On Ranting

Thoughts on Manuel Moreal’s latest post and what makes a good rant.

Built a new Micro.blog plugin: Postlist.

Adds a short-code which will display a list of posts, optionally filtered to a specific category, and ordered either alphabetically or reverse chronologically. Similar to Bear Blog’s post macro, although not as fully featured just yet.

Auto-generated description: A cheatsheet list displaying topics such as Linux commands in MacOS, Git, Go language notes, starting a dev server, sorting Git branches, and working with CSVTK.

Day 28: ephemeral

Not a high quality photo today, but true to the prompt, it was the best one I could take of this stormy cloud formation before it slipped away from view. #mbjune

Auto-generated description: A cloud formation is illuminated against a dark blue sky during twilight.

Got my kettle lid back. Dad did a great job.

Auto-generated description: A small, metallic, round object with a concave black center rests on a smooth surface. Auto-generated description: A stainless steel electric kettle is placed on a kitchen counter next to a toaster and a blue-lidded container.

Before I left for Canberra, I handed my broken kettle lid to my dad who offered to repair it. I haven’t got it back yet so this past evening I’ve been using my kettle without one. And I can now tell you what happens when you do: it doesn’t shut off. The water starts boiling and will continue to boil until I manually cut the power (it’s one of those kettles which an induction coil so it’s just a matter of lifting it off the base).

I looked into it and apparently a typical kettle has a bimetallic strip1 which is heated by the steam. This strip doesn’t require a lot of stream before it deflects due to thermal expansion, and when it does deflect, the power is cut. I guess it requires a relatively closed chamber to be effective, and having such a huge gaping hole at the top makes this completely ineffective. It’s probable it would shut itself off eventually, but that’s an experiment I didn’t want to make.

Anyway, the lid is ready and I’ll be picking it up today.


  1. Shoutout to all those Technology Connection fans out there. ↩︎

Looking forward to the rail link to Melbourne Airport. Can’t come soon enough

It’s funny that I find myself downloading 4 hours of podcasts for an hour-long flight. On the flight up here I barely got through a 30 minute Stratechey weekly article.

Before I started studying computer science, I didn’t even know how to spell Vi. Now I know how to quit from it. 😛

(This is a bit of an inside reference that I’m not expecting anyone to get. Maybe one day I’ll explain it.)

Day 27: collective

Last day in Canberra. Spending some time being in the company of these two before we head over to the minder. #mbjune

Two cockatiels, one with a yellow and gray head and the other white and gray, are perched on a person's leg indoors.

So I hear Dennis Villeneuve will be directing the next Bond film. Not sure the city of London is large enough for his typical establishment shot. 😏

I kid. I like his work on Dune. I’m confident he’ll do a good job here.

Day 26: bridge

#mbjune

A wooden trestle bridge with a crisscross pattern of support beams spans a grassy area with leafless trees.

I can understand the move away from gas for home heating to reverse cycle, but I think I will miss it. Reverse cycle for heating is not perfect. I’ve got the thermostat set for 20°C and I still feel quite cold. I don’t get that toasty feeling that comes from central gas.

🔗 Spyglass: Apple Lives Long Enough to Become the Ad Villain

People pay a lot of money for these devices from Apple. And part of the implicit bargain is that they won’t have adware or ads themselves shoved at them in every direction.

Now I’m no marketing expert, but I do know that understanding one’s customer base is important for success. And I understand that Apple’s is generally made up of people who pay a premium for a good user experience. I wonder if Apple understands this. I also know that generally pissing people off with stunts like this will not get them to come to your party.

There’s no reason to use Testify’s Suite package for Go unit tests anymore. It’s possible to do whatever you need to do with Go’s builtin test runner. Furthermore, most IDEs are smart enough to detect and run sub-tests that use t.Run(). So save yourself some trouble and just use the defaults.

This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.

Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?

Oh wait, that’s already what happens.

Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.

They truly have no standards anymore.
mastodon.social/@caseyliss/114

Maybe Apple can start putting ads for their F1 movie in their permission dialogues. Goodness knows how often I see those. 😛

Day 25: decay

#mbjune

Auto-generated description: A close-up view of a weathered, cracked wooden post with leaves and debris collected in the center.

Shoutout to all the vendors out there that slip a question about a feature that’s never used in production on a certification exam. I’m only going through training at the moment, but the instructor had a colleague that saw a question about a “tip of a day” feature on an exam once.

🔗 Omer: you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand

they don’t just ship features anymore, they ship vibes. onboarding becomes a performance. the ui is the brand. the founder’s blog post is the manifesto.

it’s not about what the software does.it’s about who it’s made for.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. Software construction is like any other human endeavour, where the person making it puts a bit of themselves into it. How can they not? But I enjoyed how this essay explored this phenomenon.

Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes

Day 24: bloom

#mbjune

Auto-generated description: A tree with vibrant pink blossoms stands against a backdrop of a partly cloudy sky.

Slack’s Canvas feature needs to make clearer which bullet point is associated with the open thread. I’ve been pinged in three separate threads over the last minute, and I can’t tell which one is which. Showing the bullet point at the top is not enough as we’re using headers to distinguish them.