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Where Have I Been
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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). Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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) If you look closely you can see a bit of the classic red stripe on the spider's abdomen. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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Reheating Chicken Schnitzel in a Microwave
Some tips for heating up chicken schnitzel that you had for dinner in a 1.1 kW microwave for lunch the next day. This is something I occasionally do, and today I found a process that works that I’d like to document for the future. First, don’t use the high setting on the microwave. A minute at high will heat the schnitzel up, but would also harden the crumbling, making it rubbery and unpleasent to eat. Continue reading →
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Photos Of Churchill Island
Yesterday, my parents and I went to Churchill Island for afternoon tea and a walk around the homestead. Here are a few photos of that outing. Apologies that some of them are not great — they were taken in a bit of a hurry. Continue reading →
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Hiding Your Attachment Folder In Obsidian's Outline
A useful little CSS snippet for anyone using Obsidian that wants to hide their attachment folder from their outline. .nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"], .nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"] + .nav-folder-children { display: none; } To use: Go to the directory $VAULT/.obsidian/snippets where $VAULT is the directory of you vault. If the snippets directory doesn’t exist, create it. Copy the CSS snippet into a new CSS file. Open you vault settings and go to Appearance. Scroll to the bottom to where you see CSS snippets. Continue reading →
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To Wordpress Or Not To Wordpress
I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. I’ve been asked to setup a new website for someone who wants to stand up a new business. In therory this is something that I can do quite easily. I know HTML and CSS. I’ve made a living building backends for web-apps. I do have an undeveloped eye for design, but I like to think I have an idea of the principal of good website usability; and as long as I’m not too ambitious, and aim for a minimal usable site, I can probably put together a simple static website. Continue reading →
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Quotes Around Names In Error Messages
I saw this error a few minutes ago: failed to process input: RUNTIME ERROR: function has no parameter stack This threw me for a minute as I was trying to work out which parameter stack went missing, what I did to cause it to go missing, and what the heck a parameter stack actually is anyway. But it had nothing to do with any sort of stack. The error message was showing up because a function call was expecting a parameter with name “stack” which was missing from the function definition. Continue reading →
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Web Search Works With Blogs Too
Here’s one more reason to write (or syndicate) to your blog instead of post directly to social media: you can use web search engines to find what you need. I hear a lot of people complain about the crappy search in Twitter or the lack of search in Mastodon, but this won’t be a problem if you post to your site and let public search engines crawl it. They’re incentivised to make sure their search is good, so you’re more likely to get better results more quickly. Continue reading →
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Less Consuming, More Creating
Mike Crittenden posted a good quote from a random Hacker News commenter: Less consuming, more creating. Doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter if it’s bad. This quote actually sums up this blog quite nicely. The first line explains why it came to exist. The second line describes how it continues to exist. Happy 1,000th post. Continue reading →
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Ballarat Beer Festival 2023
My friends and I returned to Ballarat today for the Beer Festival. It was another stunning day for it: sunny, mild, not too hot. Much like last year I took an earlier train to walk around Ballarat a little. Not much to report here: very little has changed. But I never see Ballarat so it’s good to walk around a little. My friends were on the train behind mine and I caught up with them when I boarded at Ballarat. Continue reading →
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Ignoring Bard to Speak to Paulie
So this happened today. Our team was testing the integration between two systems. The first system — let’s call it Bard — can be configured to make API calls directly to Stripe, or be configured to use the second system — let’s call it Paulie — to call Stripe on it’s behalf. Bard has a REST API that is used by the HTML front-end to handle user requests. Paulie is designed to be completely isolated from the front-end and has a simple gRPC API that Bard calls. Continue reading →
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New Stuff Setup Weekend
A bunch of new stuff I’ve bought has arrived recently and this is the weekend I finally get around to setting it up. New Furniture The largest one is a new couch. I’ve been sitting on a second-hand two seater that my parents gave me when I’ve moved out. It did the job but it was getting quite old and saggy, and I’ve been finding myself wanting to have something larger that I can lie across. Continue reading →
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Spotify Video Follow-up
Some follow-up from my post about Spotify videos. I looked into this a little and from what I understand they’re not full videos but “short looping video clips that play during certain songs,” at least according to this website. So I guess my initial belief is incorrect. Spotify might have music videos (they’re a bunch of articles about them thinking about it in 2020-21) but this looks to be completely different. Continue reading →
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On Higher Order Functions In Go
It’s a bit surprising that higher-order functions like map and filter have not caught on in Go. They seemed to have caught on quickly when they were added to Java. One of the long standing issues back then was the clunky and verbose approach to writing closures. Java 8 fixed this with the introduction of the lambda (the -> operator). Suddenly, what once took multiple lines of boilerplate could be done in a single expression. Continue reading →
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Making A Long Form Posts Category In Micro.blog
I use the Categories feature of Micro.blog to organise the types of posts I make on this site. One of the categories I have on this blog is called Long Form Posts, which I use to file all the posts I have that have titles. This is done automatically, such that I don’t have to think about adding a post to this category once I’ve written it1. It’s a little hard to find the relevant features in Micro. Continue reading →
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I, Developer
There was a bit of a discussion on Mastodon and various blogs about how best to call someone who writes code for fun or profit. I’ll spare you the prologue of how this discussion that has been going on since the start of the profession itself: I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But hearing one of these terms today got me thinking about this, and I thought I’d say what my preferences are. Continue reading →
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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? Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →