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On Treating Users As If They're Just There To Buy Stuff
Ars Technica has published a third post about the annoying user experience of Microsoft Edge in as many days. Today’s was about a notice that appears when the user tries to use Edge to download Chrome. These are notices that are displayed by the browser itself whenever the user opens up the Chrome download page.
Now, setting aside the fact that these notices shouldn’t be shown to the user at all, what got up my goat was the copy that appears in one of them:
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Weekend In Mansfield
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to spend some time with my parents who were staying in Mansfield, in regional Victoria. We were staying in a small cottage located on a hill, which meant some pretty stunning views, especially in the evening light.
We didn’t do a heap during our trip, although we did manage to do the The Paps trail on Saturday, which involved a 700 metre climb.
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Cookie Disclosure Popups Should be Handled by the Browser
I really dislike the cookie disclosure popups that appear on websites. Ideally I shouldn’t be seeing them at all — I know that the EU requires it, but I’m not a citizen of the EU so the regulation should not apply to me. But I’m pragmatic enough to know that not every web developer can or will selectively show this disclosure popup based on the geographic region of the visitor.
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My Impressions of GitHub Codespaces
The GitHub Universe 2021 conference started a few days ago and one of the features touted in the day one keynote was GitHub Codespaces. This is a development environment that is accessible from within your web browser. It’s based on VSCode, which is a popular and well-designed IDE that is already written in JavaScript1, and also provides access to a Linux shell running in the cloud, allowing you to do various things like build and test your code.
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Alto Catalogue Update
I’ve really tied myself up in knots here. I’m spending some time working on Alto Catalogue, trying to streamline the process of uploading individual tracks into a new album. This is a workflow that is absolutely not user friendly at the moment, and the only way I’ve gotten tracks into the catalogue is to run a hacked-together tool to upload the tracks from the command line. The reason why I’m addressing this now is that it’s slightly embarrassing to have this open-source project without having a nice way of doing something that, by all accounts, is quite fundamental (a good hint for when you’re facing this is when it comes time to write the end-user documentation: if you can’t explain how to do something in a way that doesn’t include the word “hack”, “complicated”, or “unsupported”, then something is missing).
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Feeds In Broadtail
My quest to watch YouTube without using YouTube got a little closer recently with the addition of feeds in Broadtail. This uses the YouTube RSS feed endpoint to list videos recently added to a channel or playlist.
There are a bunch of channels that I watch regularly but I’m very hesitant to subscribe to them within YouTube itself (sorry YouTubers, but I choose not to smash that bell icon). I’m generally quite hesitant to give any signal to YouTube about my watching habits, feeding their machine learning models even more information about myself. But I do want to know when new videos are available, so that I can get them into Plex once they’re released. There is where feeds come in handy.
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Some Screenshots Of Broadtail
I spent some time this morning doing some styling work on Broadtail, my silly little YouTube video download manager I’m working on.
Now, I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a designer. And these designs look a little dated, but, surprisingly, this is sort of the design I’m going for: centered pages, borders, etc. A bit of a retro, tasteless style that may be ugly, but still usable(-ish).
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Start of Yet Another Project Because I Can't Help Myself
One of the reasons why I stopped work on Lorikeet was that I was inspired by those on Micro.blog to setup a Plex server for my YouTube watching needs. A few years ago, I actually bought an old Intel Nuc for that reason, but I never got around to setting it up. I managed to do so last Wednesday and so far it’s working pretty well.
The next thing I’d like to do is setup RSS subscriptions for certain YouTube channels and automatically download the videos when they are publish. I plan to use “youtube-dl” for the actual video downloading part, but I’m hoping to build something that would poll the RSS feeds and trigger the download when new videos are published. I’m hoping that this service would have a web-based frontend so I don’t have to login via SSH to monitor progress, etc.
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Abandoning Project Lorikeet
I’ll admit it: the mini-project that I have been working on may not have been a good idea.
The project, which I gave the codename Lorikeet, was to provide a way to stream YouTube videos to a Chromecast without using the YouTube app. Using the YouTube app is becoming a real pain. Ads aside, they’ve completely replaced the Chromecast experience from a very basic viewing destination to something akin to a Google TV, complete with recommendations of “Breaking News” from news services that I have no interest in seeing.
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Two People
There are two people, and each one has the same problem that they want to get solved.
The first person chooses the option to pay $10 a month, and all they have to do is sign up to a service that will solve the problem for them. The service they sign up for takes care of the rest.
The second person chooses the option to pay $15 a month, 20 hours of work to get something built, and an ongoing commitment to keep it maintained.
