Leon Mika

Long Form Posts

Oct 6, 2023 ∞

Pixel Phones Are Not Dog-food, and That's a Problem

John Gruber on the Pixel 8 launch event:

It’s also impossible not to comment on just how much less interest there is in Google’s Pixel ecosystem. […] On the one hand I’m tempted to say the difference is just commensurate with how much better at hardware Apple is than Google. But I think there’s more to it than that. There’s something ineffable about it. There are aspects of marketshare traction — in any market — that can’t be explained by side-by-side product comparisons alone.

Can’t speak for the market but as a Pixel 6 Pro owner I can give you my opinion. You don’t need to watch the keynote to get that sense of disinterest. You can get it just by using the phone.

For the last few months¹ I’ve been experiencing a bug with the calendar widget. If you have nothing on your calendar for the next two weeks, it completely blanks out:



I doubt that this is intentional as the plus button doesn’t work either. Tapping it does nothing at all.

For comparison, here’s how it’s meant to look:



Now, bugs in software happen — they certainly happen in mine — and there’s no reason why Google would be immune to this, so I can forgive them for this bug showing up in a shipped version of Android. My problem is that it’s been like this for months now. This is a widget built by Google, included in Google’s Calendar app running on Google’s OS and Google’s hardware, and it’s been broken for this long. I would’ve expected this to be fixed in a few weeks, but for it to take this long?

I can’t see how anyone with an Android phone using this widget would not notice this. And the only reason I can come up with is that no-one in Google has noticed this. They simply don’t use Android, the OS that they build, in their day-to-day. Maybe some of them do, but obviously not enough of them to drive change. If there was, they would’ve found this problem and fix it by now. To quote Linus, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” and those eyeballs are obviously looking elsewhere.

Now this theory may be far fetched, but after reading Gruber’s piece, it seems like I’m not alone in thinking this. As he says later in the same article:

I’d wager that more Google employees carry an iPhone than carry a Pixel.

It shows.

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1. I can’t remember when I first saw this, but I think it was in July. ↩︎

Oct 3, 2023 ∞

Your Dev Environment is Not Your Production Environment

There will be certain things you’re going to need to do in your development environments that you should never do in production. That’s pretty much a given: playing around with user’s data or potentially doing something that will cause an incident is generally not a good idea.

But there are things you shouldn’t do in prod that you may need to do in dev. And make no mistake, there may be a legitimate need to do these things. Using Auth0 and only have a limited number of emails available for your test environment? You may need a way to quickly reset a user. Support billing in multiple countries and need to do a test in one of them? You’ll need a way to change the user’s countries.

And I think that’s fine. Not every environment needs to be a reflection of production. As long you’ve got a staging or pre-prod environment where you can do things like rehearse deployments. But everything else should be skewed towards ease of development, which will mean making these drastic options available and easy to use.

Sep 27, 2023 ∞
Electrification of Melbourne Suburban Railways Plaque
Found this plaque while passing through Southern Cross station this morning.

I didn’t have time to read it, and the subject matter looks really interesting to me (Trains? Power Lines? What’s not to love? 😀). I also don’t know how long it’ll be up for, and I’ve been burned in the past of not capturing something when I had the chance.
So I’m posting photos of it here for posterity reasons. Enjoy.

Sep 4, 2023 ∞

Alternative Day Four Photo

I had an alternative idea for today’s photo challenge, which is “orange”. I was hoping to post a photo of something related to Melbourne’s busses.

You see, PTV has designated different colour for different modes of transport. Blue for metro trains, purple for regional trains, green for trams, and orange for busses. And from my experience using the service, they’re pretty consistent with adhering to this design language:



Anyway, they’re doing train works along my rail line over the past few weeks and this morning I noticed this sign (forgive the lighting, it was before dawn):



It’s not the first time I saw this sign, but I had orange on my mind and the fact that it mentioned busses got me thinking, “how cleaver, they’re maintaining the design language through and through, using an orange sign to reference the bus service that would be replacing the trains.” Or so I thought, until I saw this sign:



Ah, that blew that theory out of the water. And also the opportunity to use it as today’s photo. I mean, I could’ve still used it — it’s still orange after all — but it doesn’t have the neat adherence to the design language that I was hoping it did.

