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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.
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Some Morning AI Thoughts
Some contrasting views on the role of AI in creation, highlighting the importance of human creativity and quality over speed and cost-cutting in technological advancements. Continue reading →
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Day 13: pathway
#mbjune
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Hello there. 🦜
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I must admit, I was not expecting much when I plugged my iPad into a HDMI and USB hub splitter. Yet I was pleasantly surprised that it had no trouble extending (well, mirroring) the display and enabling keyboard and mouse. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than I was expecting.
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Day 12: hidden
#mbjune
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If ute is short for “utility” vehicle, then instead of SUV, we should be calling these vehicles “sports utes”.
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🔗 Robert Birming: Blog Inspiration
Very nice collection of links to blogging resources — from ideas and inspirations through to colour and icon packs — from @birming. This stuff is cat nip for me, so I’m sure to enjoy browsing these links.
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Speaking of avians, I’m back in Canberra, which can only mean one thing: there will be photos of cockatiels.
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Every cafe or eatery at the airport uses an avian or aviation theme. Here’s a way to stand out: nautical theme. Having a fish and chip shop with boats and lighthouses will turn heads.
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🔗 You’re not a front-end developer until you’ve… - Nic Chan
Scored 17 in this little quiz. Not bad for a backend developer, although many of the questions universally apply.
Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes
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Day 11: brick
Might be pushing the definition of “brick” for this one. #mbjune
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🔗 Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up.
Amazing.
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Apple, I was kidding.
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Looking forward to all the fun new permission gates that will show up in MacOS Tahoe. “Your keyboard is trying to use a process on your computer. Keyboards are known to result in modifications to your personal data.” 😛
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Day 10: rail
I post a lot of train photos on this site, so here’s one of the other railed vehicles I encounter. #mbjune
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That Which Didn't Make the Cut: a Hugo CMS
You’ve probably noticed1 that I’ve stopped posting links to Open Bookmarks, and have started posting them here again. The main reason for this is that I’ve abandoned work on the CMS I was working on that powered that bookmarking site. Yes, yes, I know: another one. Open Bookmarks was basically a static Hugo site, hosted on Netlify. But being someone that wanted to make it easy for me to post new links without having to do a Git checkout, or fiddle around YAML front-matter, I thought of building a simple web-service for this.
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🔗 Dan Sinker: The Who Cares Era
This post has been doing the rounds in the online circles I travel in. I finally got around to reading it, and I think the author is right: caring about something in a world where others don’t is a radical idea. I know it’s an area where I could be better.
Oh, and I’m sorry, but I find the term “Instagram mini-essay” to be an oxymoron. The original poster’s quip of this Instagram essayist being another victim of the Who Cares Era are my feelings exactly. I mean, come on: don’t use frickin’ Instagram for your think pieces. Put a frickin’ URL on it next time.
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Day 9: wood
A photo of my grandfather’s old joinery. #mbjune
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Day 8: travel
I suppose I should start thinking about filling this up. #mbjune
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Will be away from home for a while so got a VS Code server ready so I can still work on projects. Setting it up in Coolify was so easy, yet I’ll need to fix the issue of the proxy server adding
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TIL that the metaphor for nervous anticipation is not to be “on tender hooks.” It’s to be “on tenterhooks,” a type of hook used in a frame called a “tenter” used to hold material.
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Just setup a cron for performing a repo backup on my Mac Mini server. And I swear to God: if MacOS prevents this backup from running because of some damn permission check, I’m going to be effin’ furious.
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Chalk me up as one of those people that wished they could use Markdown everywhere. I use it for notes, for messaging, writing here, etc. I occasionally dabble with WYSIWYG editors but I always turn back to Markdown. Love it.
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Day 7: switch
Has anyone had any success knowing what each hotel switch does without having to try each one of them first? #mbjune
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I stopped working this day in 2025, almost 41 years later, as a senior engineer (which is surprisingly a lot like busing tables — lots of cleanup and setting the table just right for the customers to have a great time).
This line made me laugh. I’ve never waited tables, but as a senior dev myself, it often feels that my job has become less about coding and more about fixing problems and getting out of people’s way. So it goes.
Congratulations, Brent Simmons, on your retirement.
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🔗 Jim Nielsen: Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”
What really resonates in his step-by-step process is how, as problems present themselves, you see how much easier it is to deal with performance issues for stuff you wrote vs. stuff others wrote. Not only that, but you can debug way faster!
The understanding that comes from the code you wrote yourself is grossly underrated in my opinion. Choosing to use a library for something is not free. There’s an exchange involved: speed now for understanding later.
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🔗 Flamed Fury: Monthly Recap: May 2025
I found the bookmarks from this monthly recap to be really interesting.
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Everyone wants to move fast. Yet everyone wants to change their minds all the time. Yet everyone wants things to be robust and secure. Argh! Speed, quality, flexibility. Pick two. If you ask for three, you’ll get zero.
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Day 6: contrast
Moonlight coming through my bedroom window. This one’s had the Onxy filter applied as the original was quite noisy. #mbjune
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Had a reason to write a journal entry today, which meant I had a reason to work on the journaling app. Biggest change was moving the entry list to a separate page and supersizing the text-area to allow for larger entries. Good thing too: today’s was going to need all the space it could get.
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If only joining new Discord servers is enough to satisfy the “get out more” goal I set for myself. It induces the same feelings I get when I walk into a room of people I don’t know all getting along. 😬