Imagine that there’s an open source project that has some modest traction but only one maintainer, and that maintainer wants to make a small change to fix something. Would it be okay for that maintainer to make that change directly on main?
Not entirely a hypothetical question. 🤔
Day 6: silhouette
Photo taken by my boss in 2014 while we were in the Cook Islands for work. #mbmay
Day 5: Earth
One of the first photos from Himawari-8, a JMA weather satellite that went online while I was working at the Bureau of Meteorology. The images it produced pushed our visualisation tools to the limit, but boy, they were absolutely stunning. #mbmay
(source)
The Podcast Favourites App
In today’s issue of “useless apps that nobody but me would want to use”, I’ve managed to get a version of the Podcast Favourites app built and deployed. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it works quite well.
Here are some screenshots of it, starting with the main screen you see when you log in:
As you can probably guess, I listen to a lot of ATP. 😁
Selecting one of the feeds will bring up the favourites of that feed.
Each favourite has the name of the episode, the start time (which is hidden in the listing but editable when clicking the pencil icon) and a brief description that is usually used to explain what the clip is about. The name and artwork are retrieved from the podcast RSS feed, and the description can be whatever you want.
Clicking the play button will bring up the in-browser player.
There’s no scrubber, but you can go back and forwards 30 seconds by clicking the relevant button, or by pressing < and > on the keyboard. Pressing space will toggle play and pause. Most of this I took straight out of Alto Catalogue, but moved it to the bottom of the page much like the Pocketcast web-player.
So far I’m reasonably pleased with it. Honestly, it’s probably not something that pushed me from a development sense. More like something that I’d like to use myself. And it’s far from perfect: there are a few weird navigation links at the moment, and some ugly UI. But it does the job I need it to do.
I probably won’t spend any more time on it. If I do, it would be to get the mobile version of the web-app styled correctly.
Day 4: thorny
This plant was less thorny than it once would have been, although there’s at least one thorn that those dethroning it missed. #mbmay
Day 3: experimental
An experimental Arduino sketch, built using Tinygo, to see if I could get something displayed on the LCD. #mbmay
Have finally got an approach for producing signed and notarised MacOS apps that is invokable from the command line and that consistently produce archives that work. Incidentally, the next version of Feed Journaler has been released and is now available.
Those that say “keep your user documentation up to date, not only for others but for yourself in the future,” are absolutely correct. You will forget, and you will need to go through your old code to remember how your tool works. Might as well update the docs while you’re at it.
The pièce de résistance of media with dynamic ad insertion (podcasts/streaming services/etc.) is being presented with same ad twice in a row. As much as I love being made to hear an annoying pitch once, I really love it when I’m made to hear it again. Great system guys. 😒
Part of me is wondering whether it makes sense giving Mastodon a try, maybe setting up a domain and instance hosted by Masto. The only thing stopping me is wondering what I would post there that would be different from what I post here.
Day 2: photo
The only photo of mine that I have on the wall. #mbmay
Day 1: switch
I usually sit at that table. But today, I decided to switch to the other side. #mbmay
Our council has started using electric garbage trucks for collecting waste from park bins, which I think is a great move. If I had one suggestion, it would be to add some artificial engine noise to these vehicles. Given their size, I think they’re just a little too quiet.
GitLab Search Subscriptions with NetNewsWire
I’m working (with others) on a project that’s using GitLab to host the code, and I’m looking for a better way to be notified of new merge requests that I need to review. I cannot rely on the emails from GitLab as they tend to be sent for every little thing that happens on any of the merge requests I am reviewing. For this reason, any notifications sent by email will probably get missed by me. People do post new merge requests in a shared Slack channel, but a majority of them are for repos that don’t need my review. They’ve also been days where a lot of people are making a lot of changes at the same time, and any new messages for the repos I’m interesting would get pushed away.
Today I learnt that it’s possible to subscribe to searches in GitLab using RSS. So I’m trying something with NetNewsWire where I can subscribe to a search for open merge requests for the repos I’m interested in. I assume the way this works is that any new merge requests would result in a new RSS item on this feed, which will show up as an update in NetNewsWire. In theory, all I have to do is monitor NetNewsWire, and simply keep items unread until they’ve been merged or no longer need my attention.
We’ll see this approach helps. The only down side is that there’s no way to get updates for a single merge request as an RSS feed, which would have been nice.
Woke up at 5 AM this morning for an early coding session today. Really want to fix this process of notarising a Mac app from the command line so that I can get a distribution prepared with a single button press, as it were.
Got to the point where I’ve got a Python script which will build the archive, export the archive as a signed app (I think), and upload it to Apple to be notarised. The app gets notarised successfully after running all this, or at least it’s reported to be notarised successfully.
Now waiting for a Mac to be provision in MacStadium so that I can test it. My previous tests have failed so far, either because Apple claiming that the app is notarised doesn’t actually mean that it’s notarised, or I’m corrupting the notarised archive in some way during my previous tests as I move it around the file system. Hopefully with this new process I find out which of these cases is causing the problem.
Was this activity a good use of my time? Really can’t say. Maybe, maybe not. But I was already awake a 5 AM anyway so it’s arguably better than simply lying in bed.
Arbitrage. That was the word I was trying to remember.
Dealing with identities and notarisation is a huge pain. You make an archive in Xcode, notarise it, Xcode says it’s notarised successfully, you try to launch it, and MacOS throws up that security alert. Honestly, I’m surprised anyone can release anything for MacOS nowadays.
Thinking about Twitter and newsletters during my morning walk, I wonder: did Twitter actually do anything with Revue after they bought it last year, or was it one more acquisition that was left to die on the Vine? (pun intended, sort-of)
Didn’t sleep well last night. Why? Because it was the first night of on call that I’ve had in a while, and I was afraid of being woken up by PagerDuty. Yes, that’s right: the fear of being woken up last night kept me up last night. 😫
I went to the dentist a few weeks ago (for the first time in five years 🙈) and the dentist asked if I was grinding my teeth. I said “no” as I didn’t think I was, but now I’m wondering if I do. It’s certainly something I’ve been noticing I do more often since that visit.