Aug 30, 2023 ∞
Mainboard Mayhem
Project update on Mainboard Mayhem, my Chip’s Challenge fan game. I didn’t get it finished in time for the release deadline, which was last weekend. I blame work for that. We’re going through a bit of a crunch at the moment, and there was a need to work on the weekend.
The good news is that there wasn’t much left to do, and after a few more evenings, I’m please to say that it’s done. The game is finish, and ready for release.
So here it is: Mainboard Mayhem: A Chip’s Challenge fan game (and yes, that’s its full title).

At the moment it’s only available for MacOS. It should work on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, although I’ve only tested on my M2 Mac Mini running Ventura.
It’s good to finally see this project done. It’s been in development for about last ten years, and I spent half of that time wondering whether it was worth getting it finished it at all. Not committing to anything meant any work I did do on it was pretty aimless, and I always felt like I was wasting my time. Giving myself three weeks to either kill it, or release it helped a lot. I’ll start making deadlines for all the other unfinished projects I’m working on.
As to what that next project will be, I not sure at this stage. Part of me wants to wait until this crunch time ends, but I suspect I’ll get antsy before then and start work on something else. I’ll keep you posted one way or the other.
But for now, if you happen to give it a try, thank you and I hope you enjoy it.

Aug 12, 2023 ∞

Early Version of This Blog

I was looking for something in GitHub the other day when I found the repository for the first iteration of this blog. I was curious as to how it looked and I’d thought that I’d boot it up and post a few screenshots of it.¹

It started life as a Hugo site. There a two reasons for that, with the first being that I didn’t have the patients to style a website from scratch, and Hugo came with some pretty nice templates. I chose the Vienna template, which seems to have fallen out date: many of the template variables no longer work with a modern version of Hugo. I’m also please to see that I did end up customising the header image — a photo taken in Macedon of the train line to Bendigo — although that’s pretty much all I customised.



Believe it or not, I feel a little nostelgic for it. Such simple innocence in trying to summon up the courage to write stuff on the internet. Although don’t let the article count fool you: I think there were a total of 10 posts, with half of those being unfinished drafts. I was still trying to work out whether I’d like to write mainly about software technology, or simply talk about my day. But one thing’s for sure, I was under the impression that “real” blogs required posts with a title and at-least 300 words of content. That’s probably why I only had 5 posts finished in 8 months.

The second reason why I went with Hugo was that I’d have no excuse to tinker with a CMS. I’d figure that, given that I wasn’t using one, I’d be force to focus on the content. Well, that level of self-discipline didn’t last long. About in the middle of 2020, I started building a CMS for the blog using Buffalo. I was thinking of launching it with the name “72k” (72k.co), named after the milepost the header photo was taken at.



I got reasonably far with building this CMS but it still lacked a lot, like uploads and an RSS feed. It also involved a really annoying workflow: in order to publish something, you needed to choose a “post type” (whether it’s a long-form post; a link post; or a note), the “stream” the post will appear in, write a summary, and then “review” it. Once all that’s good, you’re free to publish it. This was in service of building this up into a popular, wizz-bang blog with a well-engineered navigation and category-specific feeds (I think that’s what “streams” were). Yeah, these grand plans got the better of me and really crippled the usability of the CMS². I never launched it, opting instead to move to Micro.blog.

So that’s what this blog looked like, back in the day. I probably won’t look at these projects again. It’s only been four years and already bit-rot is settling in: it took me all morning trying to hack these into a state where I can open them in a browser. But it’s good to look back at what it was.

Still really happy I moved it over to Micro.blog.

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1. I don’t deny that part of this is procrastination of other things I should be finishing. ↩︎

2. To be honest, I think part of this lengthy workflow was to satisfy the “resistance”: self-imposed roadblocks to stop me from publishing anything at all. ↩︎

Aug 2, 2023 ∞

On Tools and Automation

The thing about building tools to automate your work is that it’s hard to justify doing so when you’re in the thick of it. Easy to see all the time you save in the aggregate, but when you’re faced with the task in your day to day, you’re just as likely to say “I can build a tool which will let me do this task in a couple of seconds, but it’ll take me an hour to build it verses the 5 minutes it’ll take for me to just do the task.”

So you just “do the task.” And the next time you get that task, you face the same dilemma.

Of course the alternative is spending the hour to automate it, and then never running that tool again (or investing more time than you save keeping it up to date l).

