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One thing I miss from using Gnome and Linux is the ability to pin any window to the top layer, so that it appears above all the others. I’m a little surprise that MacOS doesn’t support this at the OS level, and that apps need to offer it themselves. Of course, not every app does.
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This week’s earworm: Hergest Ridge 🎵
Another Mike Oldfield album (surprise, surprise). I’ve only recently discovered this after my dad shared this YouTube video on prog. rock albums. I’m making my way through the list but I’ve naturally started from what I consider the best.
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Ok, I’m all in on Obsidian for my note taking now. I’ve found myself using it at work every day this week. The editor they’ve got in the latest version is quite nice. And now that their mobile apps are out, it’s great that I can now access my notes on any device.
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Useful thing to know about Go: you can do lookups on a
nilmap:var xs map[string]string = nil x, hasX := xs["hello"]The result will simply be the zero value of the particular type. In this case
xwill be the empty string. -
🔗 Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads?
The well of bad ideas may not be bottomless, but it certainly is deep.
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An Alternative To The Reply All Idea For Micro.blog
Just thinking about Micro.blog conversations and the discussion about having a way to reply all. I wonder if a better alternative is to be able to “follow” conversations, with new replies from anyone showing up in the timeline. This can be completely opt-in per conversation — including for posts that are made by you — so that those that want the old way to continue working as is don’t loose anything. Continue reading →
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Tinkering around with some tools I use to help me at work. One, a CSV editor which runs in the terminal, has a command-line interface that is so wimpy I’m having trouble resisting the urge to rip it out and replace it with something like TCL. I don’t need another distraction.
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The (Annoying) Way To Get the Current MacOS Appearance Scheme From the Command Line
Ok, here’s something bizarre. I’m trying to get the current MacOS appearance scheme — either light or dark mode — from the terminal. The way to do this is by running this command (source): defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle If MacOS is in dark mode, this will print Dark. But if MacOS is in light mode, the command will print… an error: 2022-10-04 09:15:18.058 defaults[35844:466643] The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleInterfaceStyle) does not exist Running defaults read -g confirms what the error message says: the AppleInterfaceStyle key is not set when MacOS is in light mode. Continue reading →
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There a so many good, high quality TV shows available at the moment. And yet I have little interest in watching any of them. They feel like such a time investment. Of course, the alternative is vegging out to YouTube, so where’s the real time-sink here?
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New blog alert: lmika.day
Started a check-in blog, similar to manton.coffee. Having a record of places I’ve been to has been something I’ve been thinking of for a while, and I suspect all the travel this year, plus the recent talk about Meridian, nudged me to start keeping one.
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Trying Obsidian for note-keeping at work again. I used it a lot in my last job, but I never really liked how the markdown was styled, so I stopped when I started working where I am now.
One other reason why I didn’t keep using Obsidian was that I always forgot to launch it. Out of sight is out of mind for me, and I never think of launching it when I need to write something down. This means that most of my notes usually end up in Tot or various untitled TextEdit windows.
Fortunately, the styling of the markdown editor is closer to my taste in the recent version, so I’ll give it another go. I’ve also added Obsidian as a login item so that it shows up as soon as I log in now.
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Photos of Lake Tuggeranong
This morning I went to Tuggeranong, south of Canberra. After a cafe breakfast I took a walk around the lake. It was a lovely spring morning for it: cloudy, mild but slightly on the cool side. It was also quite a decent walk: probably took an hour and 20 minutes, and I didn’t even cover the entire lake. All in all, a nice way to begin the day. Continue reading →
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🔗 Google suffers from a digital petro curse
Hearing the story about Stadia reminded me of this post by DHH. His thoughts on why Google can’t keep a new product around for more than a few years is insightful.
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Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
What’s there more to say? 🤷
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🔗 Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement lacks crosswalks, checkboxes, Google
I wonder: if Google, as many suspect, is using CAPTCHA for image recognition training, how certain are they of the positive results? If everyone were to start clicking anything other than crosswalks, would that screw up their training data?
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Things Dynamo-Browse Need
I’m working with dynamo-browse a lot this morning and I’m coming up with a bunch of usability shortcomings. I’m listing them here so I don’t forget. The query language needs an in operator, such as pk in ("abc", "123"). This works like in in all the other database services out there, in that the expression effectively becomes `pk = “abc” or pk = “123”. Is this operator supported natively in DynamoDB? Continue reading →
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An idea for anyone maintaining a 2FA app. When there’s only a few seconds left for an OTP code, start fading the numbers out.
I only look at the time remaining indicator about half the time, usually when I have a bit of time to enter a code. Other times when I’m under a bit of pressure to login, I just look at the code and start entering it, only to stop because the number changed without me noticing.
Seeing it start to fade is a good indicator that the code will change and that I should probably wait for the next one.
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The best Slack shortcut I learnt today is Shift+Esc. This will mark all messages as read. 😌
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I had some trouble trying out status.lol yesterday. Turns out the reason was that I was using the API key from meta.omg.lol. instead of from home.omg.lol. Once that was fixed, sending status updates worked without any problem.
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As a change of pace, I’ve picked up a frontend ticket at work today. TypeScript, React, GraphQL: yes, I’m using it all. I know a little of each so I’m not coming to it completely cold. But it’s still all quite new to me so there’s still that sense of doing something novel.
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Here’s something I learnt today about cockatiels: they sneeze, or do something that can be described as sneezing. Either way, I didn’t learn this from looking it up. 🤧
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Overlay Composition Using Bubble Tea
Working on a new feature for Dynamo-Browse which will allow the user to modify the columns of the table: move them around, sort them, hide them, etc. I want the feature to be interactive instead of a whole lot of command incantations that are tedious to write. I also kind of want the table whose columns are being manipulated to be visible, just so that the affects of the change would be apparent to the user while they make them. Continue reading →
