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It lives!
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Request for any open-source projects that want to put banner ads on their site: please consider hard-coding the height of your banner to prevent the ad from reflowing the page. Otherwise, it may have an impact on the experience of those reading your docs.
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Oh, that’s nice. Looks like Obsidian allows you to set the starting ordinal for numbered lists.
This was something I wish vanilla Markdown had for a while, so it’s good to see at least one Markdown editor embracing this.
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Just heard the name for John's new app. Must say I kinda like it. It grows on you. No spoilers (except in the clip), but I do appreciate that it follows a similar vein to the crazy names I came up with. It just does it so much better.
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I wonder if we could convince Ben to order another run of Stratechery mugs shaped like the one he drinks from. I really like my Stratechery mug — it's one I often use — yet the mug he describes here is intriguing.
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In other building-small-things-for-myself news, I spent a bit of time this morning on the image processor for Blogging Tools. The big new change was adding support for working with multiple source images, instead of just one. This made way for a new “Phone Shot” processor, which arranges multiple screenshots of phone apps in a row, while also downscaling them and proving some quick crops and distribution options.
This should reduce the vertical size of mobile app screenshots I post here, something that’s been bothering me a little.
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Listening to this part of HV got me wondering if the secret to punctual trains is just a whole lot of them. You’re less likely to do something to delay a train — like hold the doors open — if you know the next one’s only a few minutes away, and will arrive on time. One builds on the other.
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Just to add one point of anecdata to Ben’s experience: I’ve never been happy with the performance of the mobile radio of Pixel phones. You can be in the middle of the CBD and still experience weird dropouts while using mobile data. It’s quite frustrating.
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While on my walk, I stopped briefly to clear a stone from my shoe and this purple swamphen (or pūkeko for our Kiwi friends) came up quite close to me. Not sure why. Looking for food maybe?
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My recent exploration of Fyne has got me looking at building a level editor again. Have started work on the viewport, with camera movement using the WASD keys, and a basic mouse tracker for painting cells. Feels pretty good so far, although the cell mouse tracker might need some refinement.
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Spending some time with the birds. Archie’s on heat, which is why she’s making those chirping noises. Ivy’s happily keeping to herself off to the side.
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Day Trip to Bundanoon
Decided to go on a day trip to Bundanoon today. It’s been five years since I last visited and I remember liking the town enough that I thought it’d be worth visiting again. It’s not close, around 1 hour and 40 minutes from Canberra, but it not far either and I thought it would be a nice way to spend the day. Naturally, others agreed, which I guess explains why it was busier than I expected, what with the long weekend and all. Fortunately, it wasn’t too crowded, and I still had a wonderful time.
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Attempting to give head scratches while recording video is more difficult than it looks. 🦜
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Small Calculator
Date: Unknown, but probably around 2005
Status: Retired
Give me Delphi 7, a terminal control, and an expression parser, and of course I’m going to build a silly little REPL program.
I can’t really remember why I though this was worth spending time on, but I was always interested in little languages (still am), and I guess I though having a desk calculator that used one was worth having. I was using a parser library I found on Torry’s Delphi Pages (the best site at the time to get free controls for Delphi) for something else, and after getting a control which simulated a terminal, I wrote a very simple REPL loop which used the two.
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🎥 I’ve released a video tutorial on how to use and configure the Sidebar For Tiny Theme. This walks through the process of creating and using a custom Micro.blog theme to configure the sidebar with custom HTML. Hope others find it useful.
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Picnic train, now boarding. 🚂
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Photo Bucket Update: More On Galleries
Spent a bit more time working on Photo Bucket this last week1, particularly around galleries. They’re progressing quite well. I’m made some strides in getting two big parts of the UI working now: adding and removing images to galleries, and re-ordering gallery items via drag and drop.
I’ll talk about re-ordering first. This was when I had to bite the bullet and start coding up some JavaScript. Usually I’d turn to Stimulus for this but I wanted to give HTML web components a try. And so far, they’ve been working quite well.
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Photo Bucket Galleries and Using the HTML Popover API
Spent a bit more on Photo Bucket this evening. Tonight I started working on galleries, which’ll work more or less like albums.
At the moment you can create a gallery and add a photo to it. Most of the work so far has been backend so the UI is pretty rough. Eventually you’ll be able to do things like rearrange photos within galleries, but for the moment they’ll just be added to the end.
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Build Indicators
AKA: Das Blinkenlights
Date: 2017 — now
Status: Steady Green
I sometimes envy those that work in hardware. To be able to build something that one can hold and touch. It’s something you really cannot do with software. And yeah, I dabbled a little with Arduino, setting up sketches that would run on prebuilt shields, but I never went beyond the point of building something that, however trivial or crappy, I could call my own.
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Working on one of the admin sections of the project I was alluding to yesterday. Here’s a screencast of how it’s looking so far.
The styling and layout is not quite final. I’m focusing more on functionality, and getting layout and whitespace looking good always takes time. But compared to how it looked before I started working on it this morning, I think it’s a good start.
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In the end it took significantly more time to write about it then to actually do it, but the dot product approach seems to work.
