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Giving the email newsletter feature a try. I don’t have many long form posts so I’m going with weekly-emails-with-all-posts setting. Looking forward to seeing how these will turn out (I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when the first email is sent).
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I bought a new desk lamp over the weekend. After trying it last night, I’m not super happy with it.
For one thing, the light is way too cool for my liking. Too cool, and too bright. The old desk lamp, which was a halogen type lamp, had a bit of shade which helped keep the light out of my eyes. This new one is shorter and has no such shade, making it difficult to positing the lamp without producing glare.
Another thing is that the switch is so far down the cord it’s almost closer to the plug than the lamp. Turning it on would involve pulling the cord up to get to the switch. My desk is against a wall and there’s a rats nest of other cables down there which makes this annoying to do. I’ve actually got it on a smart outlet so that I don’t need to use the switch at all.
I’m generally dislike shopping for things like this, and it’s these sorts of events which are the reason why. I probably should have done more research for available options — although that is difficult to do with the crummy websites from brick-and-mortar lighting shops — but the need to get something quickly was strong. In any case, I guess the job of looking for a new desk lamp continues.
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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: Continue reading →
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Tip for anyone with an email newsletter: please include a link to the post online, or a link to the newsletter sign-up page somewhere in the email. This makes it easy for people to link to your stuff so they can give you credit for the work you do.
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🔗 Write 5x more but write 5x less (via The Daily Graph)
This post itself is interesting but what made me want to link to it here is that this is one of those blogs where you can easily fall down a rabbit hole by following every link on the page (in a good way).
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It’s a bit of the shame that the best technique for projecting an iPad onto a monitor, for the purpose of sharing it in video-conferences, continues to be starting a movie recording in QuickTime Player and just not pressing record.
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🔗 Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge
Oh, Microsoft. You spend all this time and effort trying to win back users to your browser, with some success. Then you disrespect them with a move like this? Not great.
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I used MacOS dark mode for the first time last night. An inoperable desk lamp has left my workspace quite dim in the evening, causing eye strain due to the contrast. Switching to dark mode improved things greatly. I guess I’ll be staying in dark mode until I get a new desk lamp.
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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. Continue reading →
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Saved once again by Google Pay. I was almost at the cafe this morning, on my way to get some breakfast, when I realised that I walked out of the house without my wallet. I would’ve had to walk back to get it if I didn’t have my phone. Not a long walk, but would’ve been a hassle.
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FastMail’s spam filter has been a bit aggressive lately. I’ve seen a few emails show up in the Spam folder these last few weeks that were legitimate. I guess I’ll have to check it more often than I have been.
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One of the hosts of a podcast I listen to mentioned buying a product from the company I work at, and briefly talk about using it on the show. This was a new experience for me, and although I had nothing to do with the thing they bought, it felt pretty good.
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I’m looking forward to the day when I can type
pythonin any command line on any OS, and it will launch Python 3, rather than invoke some crazy dice-roll between two major versions of Python. -
Went out for breakfast again today. Wondered how long I could use my iPad without turning on my mobile hotspot. Lasted pretty well with just cached webpages and NetNewsWire, but had to succumb during my second coffee when I wanted to follow a link.
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A podcast I was listening to mentioned a book that sounded interesting, so I checked the Kindle bookstore to see if I could buy it. Well, not only did I already buy it ages ago, it has been sitting in my library all this time and I barely started reading it.
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Pro-tip for anyone using Vivaldi: you can unbind the “Cmd-Q” keyboard shortcut within Preferences so you don’t accidentally close all your browser windows with a single keystroke, like I just did. 🤦
(A confirmation prompt would be nice, Vivaldi).
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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. Continue reading →
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You know those journals you see in movies where the writer is working on something, and they write down every single thing they do? I’m wondering if I need to start one. There are things I know I’ve done recently when dealing with a problem, but I can never remember the details.
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I wonder if there’s a way to replace MacOS’s pretty ordinary spellcheck suggestions with a straight up web-search for “define <miss-spelt word>” and getting the first result. Doing this using DuckDuckGo seems to yield the word I was trying to spell almost every time.
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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. Continue reading →
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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). Continue reading →
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Today is starting out reasonably quietly. All the big development work is done and the only tasks left are the little annoying things, the “bottom of the backlog barrel” if you will. Still, won’t be long before the next major feature comes our way.
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A Tool That (Almost) Solved My Step Function Woes
I reached the end of my tether at work today on the task I was working on. The nature of the task involved crafting an AWS Step Function with several steps. Each step on the critical path contained some error handling, and several of them contained some cleanup logic, that had to be called by a bunch of other steps. This cleanup sequence is relatively complicated, and I’ve raised a number of PR’s to my colleagues which have come back with requests for change. Continue reading →
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Thinking over the NaNoWriMo short story I’m working on, there seems to be a lot scenes with characters just sitting around and talking. It’s in danger of turning into a Star Wars prequel. 😄
