I’d be curious to know if there’re any Go apps that are using the plugin package. I’m not aware of any myself; most seem to use things like shell-outs or embedded languages. It seems like the package itself is little more than an experiment so I’m not that surprised, but it’s a little disappointing.
I’m a little suspicious of using project starter kits for learning something new. Sure it can whip up that React or Svelte web-app in a few seconds, but then you’re left with maintaining project infrastructure that you didn’t build yourself. Might be best to start learning projects from scratch.
One of these days, I’m going to write a long form post, and do the narration in a single take.
Word Cloud
From Seth’s blog:
Consider building a word cloud of your writing.
Seems like a good idea so that’s what I did, taking the contents of the first page of this blog. Here it is:
Some observations:
- One of the most prominent words is “just”, with “it’s” not far behind. I though it’s because I started a lot of sentences with “it’s just”, but it turns out I’ve only used that phrase once, while the individual words show up around 10 times each. I guess I use “just” a lot (apparently, so does Seth). I am surprise to see the word “anyway” only showing up twice.
- Lots of first-person pronouns and articles, like “I’m”, “I’ve”, and “mine”. That’s probably not going to change either. This is just1 the tonal choice I’ve made. I read many blogs that mainly speak in the second person and I don’t think it’s a style that works for me. Although I consciously know that they’re not speaking to me directly, or even to the audience as a whole, I don’t want to give that impression myself, unless that’s my intention. So it’ll be first person for the foreseeable future I’m sure.
- Because it’s only the first page, many of the more prominent words are from recent posts. So lots about testing, OS/2, and Bundanoon. I would like to cut down on how much I write about testing. A lot of it is little more than venting, which I guess is what one does on their blog, but I don’t want to make a habit of it.
- I see the word “good” is prominent. That’s good: not a lot of negative writing (although, this is a choice too).
- I see the word “video” is also prominent. That’s probably not as good. Might be a sign I’m talking a little too much about the videos I’ve been watching.
Anyway, I thought these findings were quite interesting. One day, I’ll have to make another word cloud across all the posts on this blog.
Cracked open Acorn to come up with a new wordmark for Apple:
Yes, I know I’ve got work to do. 😜
Caught up on the WWDC announcements (did Ars Technica have a live blog this year? Must’ve missed it). The scratch maths feature for the iPad looks pretty good. If my Apple Pencil wasn’t always flat, I’d definitely make use of it.
The view from the top of Mount Rogers Reserve.
To get to Bundanoon from Canberra you have to drive past Lake George. I’ve always seen it empty but yesterday I saw it with water, so I had to stop and take a photo.
Day Trip to Bundanoon
Decided to go on a day trip to Bundanoon today. It’s been five years since I last visited and I remember liking the town enough that I thought it’d be worth visiting again. It’s not close, around 1 hour and 40 minutes from Canberra, but it not far either and I thought it would be a nice way to spend the day. Naturally, others agreed, which I guess explains why it was busier than I expected, what with the long weekend and all. Fortunately, it wasn’t too crowded, and I still had a wonderful time.
The goal was to go on a bush-walk first. I chose to do the Erith Coal Mine track, for no particular reason other than it sounded interesting. This circuit track was meant to take you to a waterfall by an old coal mine. However, the track leading to the actual mine was closed, thanks to the recent rain. In fact, if I could describe the bush-walks in one word, it would be “wet”. The ground was soaked, as were the paths, and although conditions were lovely, the paths were still very slippery.
After completing that circuit in probably 45 minutes, my appetite for bush-walking was still unsatisfied, so I tried the Fairy Bower Falls walk next. This was not as steep as the first one, but it turned to be a much harder track due to how wet and slippery everything was.
I stopped short of the end of this one too, as it seems the path was washed away. But I did manage to get a glimpse of the waterfall, so I’m considering that a win.
After that, I returned to the town for lunch and some train spotting. The train line to Goulburn runs through Bundanoon, and the last time I was there, there was probably a freight train every hour or so. So I was hoping to get a good view of a lot of freight traffic. Maybe shoot a video of a train passing through the station I could share here.