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🎥 Elm Connections #7: Deploying
In which I round out the series by deploying Clonections to Netlify.
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🎥 Elm Connections #6: Fetching And JSON Decoding Puzzles
In which I use Elm’s HTTP client and JSON decoder to fetch puzzles from an external resource.
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🎥 Elm Connections #5: Option Shuffling
In which I use Elm’s random number generator to shuffle the options.
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In which I put away Elm for a bit to make the playfield look good (or at least, better than it was).
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🎥 Elm Connections #3: Group Matching
In which I work on “categories”, the model and logic that deals with the groups the player is to “connect”, plus find my way with how sets work in Elm.
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🎥 Elm Connections #2: Starting The Playfield
In which I continue work on a Connections clone in Elm by starting work on the playfield.
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🎥 Elm Connections #1: First Steps
In which I record video of me building a Connections (or Conlextions) clone in Elm (while at the same time, have a go at editing video).
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Making some progress in learning Elm for building frontends. Started working on a Connections clone, which I’m calling “Clonections”. This is what I’ve got so far:
It’s been fun using Elm to build this. So far I’m liking the language. Of course, now I’ll have to come up with puzzles for this. 😐
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I realise I’ve been posting a lot about Ivy, and not a whole lot about Archie. So to even the scales a little, here’s a video of Archie receiving a head scratch this morning.
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Spent a little more time working on my idea for Dynamo-Browse this week. Managed to get it somewhat feature complete this weekend:
I probably should say a few words on what it actually is. The idea is to make it quick and easy to run pre-canned queries based on the currently selected item and table.
Let’s say you’ve got a table with customer information, and another table with subscription information, and they’re linked with some form of customer ID. If you wanted to see the subscriptions of a customer, up until now, you’d have to copy the customer ID to the paste-board, change the currently viewed table, then run a query to select the subscription with that customer ID. It’s not difficult but it’s extremely tedious.
This change is meant to streamline this. Now, in a script function, you can define a “related item” provider which, if matched against the currently displayed table, will be given the currently selected item, and will return a list of queries that will display items related to the current item (depending on whatever definition of “related” will be). This will be presented to the user as a list. When the user chooses the item, the query will run and the results will be displayed.
Here’s an example of the script used for the screencasts:
ext.related_items("business-addresses", func(item) { return [ {"label": "Customer", "query": `city=$city`, "args": {"city": "Austin"}}, {"label": "Payment", "query": `address^="3"`}, {"label": "Thing", "table": "inventory", "query": `pk=$pk`, "args": {"pk": "01fca33a-5817-4c27-8a8f-82380584e69c"}}, ] }) ext.related_items("inventory", func(item) { sk := string(item.attr("sk")) return [ {"label": "SK: " + sk, "table": "business-addresses", "query": `pk^=$sk`, "args": {"sk": sk}}, ] })Notice how the last
business-addressesitem specifies the “inventory” table, and that the “inventory” provider actually uses an attribute of the item. Here’s a screencast of that working:This feature has been on the idea board for a while. I was trying to work out how best to handle the pre-canned queries, especially considering that they will likely be different for each item and table. Some ideas I had were adding additional UI elements that the user could use to configure these queries. These would go into the workspace file, a sort of an embedded database which is created for each session. This was pretty crappy, especially when you consider that workspaces usually only last until the user exists. It was only a few weeks ago when I considered using the scripting facilities to implement this (which, honestly, shows how much it remains under-utilised).
Anyway, I’ve only just finished development of it. I’d still like to try it for the various related items I tend to use during my day-to-day. We’ll see how well it works out.
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Idea For Mainboard Mayhem: A Remote Pickup
Sort of in-between projects at the moment so I’m doing a bit of light stuff on Mainboard Mayhem. I had an idea for a new element: a remote control which, when picked up, will allow the player to toggle walls and tanks using the keyboard, much like the green and blue buttons.
I used ChatGGT to come up with some artwork, and it produced something that was pretty decent.
Prompt: pixel art of a remote control with a single red button styled like the tiles found in Chips Challange, rotated 45 degrees to the right. Only issue was that the image was huge — 1024 x 1024 — and the tiles in Mainboard Mayhem were only 32 x 32.
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Also got a bit of train spotting in as well. I parked at Kyneton station in the hope of seeing a train go by. Wish I could say my timing was strategic but in truth I was just lucky.
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This conversation with @Gaby got my creative juices flowing so I though I’d put together a small video tutorial for using the GLightbox plugin by @jsonbecker. There have been a few updates with the plugin so how I use it might be slightly out of date. Either way, please enjoy.
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Success! Managed to get a Go app built, signed, and notarised all from within a GitHub Action. It even cross-compiles to ARM, which is something considering that it’s using SDL. Here’s the test app being downloaded and launched in a VM (ignore the black window, the interesting part is the title).
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I won’t lie to you. I got some pretty strong vibes of the Birds at this point in my walk.
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🔗 github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
This little tool is awesome. It allows you to easily make GIFs of a command line session from a text-based DSL. I tried it on the full screen TUI app I’m working on and it worked flawlessly.
Now wondering if I could use it for automated testing. 🤔