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(Hyper)critical Acclaim
There were a couple of events that led me to writing this post. I’m sure part of it was seeing the posts on the 10 year anniversary of Steve Jobs, although such an event would probably not have been sufficient in itself. What tipped it over the edge was seeing the Ars Technica review of iOS showing up in my RSS feed on the same day. Pretty soon I’m expecting the MacOS review to drop as well.
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On Choosing the Hard Way Forward
This is about work, so the usual disclaimers about opinions being my own, etc. apply here.
I have an interesting problem in front of me at the moment: I’ve need to come up with a way to be notified when a user connects to, or disconnects from, a PostgreSQL database. This is not something that’s supported by PostgreSQL out of the box1, so my options are limited to building something that sits outside the database. I can think of two ways that I can do this: have something that sits in front of the database which acts as a proxy, or have something that sits behind the database and generates the notifications by parsing the server log.
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Some Notes About the Covid-19 Situation
Now that the vaccines are here and are (slowly) being rolled out, and that Covid zero is no longer achievable in any realistic sense, the pandemic seems to be taking on a bit of a different vibe at the moment. I am no longer religiously watching the daily press conferences as I did in the past. They’re still occurring as far as I know, and I do appreciate that the authorities are showing up every day once again to brief the public.
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On Confluence
I’m sorry. I know the saying about someone complaining about their tools. But this has been brewing for a little while and I need to get it off my chest.
It’s becoming a huge pain using Atlassian Confluence WISIWIG editor to create wiki pages. Trying to use Confluence to write out something that is non-trivial, with tables and diagrams, so that it is clear to everyone in the team (including yourself) is so annoying to do now I find myself wishing for alternatives. It seems like the editor is actively resisting you in your efforts to get something down on paper.
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On Apple's Media Release Gymnastics
I started listening to the latest Talk Show, where John Gruber and MG Siegler discuss Apple’s media release of the class action settlement. Releasing it to the major media outlets in such a way as to spin the guideline clarification as a concession to developers, even though nothing has actually change, is genius if true. I imagine that’s why Apple’s PR department get the big bucks.
But I wonder if Apple has considered the potential blowback of this approach. I might be naive here, but I can’t help wonder whether these media outlets publishing that Apple hasn’t actually conceded anything will eventually realised that they have been had. Would that affect the relationship between the two in any way? Say Apple wants to publish some good news and expect these outlets to maintain the favourable air of their release. Would they do it?
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Post Of Little Consequence
I’m wouldn’t call myself a regular poster on this blog. I don’t have a goal of writing a post a day or something. But I do want to keep it up with some frequency, and post at least one item a week. I realised today that it’s been a week since my last post.
However, due to the current lockdown, very little of note has happened over the last week. Apart from work, TV, reading, and doing a few personal projects on the side, there really isn’t much going on. So it was hard to come up with something that was interesting to write about.
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Six Weeks Off Twitter
It’s been roughly six weeks since I’ve stopped using Twitter on a daily basis. I initially took a break to stay away from some anxiety inducing news, and I was initially going to return to daily use once that passed. But after hearing others on Micro.blog post about their experience closing their Twitter account, I decided to see how long I can go staying off Twitter myself.
I wouldn’t say that I am a big Twitter user. I don’t have a Twitter audience (I think my follower count is in the single digits), I hardly ever tweet or reply, and although I have a few friends and family on there, I have other means of communicating with them that I tend to use more often. The only thing I would miss are the occasional interesting or amusing tweets from those that I follow, something that is not guaranteed in any particular reading session.
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Seeking Out Bad News
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe it’s because I think that if I don’t, then a problem will go unaddressed as no-one else is aware of it.
There’s probably some evolutionary trait to this. Being the one that hears a predator, and reacts to it before anyone else, is an advantage. But in this day and age, many of the problems that I have anxiety about is pretty much known by everyone, and addressing it in any meaningful way is beyond my direct control.
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A Year On Micro.blog
It’s been a year since I’ve signed up to Micro.blog and written my first post, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner.
The reason for joining was to write more; to focus less on the blogging engine and more on the blog itself. At the time I have only posted seven times over a period of 9 months. In the last year, that post count has risen to 222. I guess I can call that objective achieved.
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Working On The Weekend
I’ve saw a Tweets last night saying that the best thing a young person can do to help their career is to work on the weekend. The implication there is that being the one that “puts in the extra hours” can seem, in the eyes of your employer, like you’re the hardest worker there, that you’re committed to the project and the job. This could lead to bonuses, promotions, perks, a reputation, you name it.
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Stumbling Into the Concept of Narrating Your Work
About a week ago, we had a retro. One of the things that was brought up was the sense that management felt that the team was not delivering as much as we could be. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the higher ups work in Perth, a good 3,452 KM away from Melbourne. Another was that a lot of the work the team deals with is experimental in nature: more R&D vs. product development (a large portion of it involves dealing with a lot of barely supported, and completely undocumented APIs for MacOS).