I had lunch outside and walked around the town a little, always within sight of the railway line, hoping for at least one train to pass through. But luck wasn’t on my side, and it wasn’t until I was on my way home that I saw what I think was a grain train passing through Wingello. I pulled over to take a video, and while I miss the locomotive, I got a reasonable enough recording of the wagons.
Being a little more hopeful, I stopped at Tallong, the next town along the road. I bought a coffee and went to the station to drink it and hopefully see a train pass through. Sadly, it was not to be. So I decided to head back home.
So the train spotting was a bust, and the bush-walks were difficult, but all in all it was quite a nice day. I look forward to my next visit to Bundanoon. Lets hope the trains are running a little more frequently then.
I enabled notifications on Vintage Logo as I wanted to be notified when new logo designs were release. Today I got two nusience notifications prompting me to open the app, the last one raise mere hours after I last launched it. So now I’ve turned off notifications. Why do apps do this to themselves?
Photos of the poor patient, sitting next to the clumsy human. Rest assured, she’s getting a course of pain killers, plus a lot of apology head scratches.
Bit of a stressful morning, involving injuries and unplanned visits to the vet. Things are well now, and the tension is starting to dissipate. But what a way to spend the morning. 😮💨
Working with PostgreSQL is an absolute joy. Such an amazing database. Just goes to show that the fun tech out there is not always the new and shiny. The battled hardened, featureful, bread-and-butter tools that tends to get overlooked can be just as good (Linux falls into that category as well).
👨💻 New post on AWS over at Coding Bits: AWS Secrets Manager Cached Credentials Error
Attempting to give head scratches while recording video is more difficult than it looks. 🦜
An Unfair Critique Of OS/2 UI Design From 30 Years Ago
A favourite YouTube channel of mine is Michael MJD, who likes to explore retro PC products and software from the 90s and early 2000s. Examples of these include videos on Windows 95, Windows 98, and the various consumer tech products designed to get people online. Can I just say how interesting those times were, where phrases such as “surfing the net” were thrown about, and where shopping centres were always used to explain visiting websites. I guess it was the best analogy one could use at the time.
A staple of Michael MJD’s channel is when he installs an old operating systems onto old hardware1. Yesterday, I watched the one where he installed OS/2 Warp 4 onto a 98 PC. We were an OS/2 household back when I was growing up, thanks to my dad using it for work, and I can remember using OS/2 2.1 and thinking it was actually pretty good. Better than Windows 95, in fact. I can’t remember if I ever used Warp 4, though.
Anyway, while watching this video, and I was taken aback on how bad the UI design of OS/2 Warp 4 was. And really, I probably shouldn’t be throwing stones here: I’m not a great UI designer myself. But I guess my exposure to later versions of Windows and macOS matured my tastes somewhat; where I got exposed to the idea of interaction systems and user experience design (and generally just growing up). Obviously given how new the GUI was back then, many of these concepts were still in their infancy, although if you were to compare these UIs to the classic Mac or even Windows 3.1, I do think there was something missing in IBM’s design acumen. Was it ability? Interest? Care? Not sure. But given that it’s been 30 years, I’m not expecting the OS/2 devs to be able to defend themselves now. That’s what makes this critique wholly unfair.
Anyway, I’d thought I share some of the stills from this video that I thought contained some of the more cringeworthy UI designs2, along with my remarks. Enjoy.
I found this video on the failure of the Star Wars Hotel by Jenny Nicholson to be absolutely fascinating. A great example of Disney enshittification and promising more then they can deliver. Many of her other videos are great as well (I actually went on a binge session over the weekend). 📺
👨💻 New post on Go over at Coding Bits: Disabling Parallel Test Runs In Go
My Pile-Up Poker result for today = $840.00. Decent result for a first game.
Also, I’m not sure if sharing my actual “solution” is consider a spoiler, so click through to see that.
