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Casey Newton published a great interview with the dev behind Web3 Is Going Just Great. The whole thing is worth a read, but she made this choice statement that I found especially apt:
In a lot of ways, people are also tying themselves to the technology in ways that I haven’t really seen before. You don’t see a lot of people pick a type of data model—say a linked list—and say “okay, how can I solve [x problem] with a linked list?” But that’s exactly what’s happening in web3
Exactly!
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I’m wondering if the Apple Pencil would do well with a dedicated charging case. I only use my Pencil occasionally so I don’t keep it on the iPad, and when I do need it, it’s always flat. Having it on the desk, charged at say 50% to keep the battery healthy, would be nice.
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Someone shared a great Q&A video with Seth Godin yesterday. I was hoping to listen to it at the gym but the video — which is hosted by Vimeo and embedded in a webpage — refused to play when the phone screen was off. Not sure if this is Vimeo, or just the web browser, but it’s a bit of a shame that this happens.
I’m converting it into an audio file and have uploaded it to Pocketcasts, so it’s not a huge issue. This can be done relatively easily using youtube-dl with the
-xflag:youtube-dl -x --audio-format=mp3 <url-of-webpage-containing-video>Make sure to set the
--audio-formatflag. I didn’t included it at first and it produced an M4A file which was around 100 MB, which I thought was a bit large. The MP3 file was half that, and it’s likely I could have reduced it further, but I figured that it was good enough. -
My YouTube Watching Setup
I’m not a sophisticated YouTube watcher but I do watch a lot of YouTube. For a while I was happy enough to simply use the YouTube app with a Chromecast. Yes there were ads, but the experience was nice enough that I tolerated them. Recently, however, this became untenable. It started with Google deciding to replace their simple Chromecast target with a Google TV style app, complete with a list of video recommendations I had no interest in watching. Continue reading →
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Apparently household solar panels are so prevalent in some states that it’s at risk of destabilising the grid. It’s a bit of a shame that this wasn’t foreseen by those responsible for the grid, and that energy storage systems weren’t considered to deal with the excess, instead of requiring a remote kill switch on the inverters.
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I was entering a commit message in GitHub, when I was shown the following tip:
ProTip! Great commit summaries contain fewer than 50 characters. Place extra information in the extended description.
Maybe it’s just me but it would be nice if the message provided a link to a style guide explaining why great commit summaries have fewer than 50 characters. There must be a reason, since someone has gone to the trouble of coding up this message. Tell me what that reason is, and I’ll determine whether it’s a good enough style to adopt.
If there isn’t a reason, maybe it’s best not to bother me about this.
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It may not have cooled down quite yet but with the days getting shorter, Autumn is feeling really close now. Time to break out the Hot Cross Buns again.
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Reminder That Your Content Isn't Really Yours on Medium #3
Looks like Medium has had a redesign recently, with recommended posts now being featured more prominently. Instead of appearing at the end of the post, they’re now in a right-hand sidebar, which doesn’t scroll, that is directly below the author of the post you’re reading. And let me be clear: as far as I can tell, these are not recommendations from the same author. They can be from anyone, covering any topic that I can only assume Medium algorithmically thinks you’d be interested in. Continue reading →
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There’s nothing quite as deflationary as returning home from a holiday. After the drive and the unpacking, I always find myself having nothing to do until dinner time.
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I wish I had more to say today, on this, our last day of our summer holiday. So in leau of a better post, here’s a photo of a wallaby I saw on my evening walk.
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Played golf for the first time in roughly 9 years. I’m terrible at the game but got a little better near the end thanks to my sister’s excellent coaching. Will probably be another 9 years until I play again though.
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A collection of useful writing tips for journalists, but I think would also be helpful for anyone else writing online.
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Last year, when we were on our holiday in Phillip Island, my parents suggested that I do the Churchill Island walk. I added that as a reminer in my calendar and set the date to be roughly a year from then. Yesterday, the reminder showed up, and I can safely say that I marked it as done.
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I’m starting to think that the 1x zoom on this Pixel 6 might be a bit too wide. I was scrolling through some photos I took this morning, hoping to post them here, but the subject is too hard to see. I may need to move to 2x or even 4x for future shots.
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These signs were up around town today. We went to the usual places they have markets but there was nothing there: no stalls or anything. It’s only just now that I realised we may have looked at the wrong places.
Probably need more signs around those other market spots.
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Had the opportunity to play Ticket To Ride, Europe today. It took a little while to get my head around the rules, particuarily around how cards should be drawn, but it eventually clicked once we started playing.
I’d recommend playing one or two rounds without stations first, just so that the core mechanics of the game could be practiced without too many moving parts.
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I tried walking around with a notebook yesterday to… you know… be the type of person that carries a notebook. First attempt did not go well: got in the way of my phone a fair bit. I might try carrying it in my other pocket with my keys.
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I used the BBEdit diffing tool for the first time today, and I must say that it’s actually quite good. Shame I didn’t try it sooner. It would have saved me a couple of hours trying to debug the CI/CD problem I’m trying to fix.
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The "Too Much Data" Error in Buffalo Projects
If there’s anyone else out there using Buffalo to build web-apps, I just discovered that it doesn’t clean up old versions of bundled JavaScript files. This means that the public/asset directory can grow to gigabytes in size, eventually reaching the point where Go will simply refuse to embed that much data. The tell-tail sign is this error message when you try to run the application: too much data in section SDWARFSECT (over 2e+09 bytes) If you see that, deleting public/assets should solve your problem. Continue reading →
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Signed up for an online course this morning, then browsing the web an hour later I found someone else offering another course on the same topic that also looked interesting. Can I sign up to two courses that cover the same thing at once? 🤔
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I really dislike code reviews. I admit it. I don’t like doing them, and I don’t like having it done to the code I write. I know this is my ego talking here, but really, sometimes I just want to say to the reviewer “if you don’t like the code as written, why don’t you write it?”
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🔗 No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari (via Daring Fireball)
I see nothing wrong with this. Apple has got their own priority backlog of work for Safari, but the fact that Safari is open source means that if others have different priorities, they have the ability to make these changes to the project directly, should they be capable of doing so. What these other contributors choose to do, and how they choose to decide this, is their business.
I’m not expecting regular users of Safari to understand this distinction between open-source project owners and contributors, but I’d had though that web-developers, whom I imagine deal with open-source software all the time, to know better. So it’s either that those complaining are not aware that Safari is an open-source project, or they do know and are just jumping on the rage bandwagon for whatever reason they may have. If it’s the latter, then I think they’re doing themselves a disservice.
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Watching a lot of vintage computing videos recently, it’s staggering how much system “software” was actually burned into ROM. The modern day developer in me feels squeamish about the prospects of releasing something like this, bugs and all, without the ability to change it.
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I’m feeling a bit stuck in my career at the moment, and I’m wondering if the thing that’s keeping me from moving to the next level is the fear of being on the hook for something.