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On the Souring Relationship Between Apple and its Developers
Listening to episode #430 of ATP yesterday, it was kind of shocking to hear the loss of good will experienced by the hosts towards Apple and their developer relations. I can’t say that I blame them though. Although John’s point about lawyers making the case for Apple is a good one, I do get the same feeling that Marco does about Apples opinion about developers, which is not a positive one.
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Podcast Roll 2021
Yesterday, @Munish had the courage to share his podcast subscriptions1. Sensing an opportunity to talk about with what I’m currently listening to, even though it may reveal more about myself that I’m usually comfortable with, I’m taking up his dare and sharing mine.
So, here is my podcast roll as of early May 2021:
The shows above can roughly be divided up into the following categories:
Technology: This is a topic that I’m very interested in so there are fair few of these. A lot of them are Apple centric, but this is more of an accident than by design. The second podcast that I started regularly listening to was The Talk Show since I was a casual reader of Daring Fireball at the time (and I still am). That opened me up to ATP, which led to a bunch of Relay.fm shows.
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On Basecamp
I’ve been thinking about the incident at Basecamp for most of the week. I wanted to write something about it earlier, after hearing about the policy changes on Tuesday, but I’d figure that it would probably be best to wait a bit and learn more about the issue first. The last thing I wanted to do is add one more knee-jerk reaction to the mix during the heat of the moment.
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Some thoughts on Apple Subscription Podcasts offering
You’ve probably seen the blog post outlining the details of Apple’s new Podcast Subscription offering. The latest post from Daring Fireball has a link to it if you haven’t seen it on Twitter already.
After reading this, I’m not sure who would choose to go with Apple’s Podcast hosting. Money aside, it looks like another case of Apple mediating the relationship between host and listener, not to mention keeping subscriber content exclusively on Apple’s app.
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Surmounting The Hill
Sometimes adding features to software is like cycling on a hilly road.
You start off at the bottom of the hill, a little unsure of the hight and gradient, and how well you’ll be able to tackle it. You start the uphill climb, writing new code, adding tests, trying an approach that may not work, backtracking and starting again. This uphill climb is starting to tire you out. You’re making forward progress, even thought it may not feel like it, but it’s slow and you’re not sure how much longer you can keep cycling for.
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A Year Under The Pandemic
This was originally a journal entry but I thought I’d share it here as well. Today is the end of week 52, almost a year to the day that the pandemic became all to real for me. I’ve taken today day off to spend some time in Warburton. It was in Warburton last year, almost to the day (13th of March), that things began to get serious. The news coming out of China and Italy was grave: hundreds of deaths, thousands of new cases, hospitals filling up, lack of ventilators and staff to operate them, PPE shortages, scenes of people locked down in their home. The outbreak in New York was becoming serious as well, and the US government announced closure of their borders to Europe.
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Australia’s ABC News shot to the top of the App Store charts following Facebook’s news ban
From the Verge:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC News app shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in Australia over the course of the last few days, not long after Facebook banned Australian news sources on its platform.
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ABC News currently sits at No. 2 in the App Store’s overall app rankings in Australia, according to the analytics firm App Annie, and No. 1 in the news app charts. When Patel noticed the change, the app was also briefly No. 1 overall, ahead of Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app itself.
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Some uninformed thoughts about the ACCC Media Bargaining Code
Yesterday, when the news about the news and Facebook was making the rounds in Australia, I have been wondering about my position about the whole thing. After listening to the Stratechery Daily Update1 from Ben Thompson about it, I think my position on this has solidified.
I’m no fan of Facebook, but I can completely understand why they took the action they did, and I believe that it is in their right to do so. It could be argued that banning links and pages from government and NPO organisations was wide-reaching, and for that, I think it’s important to consider the motivation here. Was Facebook being cautious about their interpretation of the proposed law, which was written so poorly to suggest that anything related to the goings on in Australia fell under the code? Where they just being sloppy about which organisations were banned? Or were they going to such broad lengths to make a point and leverage their negotiation position? I don’t know: all three scenarios seem plausible.
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A $2000.00 Smartphone with Ads
I just learnt today that the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has ads. I’m generally not that interested in Samsung phones, but the idea of putting ads on a device that costs up to $US 2,000.00 offends me so much that I had to comment.
If I shell out that amount of money for a device, I expect an experience that is worthy of that price. Having that experienced degraded with crappy banner ads, and a built-in app1 which hijacks the lock screen, really brings down the intrinsic worth of the whole device to a point that doesn’t justify the price they’re asking for. It shows contempt for the customer — you know, the person that, by right, is the owner of the phone they paid for — and it’s just overall dishonorable.
