect time to get outside and do them before summer rolls around.

    Below are some photos of each of the walk.

    Macedon

    The first walk was along the borders of the Macedon Regional Park, following a self-plotted course, more-or-less, along the Bendigo railway line. It’s a little difficult at times, maybe bordering on dangerous (and possibly not super legal either), so I’d probably wouldn’t recommend this. But since it follows the rail line pretty much the entire time, it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some train spotting.

    I realised today that it’s been 10 years since I first walk this particular trail. I’m wondering if it might be time to retire it. As nice as it is, there are certain aspects of it that are getting a little tiresome. Plus it’s always boggy, even during the height of summer, meaning that you’ll usually get your socks wet and your pants dirty when you walk it. Even so, walking it is always a pleasure.

    Trentham

    Following a brief lunch in Kynteon, it was time for the second walk: The Domino Trail in Trentham. This is a rail trail that travels through some really nice forest. Last time I did this, more than a year ago, the path was closed as a severe storm brought down a number of trees and I was unable to do the entire path. Fortunately the trees were cleared and the path reopened.

    I caught the rain a few times and much of the track was quite boggy given the decent amount of rain we’ve received, but overall, it was a nice day out.

    ∞

    Opinionated Tips for New Micro Bloggers Coming From Twitter

    or, How I Use Micro.blog

    To all new-comers from Twitter, welcome to Micro.blog!

    No doubt you’ve received the welcome message from Jean with links on how Micro.blog is different from Twitter, but you’re probably still wondering how to get the most out of Micro.blog. And while I’m not claiming to have all the answers, I’ve put together a few tips for how I get value from writing here.

    First, the thing that took me a while to appreciate is that Micro.blog’s not so much a social media platform, at least not in the traditional sense. I mean, it certainly can be described as one, and if your goal is to connect with others online, it works just as well as any other. But in essence, it’s closer to a blogging platform, albeit one with social aspects tied to it. When you write a post, not only would it appear in the timeline of those that follow you, it will also appear on your own blog. So an option before you is to lean into this. Treat your blog as your own space on the web. Get a domain name and share it with others. Style your blog as much or as little as you want. Take a look at the plugins to see what you can add to your site. You don’t have to do this right away, but it’s well worth considering if you hope to get the most out of writing here.

    Second, write naturally. You’re not feeding an algorithm here. There’s nothing like trending topics or recommendations that takes what you write and throws it around the network. Instead, you’ll get something better: real humans reading and replying to your post. So write for humans. If a post needs to be longer than 280 characters, then it can be: no need for threads here. Also, adding hashes in front of words does nothing other than make what you write harder for others to read.

    Finally, write for yourself. The cheap endorphin rush you use to get from likes and retweets will never come, so you’ll need another way to get pleasure from writing here. What works for me is to write for myself. If I write something, I do so with the expectation that no-one else will see it. Of course, you’re writing on the open web so others can certainly see it: try not to be too much of a jerk. But even if no-one else does, as long as I get something out of what I write, that’s all I ever need.

    Of course, how and why you use Micro.blog is ultimately up to you. After all, you are the one paying $5.00 to use the service (and yes, in this case, you are the customer here, not the product). So make sure you use it in a way that works for you. And it may take a while before you find the utility you’re looking for. I’d advise patience here. You will not find the short-term rush you’ll get from Twitter. Before you is a slower path. But it’s one that can lead you towards a much better and fulfilling experience of writing online.

    Happy blogging.

    ∞

    Technical Knowledge Management Update

    Finished the first pass of moving all my technical knowledge into static Markdown files. I’ve got all the files now in a Git repository hosted on Github. They’re also published as a website called TecKnow Space (pronounced “techno space”)1.

    The way I’ve done this is by writing a tool I which will checkout the source Git repository, iterate over all the source Markdown files, render them as HTML, and push them to another Git repository which is being served using GitHub pages. The tool, which is currently not open-source, was written in Go and uses go-git for the Git client, and BlackFriday as the Markdown renderer.

    The output is just a directory tree of HTML files. I did consider Hugo for a brief moment, but I wanted to avoid the complexity of including a base Hugo site here, especially given that the main reason for using Hugo is for the themes. That did mean that I had to write a tool to do this, but my thinking is that if I decided to move to Hugo, I still need something to iterate over all the Markdown files anyway, since they’re stored in a different structure than the content of a Hugo site. And some small modifications to the tool would could be made to make that happen.

    At the moment, I need to run the tool manually to regenerate the site. But, ultimately, I’d like to setup Github’s CI/CD to re-render the source files when I push changes to main. That, plus styling and optimising how I organise this information, will probably be the next step I tackle.

    1. One of those names that worked off the bat, and I grin whenever I say it. ↩︎

    ∞

    Some Links To Motivational Posts That Help Me

    This post contains a bunch of links to posts and articles that motivate me in some way, either with blogging or working in public. Sometimes I feel down or self-conscious about the types of posts I make, or not posting anything at all, and I like to revisit these occasionally to help me keep it up.

    Many of these come from members of Micro.blog. To those that shared it, thank you!

    About blogging

    About development

    About working in public

    About persistence

    About other things

    I’ll update this post with any more I find along the way.

    ∞

    Option Currency Symbol Reference

    A small, incomplete reference of the various currency symbols that can be produced using the Option key. Here because I always forget these, and I’ve been needing to produce these quite often lately.

    Currency Symbol Key
    Dollar $ $
    Cent ¢ Opt4
    Pound £ Opt3
    Euro € ShiftOpt2
    Yen ¥ Opty
    ∞

    An Alternative To The Reply All Idea For Micro.blog

    Just thinking about Micro.blog conversations and the discussion about having a way to reply all. I wonder if a better alternative is to be able to “follow” conversations, with new replies from anyone showing up in the timeline. This can be completely opt-in per conversation — including for posts that are made by you — so that those that want the old way to continue working as is don’t loose anything.

    It has one other advantage: I’ve seen conversations in Micro.blog that I had no real interest in participating in (usually because I have nothing to add) but I was interested in following along. Usually these are people asking for recommendations, and others post theirs as replies. Being able to “subscribe to new replies” would allow me to get updates to these as they come in, rather than have me check-in on the conversation thread every hour or so.

    Anyway, that’s the idea. Let me know what you think.

    ∞

    The (Annoying) Way To Get the Current MacOS Appearance Scheme From the Command Line

    Ok, here’s something bizarre.

    I’m trying to get the current MacOS appearance scheme — either light or dark mode — from the terminal. The way to do this is by running this command (source):

    defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle

    If MacOS is in dark mode, this will print Dark. But if MacOS is in light mode, the command will print… an error:

    2022-10-04 09:15:18.058 defaults[35844:466643] 
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleInterfaceStyle) does not exist

    Running defaults read -g confirms what the error message says: the AppleInterfaceStyle key is not set when MacOS is in light mode.

    Why was this chosen as the way to do things? Now I need to capture and parse stderr just confirm that the reason an error occurred was because MacOS is in light mode; as oppose to some other, possibly legitimate, reason.

    A tad annoying I must say.

    ∞

    Photos of Lake Tuggeranong

    This morning I went to Tuggeranong, south of Canberra. After a cafe breakfast I took a walk around the lake. It was a lovely spring morning for it: cloudy, mild but slightly on the cool side. It was also quite a decent walk: probably took an hour and 20 minutes, and I didn’t even cover the entire lake. All in all, a nice way to begin the day.

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