I’m not sure what the best answer is. Maybe tracking times where you wish you had that tool you didn’t build somewhere? Then, when you’ve done it at least 3 times for the same thing, you have supporting evidence that it’s worth automating. Maybe include the time it took to do it manually as well, so you can compare it to how long it might take to build the automation.

Might be worth a try.

Jul 15, 2023 ∞

🔗 XML is the future - Bite code!

I wanted to write something about fads in the software development industry when the post about Amazon Prime Video 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.

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1. 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! ↩︎

2. Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. ↩︎

Jul 7, 2023 ∞

Code First, Tests After

Still doing the code first, tests after at work and I’m really starting to see the benefits from it. Test driven development is fine, but most of our recent issues — excess logging or errors that are false positives — have nothing to do with buggy business logic. It’s true that you can catch these in unit tests (although I find them to be the worst possible tests to write) but I think you gain a lot more just from launching the application and seeing it run.

Now granted, it’s not always possible to do this with micro-services. There’s always some dependency you need, and setting all these up is a bit of a pain. That’s probably why I deferred all my manual testing to the end, when I’ve pushed my changes to get them reviewed and deployed it to the environment. Do a quick cursory test from the frontend just to make sure it hasn’t broken anything, then move on to the next task.

I think this way of working was a mistake. This is something frontend developments get right: you need to run your software while you’re working on it. It’s so important to see not just how well it works, but how it feels to work¹: what goes to the log, how fast it performs, etc. You don’t get this feeling from just depending on unit tests.

Plus, there’s always a nice buzz to see the thing you’re working on run for the first time. That magic seems to decay the further you are from where it’s running. It just becomes another cog in the system. And maybe that’s what it’s destined to be, but it doesn’t need to be this way while you’re working on it.

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1. I don’t know of a better way to say this other than “how it feels to work”. I suppose I could use boring words like “tight iteration loop” but there are too many boring words on the blog already. ↩︎

Jun 15, 2023 ∞

On The Reddit Strike

Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday:

Reddit is miffed that Google and OpenAI are taking its data, but Huffman and team didn’t create that data: Reddit’s users did, under the watchful eyes of Reddit’s unpaid mod workforce. In other words, my strong suspicion is that what undergirds everything that is happening this week is widespread angst and irritation that everything that was supposed to be special about the web, particularly the bit where it gives everyone a voice, has turned out to be nothing more than grist to be fought over by millionaires and billionaires.

That, though, takes me back to Bier’s tweet; the crazy thing about the Internet is that said grist is in fact worth fighting over.

It’s easy for me to say this, as I’m not a user of Reddit, but I have full sympathy for the striking moderators.

You spend much of your free time volunteering to keep a community on a site, producing value for it’s users and owner, with the expectation that the site would recognise your efforts and reciprocate by serving your needs with, say, an API. I can understand how enraging that would feel when they turn around and “alter the deal” while expecting the mods to continue as if nothing has changed.

So good on the moderators showing that they too have leverage.

And as to OpenAI using the API to train its model: well yeah I can understand the CEO of Reddit feeling shitty about that, but I would’ve hope he would have the ingenuity to solve that while maintaining the needs of those that actually provide value to the site. Either he doesn’t which, given that he’s one of the founders, I find hard to believe; or he just doesn’t want to.

Jun 12, 2023 ∞

Truthful Travel Talk

It’s time to be honest: I think overseas travel is wasted on me.

We were driving down from Antibes to Genova today. It was a nice trip, complete with picturesque towns passing us by as we drove along the motorway. My friend was oohing and ahhing at each one: remaking about how nice it would be to see them, stay in them for a while. He was also remarking on what we would do when we arrived at our destination. There was just this air of enthusiasm about the whole thing.

I didn’t feel that enthausiasm. We heard some news that another friend of ours had their luggage stolen, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I spent a fair bit of last night going through possible ways on how I could avoid it happening to me, and how I would handle it if it did, and just the whole hassle of dealing with that possibility.

This, mixed with the inevitable task of finding my barring in an unfamiliar place, stressing about how I would interact with the locals in their non-native language, the ongoing recovery from Covid-19, and a bit of home-sickness, and you can probably guess that I’m just not feeling the vibe of adventure at the moment.

And yeah, I might have done this to myself, particularly since I haven’t had much to do with this part of the trip.Happy to “go with the flow” of what others are doing. And people might ask me “oh, wouldn’t it be good to see this?” or “wouldn’t it be fun to experience that?” Yeah, maybe? I might get some enjoyment out of it, but I’m not sure if it’ll offset the stress I feel with the logistics of it all.