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Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting
Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting:
The surprising thing? In a recent primary in New York, some people had trouble with the new method. It’s not that the method of voting is particularly difficult. The problem is that we’ve trained ourselves to be RIGHT. To have “our candidate” and not be open (or pushed) to even consider that there might be an alternative. And to feel stress when we need to do the hard work of ranking possible outcomes, because that involves, in advance, considering acceptable outcomes that while not our favorite, would be acceptable.
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A Feature Request for Twitter, Free of Charge
It looks like Twitter’s product design team need some help. Their recent ideas, “inspired” by the features of other companies like Snap (Stories) and Club House (Audio Clips), don’t seem to be setting the world on fire. Well, here’s an idea for them to pursue, free of charge.
A lot of people I follow seem to use Twitter threads for long-form writing. This might be intentional, or it might be because they had a fleeting thought that they developed on the spot. But the end result is a single piece of writing, quantised over a series of tweets, and assembled as a thread.
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Adding Blog Posts to Day One using RSS
Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this.
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Some thoughts on app permissions in macOS
It’s funny how the casual meandering of your mind can be a source of inspiration. This morning, my mind casually turned to thinking about all the work that Mac developers need to do to get access to privileged APIs — like location, contacts, or the accessibility APIs. My experience of going through the motions to enable these permissions for the apps I use, along with hearing of the lengths developers go through to make this as seamless as they can, reveals to me the clunkiness that this entails. I could imaging this being a huge source of frustration for these developers, not to mention a huge source of support requests.
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First encounters with GitHub (and Substack)
All these new Substack newsletters that I’m seeing reminds me of my first encounter with GitHub.
Back in 2009, I was checking out the source code of an open-source library we were using. Clicking on the link to the source bought me to this strange, new code-hosting service that I’ve never seen before. As someone who was use to the heaviness that was SourceForge, or the boring uniformity that was Google Code, the experience felt very minimal and slightly unintuitive. It took me a while, for instance, to realise that the version tags were selectable from a drop-down list. I also thought that it was quite restrictive to only offer checking out the source code with this weird SCM client called “git”. The whole experience left me thinking of this website as rather niche, and I never really expected to see it that often, given that Source Forge or Google Code reigned supreme at the time.
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A Quick Review of the Year
Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” type post, although there’s a bit of that, and there’s no dramatic insight or anything of that nature. It’s more of a chance for reflection, plus a bit of a document for future me on what the year was like.
Personally, as difficult as this past year was, I wouldn’t necessarily say 2020 was a bad year. I know I’m saying this from a position of good fortune: I didn’t loose my job, or my house, or my health. So I know there are a lot of others that have experienced a much worst year than I have. But for me, I’m coming out of this year feeling a little better than I have the previous couple of years gone by.
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Vivaldi - My Recommended Alternative to Chrome
I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would be better just to post my story here.
I became unhappy with Chrome about two years ago. I can’t remember exactly why, but I know it was because Google was doing something that I found distasteful. I was also getting concerned about how much data I was making available to Google in general. I can prove nothing, but something about using a browser offered for free by an advertising company made me feel uneasy.
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Revisiting the decision to build a CMS
It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an update.
In short, and for the second time this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining a CMS is not a good use of my time. The largest issue was the amount of effort that would have been needed in order to work on the things that don’t relate to content, such as styling. I’m not a web designer, so building the style from scratch would have taken a fair amount of time, which would have eaten into the amount of time I would have spent actually writing content. A close second was the need to add additional features to the CMS that were missing, like the ability to add extra pages, and a RSS feed. If I were to do this properly without taking any shortcuts, this too would have resulted in less time spent on content.
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A Brief Look at Stimulus
Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails, the front-end layer is very simple: server-side rendered HTML with a bit of jQuery augmenting the otherwise static web-pages.
After a bit of time, I wanted to add a bit of dynamic flare to the frontend, like automatically fetch and update elements on the page. These projects were more or less small personal things that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time maintaining, so doing something dramatic like rewriting the UI in React or Vue would have been overkill. jQuery was available to me but using it always required a bit of boilerplate to setup the bindings between the HTML and the JavaScript. Also, since Buffalo uses Webpack to produce a single, minified JavaScript file that is included on every page, it would also be nice to have a mechanism to selectively apply the JavaScript logic based on the attributes on the HTML itself.
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Some uninformed thoughts about Salesforce acquiring Slack
John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce:
First, my take presupposes that the point of Slack is to be a genuinely good service and experience. […] To succeed by appealing to people who care about quality. Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams.
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