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Day 25: decay
#mbjune
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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.
Given how often the instructor rags on competing products, I’d be surprised if the exam doesn’t have a question like “why does our competitor suck?” 😏
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🔗 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
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Day 24: bloom
#mbjune
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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.
Oh actually, the bullet point is highlighted in the Canvas. Okay, that’s something. Maybe they can make it clearer it’s associated with the open thread? It’s the same colour as the “this is new content” highlight.
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Need to change my credit card as my old one is expiring, so I’m doing a stocktake of what I’ve subscribed to. Total service count is 28. Potentially more as I’m sure there are some that I don’t have a 1Password entry for. A good opportunity to trim some of them down.
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I.S. Know: An Online Quiz About ISO and RFC Standards
An online quiz called “I.S. Know” was created for software developers to test their knowledge of ISO and RFC standards in a fun way. Continue reading →
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Day 23: fracture
#mbjune
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Brief Look At Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor
Kicking the tyres on Edit, Microsoft’s new text editor for the CLI. Continue reading →
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On MacOS Permissions Again
Some dissenting thoughts about John Gruber and Ben Thompson discussion about Mac permissions and the iPad on the latest Dithering. Continue reading →
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Day 21: silhouette
#mbjune
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Out early in yet another bracing morning. Didn’t even know this temperature gauge showed negative numbers.
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Being in meetings most of the day has left my voice hoarse and completely tired out. I don’t know how people who talk for a living do it (my suspicion is a decent microphone and regular vocal training).
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Day 20: gather
#mbjune
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Was writing “Airbus” in a message and mistakenly typed a P instead of a B. Found the results amusing, so I fired up ChatGPT’s image generator:
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Done. Removed the Discover feed from BlueSky. I was getting a little too obsessed with it and depressed from it. It’s reverse chronological from here on out.
(Honestly, I should probably cut down on social media altogether, but one step at a time.)
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Day 19: equal
Full disclosure: I used the Google Photo AI erasure tool to remove the front number-plates from these two silver Toyota Echoes (if you’re a regular reader, you can probably guess why). #mbjune
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Found a particularly interesting bug in Safari when I tried adding a background transition to radio-button labels styled to look like regular buttons. Tapping the labels on the iPad causes the background colour to flicker:
Fixed it by working around the problem: I only need the transition when the user taps “Submit”, so I held-off from applying the transition attributes until that happens. But wow, what an weird way to fail.
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Pro tip: don’t copy the
.gitdirectory of one repository over the.gitdirectory of another. Some weird and wacky things will happen, like the active branch changing from underneith you to the files you modified being in conflict with those same files being deleted. -
Tried out the Micro.blog Raycast extension by Tynan Purdy. Works well. I am curious to know how customisable the input form is. A larger text box and a character counter would be nice.
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Thinking of Meta putting ads in WhatsApp reminds me of when Microsoft tried ads in Skype. The pitch for users, as I was to understand it, was that the ads will help drive the conversation. I know my life could be spiced up with a conversation about dishwashing detergent.
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Day 18: texture
#mbjune
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Mark this day where I got swayed to build something atop of Kubernetes rather than doing something hand-rolled. Hope not to look back on this day when things are broken and delayed and I have no idea of how to fix it.
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I think I’ve decided that I prefer Canberra in the summer rather than the winter. Sure it means you’re likely to get the hot weather, but it needs to get really hot before you decide not to go outside. And getting outside when the temperature is at or below freezing is just as hard. 🥶
It got to -5.1°C last night. It’s currently -2.1°C as I write this.
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🔗 Nicholas Bate: The Greatest Productivity Tips, 159
Simply because we do not affix a postage stamp to our e-mail does not mean it is free. That mail has a huge cost in productivity terms: for us, in did we craft it correctly first time? For others in lack of certainty perhaps of what is required of them. For others in being cc’d without need.
No, mail isn’t free. It’s extraordinarily expensive.
So true. I would add that Slack is just as expensive, only that you’re making micropayments over the course of the day instead of one lump sum.
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Day 17: warmth
#mbjune
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Just watched the WWDC video on Liquid Glass and I must say it looks pretty nice. Granted I’ve not actually used any part of this new design yet, but if they can manage to pull it off, it’ll be quite a refreshing new look.
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Day 16: blur
#mbjune
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🔗 82MHz: Blogs are still a thing
One more for the “blogging’s not dead yet” list everyone’s keeping.
Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing […] But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it’s not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn’t commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich.
That’s why I like it too. It’s a slow, quiet, and comfortable form of online interaction.
Via: Mastodon boost by Brent Simmons
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🖼️ Gallery
Day Trip to Yass
Decided to go to Yass today, a small town in NSW just north of where I’m staying in Canberra. I pass by Yass every time I drive to Canberra from Melbourne, and I wanted to see what it was like, at least once. And this morning I discovered that it had a railway museum, which sealed the deal. Unfortunately the weather was not kind: it was bitterly cold and rainy the whole time I was there.
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Day 15: tie
Was wondering what I’d submit for today until I realised that the bird cage had all sorts of toys with tied knots. #mbjune
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🔗 MOR10: Blogging is dead. Long live ephemerality.
This ended up being quite an insightful piece, particularly around how much better the authoring tools are in Instagram and other social media apps.
Via: Juha-Matti Santala
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Appreciate that there's someone else out there getting driven crazy by Apple throwing up permission pop-ups everywhere in MacOS. And the Terminal, of all places.
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Ricco’s taken an interest to my shoes today. Ivy, despite trying to come off as her own bird when it comes with dealing with Ricco, couldn’t help taking an interest too. 🦜
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📘 Devlog
UCL — More About The Set Operator
I made a decision around the set operator in UCL this morning.
When I added the set operator, I made it such that when setting variables, you had to include the leading dollar sign:
$a = 123The reason for this was that the set operator was also to be used for setting pseudo-variables, which had a different prefix character.
@ans = "this"I needed the user to include the
Continue reading →@prefix to distinguish the two, and since one variable type required a prefix, it made sense to require it for the other. -
Day 14: twilight
#mbjune
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I think I may need to write more long form. It’s easy to dash out a small thought or two like this. It’s quite different trying to organise your thoughts into something larger. Different muscles are being exercised, and it feels like mine have atrophied a little.