So that’s where I am at the moment. It’s got to the point where I’m contemplating coming home early. It would actually simplify my itinerary quite a bit, and I won’t be leaving my friends in the lurch: it would be a portion of the trip where I would be travelling by myself. Even with a week less, that’s still about 4 weeks in total, which I think it’s plenty, or at least plenty for me.

Update 30 June: Apart from taking a slightly earlier flight home, I ended up staying the the full 5 weeks. And in retrospect, I’m really glad I did. I figured that I would regret not visiting the places I’ve would’ve cut out if I were to go home early; and after visiting them, I know now that I would’ve missed out on some of the most memorable parts of the trip.

I think what sparked this post was a mixture of anxiety of travelling alone and little bit of home sickness. But nothing beats anxiety like working through the problem (if you can call travelling solo a “problem”). And as for home sickness: well, I’m not sure there’s much I can do about that apart from remembering that home will always be there.

May 29, 2023 ∞
Where Have I Been
Inspired by Manton and Maique, I thought I’d document the places I’ve visited as well. I’d had to refer to this list a few times in the past so having a record like this is helpful.
Transfers are not included here. In order for a place to be listed here, I’ve have had to have landed there. Also, I’ve excluded Victoria, Australia, as this is where I live.
• 🇦🇺Australia (home)
  • New South Wales
  • South Australia
  • ACT
• 🇧🇷Brazil
• 🇨🇰Cook Islands
• 🇫🇯Fiji
• 🇫🇷France
• 🇮🇹Italy
• 🇮🇩Indonesia
• 🇯🇵Japan
• 🇰🇮Kiribati
• 🇳🇿New Zealand
• 🇳🇺Niue
• 🇵🇬Papua New Guinea
• 🇼🇸Samoa
• 🇸🇬Singapore
• 🇸🇧Solomon Islands
• 🇪🇸Spain
• 🇨🇭Switzerland
• 🇹🇴Tonga
• 🇹🇻Tuvalu
• 🇦🇪United Arab Emirates
• 🇬🇧United Kingdom
  • Devon, England
• 🇺🇸United States of America
  • District of Columbia
  • Maryland
  • Nevada
• 🇻🇺Vanuatu
• 🇻🇳Vietnam
Last Updated 12 Nov 2023
• 12 Nov 2023: Added Singapore and Indonesia
• 28 May 2023: First version. Note: I’m writing this while on an overseas trip, so I’ll also be including the countries that I’ll be visiting over the next few weeks.
May 18, 2023 ∞

Full Width Notes In Obsidian

More custom styling of Obsidian today. This snippet turns off fixed-width display of notes, so that they can span the entire window. Useful if you’re dealing with a bunch of wide tables, as I am right now.

body {
    --file-line-width: 100%;
}

div.cm-sizer {
    margin-left: 0 !important;
    margin-right: 0 !important;
}

I wish I could say credit goes to ChatGPT, but the answer it gave wasn’t completely correct (although it was close). The way I got this was by enabling the developer tools — which you can do from the View menu — and just going through the HTML DOM to find the relevant CSS class. I guess this means that this’ll break the minute Obsidian decides to change their class names, but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

May 9, 2023 ∞

F5 To Run

While going through my archive about a month ago, I found all my old Basic programs I wrote when I was going through school. I had a lot of fun working on them back in the day, and I though it would be nice to preserve them in some way. Maybe even make them runnable in the browser, much like what the Wayback Machine did with the more well-known DOS programs.

So I set about doing just that, and today the site is live: F5 To Run.

And yeah, it’s likely that I’m the only one interested in this. No matter. I’m glad they’re off my dying portable drive and preserved on the web in some fashion.

May 4, 2023 ∞

Twitter, Public Alerts, And Federated Protocols

So apparently Twitter’s leadership team has discovered the value it has for public alerts:

Of all the changes Elon Musk has made to Twitter, blocking emergency and public transit services from tweeting automated alerts might have been his least popular. User backlash roared, as National Weather Service accounts got suspended. Then, one of the country’s largest public transit services, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), had so much trouble tweeting, it decided to quit posting updates to Twitter.

It always seemed a little off that these organisations were using Twitter for this. Not everyone is on Twitter, and those that were had to agree to the terms of a private company which could, at any time, do… well, what it’s doing now. Should public alerts for weather and transportation really rely on such private entities?

I can see why these companies were used back in the late 2000’s, when they first came onto the scene. They had apps with push-based notification with a good (enough) user experience. They were also investing in the backend, setting up services that can scale. So organisations palming off dissemination of these alerts to Twitter made sense.

But I don’t think it makes sense anymore. With ActivityPub and (in theory) whatever BlueSky is cooking up, you now have open, federated protocols, and a bunch of apps people are building which use them. You also have public clouds which provide an easier way to scale a service. With these two now available, it seems clear to me that these organisations should deploy their own service for sending out these alerts using any or all of these open protocols.

Then, the public can come to them on their terms. Those using Mastodon or BlueSky can get the alerts in their app of choice. Those that aren’t interested in either can still use any mobile apps these’s organisations have released, and these protocols can be used there as well. One can imagine a very simple ActivityPub “receiver” app, stripped of all the social features apart from receiving notifications, that can be used for organisations that don’t or can’t release a mobile app. Plus, having a service that they run themselves could also make it possible to setup more esoteric notification channels, like web push-notifications through the browser.

And yeah, it’ll cost money and will require some operational expertise. But I’d argue that serving the public in this way is their perdure, and the reason why tax dollars go in their direction.

So now’s a great time for these organisations to step away from relying on these private companies for disseminating alerts and embrace the new federated protocols coming onto the scene. Who knows, maybe they’ll also embrace RSS. That would be nice.

Apr 30, 2023 ∞

Content Warning: About A Spider

This spider was hanging around my garage door opening button for a few weeks now. I didn’t think much of it until today, when I noticed that it was actually a redback. Not the largest redback I’ve seen, but one located pretty close to a button I push quite frequently.

Photo of said redback (it's small, but the photo is a close-up)



I don’t know about other Australians, but I’ve got a “kill on sight”¹ policy with redbacks, so it had to go.

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1. Of course I say that, but I’ve seen redbacks on shed doors that I haven’t done anything about. Though I wouldn’t call them harmless, there were out of the way enough for me to disregard them. ↩︎

Apr 24, 2023 ∞

About Those Checkmarks

This posts going to be about Twitter. Yes, I know; another one out there. It’s also going to be a bit speculative in nature, so feel free to skip it if you like.

I’ve been reading the coverage over the “retirement” of the legacy verification system, both in the news and on the socials. And what I find interesting about this whole affair is all the new Twitter Blue subscribers complaining about people that had the checkmark choosing not to sign up.

Their displeasure comes through in their tweets on why they think these people choose not to subscribe. Many tout money (these people are too stingy) or logistics (write it off as a business expense). But they don’t give a reason as to why they care. Surely money or logistics is their problem to sort through. Why should you be unhappy that they chose not to join Twitter Blue? I haven’t seen any tweets answering this question.

I’m not surprised by that. I wonder if the reason is that many of those that have acquired a checkmark saw the those with a verified Twitter handle as being part of the in-group; members of an elite club that you cannot get a membership for¹. Naturally they wanted to be part of this in-group, and when this new Twitter Blue subscription offer rolled out, they saw an easy opportunity to gain entry.

But the thing about status symbols is that they’re only valuable if the in-group chooses to keep them. When all these formally verified people refuse to sign up to Twitter Blue, and their checkmarks were removed from their handle, so too did the checkmark loose it’s value as an indicator of worth. The checkmark no longer a signals status.

Even worse is this in-group has changed their position to one where not having the checkmark is the sign of status. Suddenly, those that have signed up to Twitter Blue found that their attempts to buy their way in was for naught. And that’s what I think they’re angry about. Their new checkmark doesn’t impart status anymore, since those that had it don’t want it. Now it’s just an indicator that you’ve paid $8 a month, with maybe a hint that you found the symbol important in the first place.

That’s also probably why Musk saw it fit to “pay” for Twitter Blue for accounts with more than a million followers, trying to prop up any remaining status this indicator once had. This raises more questions though. Surely he would have seen that allowing anyone to verify their account would dilute the intrinsic status that came with it. I guess he thought that those with the checkmark felt it important enough to keep it, and it will retain its value as a status indicator.

Anyway, this could be all pretty obvious to a first year psychology student, but I found it all very revealing. It’s certainly interesting seeing this play out over the last couple of days.

