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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 →
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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. Continue reading →
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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.” Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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”. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
