• How many people do you think know about pigeon racing? I know it’s not a common activity, but I thought most people would be aware of it. Yet I was listening to a podcasts today, and it sounded like one of the hosts, who may have been 5 years younger than me, was hearing about it for the first time.

  • I appreciate that those making, and putting up, these signs are sticking to this classic phrase.

    A white sign on a blue building with the text POST NO BILLS
  • Argh! I keep forgetting Micropub wants everything to be an array. Setting a property in a h=post POST request to a plain old string doesn’t do anything. It took me 30 minutes of faffing about trying to get draft posts working before I turned to Claude Code to get the solution.

  • Not that I need more social media consumption in my life, but I do wonder if it’s possible to follow Mastodon profiles in a Mastodon client, while responding to them via Micro.blog. I would like to follow a few people who post on Mastodon, but they’re really chatty, and I rather avoid having them in my Micro.blog timeline. I could use my Mastodon account to follow them, but that’ll mean responses come from there, and not from Micro.blog. Is there a way to bridge the two, I wonder?

  • I keep forgetting that I have a Nebular subscription. I should use it more often.

  • New Theme, Who's Dis

    451 words about switching over from Tiny Theme to Mythos. Continue reading β†’

  • Portrait selfies with a phone in landscape orientation I can give or take. What I want is landscape photos from the phone in portrait. Device manufacturers, make that, then we’ll talk.

  • Retired my old kettle and set up my new one. Currently drinking my inaugural cup of tea from it, while I work on my site.

    A stainless steel kettle sitting on its base on a kitchen bench.
  • Just read this week’s P&B with @birming. Loved it. It’s always fascinating reading these interviews from people you follow.

  • πŸ› οΈ Signboard

    A kanban app that writes Markdown files by Colin Devroe. Looks interesting. Will take a look when I need a standalone Kanban app.

  • Can definitely recommend Nurse On-Call for any Victorian unsure about how to respond to a health problem. The queue was short, almost immediate, and the nurse took their time going through my concerns and symptoms. I got peace of mind and some material on what to do next. Wonderful service.

  • Speaking of cafes, this pigeon is determined to get inside. It was shooed out a few minutes ago, but it wandered back in again. It’s at my feet while I write this.

    A pigeon is standing on a textured concrete surface.A pigeon is walking on a concrete floor near a wooden chair.

  • Whenever I go to the cafe, I bring along my iPad to read through my RSS feeds. One day, a kid walked by my table and took a peek at my iPad screen. I can only image their disappointment when they discovered I had no video or game playing on there. 😏

  • Learning To Like Sentinel Errors In Go

    Coming around to returning a result or an error in the Go programming instead of returning nil for both. Continue reading β†’

  • “Get out more” goal for September achieved. βœ…

    Boardgames at the Melbourne Central Lion Hotel again. Tonight, it was Codewords (had a go at being the spymaster this time) and Dixit.

  • πŸ› οΈ Glow: Render markdown on the CLI, with pizzazz! πŸ’…πŸ»

    Terminal Markdown viewer. Nice little app. My one criticism is that it should default to opening a file argument in the viewer, rather than just rendering the file to stdout. But otherwise, sure to be a useful little tool.

  • I saw Manton use ChatGPT to try and guess his age, in the context of OpenAI adding some age gating features. I was curious to know how it’d go with my age, so I did likewise, giving it this prompt:

    Based on your memory of past conversations, along with the various posts I make on sites such as lmika.org, can you guess my age?

    It’s guess:

    Putting all that together, my best guess is that you’re probably in your late 30s to early 40s.

    Great guess! I’m 40, so bang in the middle.

    Here’s a public link to the conversation outlining it’s reasoning (hey, first use of public ChatGPT share links!). All pretty accurate, especially around the topics of nostalgia.

  • Spotted on my way to work: a Little Black Cormant and an Australasian Darter preening by the river.

    A heron and a starling are perched on a metal railing above a body of water.
  • There’s not much us Android users have over iOS, but there is one: Myki integration with Google Wallet, with auto top-up. It really is quite nice not to worry about running out of credit when you’re rushing to catch the train.

  • It’d be nice if ChatGPT had an option to link to a specific position in a chat session while keeping the chat private. That way, I can effectively create a bookmark that I can place in notes and refer to later. I’ve started doing this for Slack messages too, and it’s been quite useful.

  • πŸ”— Steph Ango: File over app

    The files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

    This is excellent advice, and one that I’m trying to practice better. I’d also argue that this can be extended to a software design principal, which is to assume the data will outlive the system. Therefore, prefer a data scheme that will be long lasting, and worry less about the systems that operate over it. This is why I found it distasteful to offload schema designs to ORMs.

  • CSS is turning into quite a capable programming language. I just learnt that the language is getting custom functions and an if function. I’m quite excited to hear this.

  • Credit to Metro. A tree blew over the line mid-afternoon, suspending the train line, and I was worried it would affect my commute. But they managed to clear it before peak time, and I experienced a smooth ride home. Very impressive recovery. πŸ‘

  • It’s amusing to imagine how far Apple’s bizarre, corporate-esque copywriting goes. Would one be able to go into CaffΓ¨ Macs in Apple Park, pick up a packed sandwich, and see printed on the label:

    With this sandwich, our focus is to maximise sustenance and nourishment so we can drive continued living in our employees.

    We’ve also introduced a new ecosystem of ingredients to compliment this unique sandwich. Thanks to the incredible availability of nuts and other allergens, we’re able to create a new awareness that this sandwich may contain some of these.

    😼

  • I’ve seen a few strange things in parks, but this disco ball is probably one of the strangest.

    Auto-generated description: A reflective disco ball is lying on a grassy field.