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1. I know that’s not the point of this verification status, but it does seem like many saw it as an “I’m an important person” signal. ↩︎

Apr 22, 2023 ∞

Day One and Project Jurassic

So, Day One is in danger of being sherlocked by rumor’s of Apple’s upcoming journaling app:

Mayne echoes the sentiment of several app developers who have been frustrated when Apple launched in-house competitors to the apps they have introduced to the ecosystem, often copying features those apps innovated and adding functionality that only Apple can offer, per the iPhone’s privacy and security policies and APIs.

I’m a user of Day One and I have my doubts that Apple’s app would be a drop-in replacement for my journaling needs. And I think the reasons why Day One works for me — and could be made to work better — are also opportunities for Auttomatic to differentiate Day One from project Jurassic.

The first is access to user’s data. If Apple’s going to leverage the data it has access to on the phone, then Auttomatic should go the other way, making it dead easy for services outside Apples ecosystem to add stuff to people’s journal. Have a blog? Post photos to Flickr? Track movies in Letterboxd? Wouldn’t it be nice to get this into your Day One journal, safe and secure? A public API that these services can use to add posts to user’s journal would go a long way here. These services can offer an export option straight from the app, and Day One can be the private collection of all things a user does on the web, sort of like a private blog.

And yes, I know there’s that IFTTT integration, but I found it to be pretty crummy (all the post formatting was stripped and images were not uploaded). And it would be a pretty ordinary user experience to have these services say to their users “hey, if you want the stuff you track here in your journal, you have to create an account at this other service.” I guess all these services could publish this information as RSS feeds, and I would settle for that, if the IFTTT integration is actually working.

But arguments about IFTTT aside, the point is that Day One should fully embrace other services getting user’s data into their journal, and the best way to do this is with a public API. I know it won’t work for all their journals (one’s encrypted E2E should remain so) but the user’s should have that option, and services should be empowered to allow this.

And let’s not forget the largest trump card Automattic has over Apple: an Android app and web app. I haven’t used the web app but I use the Android app all the time. I can’t imagine Apple releasing an Android version of their journalling app, particularly if they’re gearing it towards health and leveraging all the private data people have on their iPhones. Automattic should keep working on both the Android and web app, so that users not completely in Apple’s ecosystem can keep journals.

So I don’t think Auttomatic has much to fear about project Jurassic. But they can’t rest on their laurels. They should embrace the platforms outside of Apple and iOS to really differentiate Day One, and keep it a favourite of mine for journaling.

Apr 22, 2023 ∞

Nerd Counterflex

You know that Washington Post article that has the list of websites Google used to train Bard? I been seeing people post screenshots of their sites in the training set on their blogs and Mastodon. This morning I read a post from Chris Coyier about it:

My largest corpus of writing to date is on the web at css-tricks.com (along with many other writers), so naturally, I’m interested in seeing if it was used. (Plus, I’ve been seeing people post their rank as a weird nerd flex, so I’m following suit.)

I’d suggest reading it. The post is more than just him flexing his ranking in the training set.

Well, I got curious to see if any of my writing was there. Here’s the result:



I guess you can call this a form of a nerd counterflex?

None of my other sites were there either. There was “lmika.com”, but that’s not me. Maybe having that was good enough for Google.

So yeah, you won’t be seeing Bard sharing any of my… “insightful” thoughts about code reviews anytime soon. 😄

Apr 1, 2023 ∞

First Posts Of The Day

It’s bit strange how the first post of the day can always feel like the hardest to get out. Every one after it is so much easier to write.

I wonder if it’s because when faced with an empty text-box, there are these grand plans about what I’m going to write, as if everyone reading this is hanging on my every word: it’ll be my masterpiece of wit, inspiration, and insightfulness that will spread far and wide and blow the minds of everrryyywoonnneee¹. Then I write something, and naturally it falls far short of these expectations: mundane, unimportant, already said before².

Then I say to myself, “ah well, at least it’s written down.” And with that, the expected level of quality for anything else that day has been set.

So, this is today’s first post. More might come, probably along the same level of importance as this one. At least until the tomorrow, when the cycle starts again.

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1. Another possibility is that I feel I need to write something at the same level of quality of those that I read. That’s probably not a bad feeling to have; but, at least for me, it can get in the way of writing anything at all that day. ↩︎

2. And lets not forget the bad spelling and grammar I failed to catch. ↩︎