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Oof, my Python skills have atrophied quite badly. I’m trying to write a script and I’m forgetting fundamental things like how to interpolate variables within strings, or which standard library packages are used to do what. It’s not like I can’t look this stuff up, but it’s really slowing me down.
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On Slash Pages Verses Blog Posts
Interesting discussion on ShopTalk about slash pages and whether blog posts may make more sense for some of them. Chris and Dave makes the point that blog posts have the advantage of syndicating updates, something that static pages lack on most CMSs. It’s a good point, and a tension I feel occasionally. Not so much on this site, but there’ve been several attempts where I tried to make a site for technical knowledge, only to wonder whether a blog or a wiki makes more sense. Continue reading →
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One crummy thing about the move to SPAs is that website’s no longer expose query URLs. I wanted to add a Raycast quick link to search for a 2-letter country code, but ISO’s search uses AJAX or something, and there’s no way to run a search directly from a URL. Or at least I didn’t see one.
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Oh dear. I’m eying a domain that’s priced at $370.00 /year. Not sure the revenue from my idea — currently estimated to be $0.00 /year — will cover that cost. I think there’s a business word for such discrepancies. 😬
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I only just discovered that you can use your finger to annotate screenshots in iPadOS. Go to the options menu and turn on “Draw with Finger”. I actually had no idea it was possible to make annotations without using a pencil. Why this is off by default when there’s no pencil nearby is beyond me.
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I kinda feel for UI designers. If you were asked to come up with a menu icon for showing reading mode, font size settings, and accessing the page menu with other miscellanea, which gliph would you use? I’d say that the one chosen for Safari is a little confusing, but I really cannot blame them.
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Project Update: DSL Formats For Interactive Fiction
Still bouncing around things to work on at the moment. Most of the little features have been addressed, and I have little need to add anything pressing for the things I’ve been working on recently. As for the large features, well apathy’s taking care of those. But there is one project that is tugging at my attention. And it’s a bit of a strange one, as part of me just wants to kill it. Continue reading →
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Trying out the use of XML over a home made domain-specific language and… I must concede, it might be a better fit. As clunky as the DOM is, XML can be made to be good, as long as you use it in moderation.
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Finally putting some money into a decent chair for my desk at home. The one I have is showing its age, not to mention loosing its comfort. Who would’ve though a sub $100 desk chair from Officeworks would be lacking in quality? 😛
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Gallery of Fake Logo For Test Organisations
A collection of humorous fake logos for test organizations is created for work-related purposes, primarily showcasing film and media production studios. Continue reading →
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Had another look at how I could export an Obsidian kanban board as an actual kanban board today. I thought I’d through ChatGTP at the problem, and see whether it could produce a Go program that took the markdown representation of a kanban board and reproduce it as a HTML file.
Here was the prompt I used:
Please write a Go program which will take a Markdown version of an Obsidian kanban note, parse it, and convert it into a HTML page.The markdown representation of a kanban note is as follows:
- A H2 header represents a column, with the H2 text value representing the column name.
- Between each successive H2 header are the cards for that column. Each one begins as a TODO item. The card contents is indented and can be any arbitrary Markdown.
The generated HTML must have the following traits:
- Each column must be wrapped within a div.
- Each card within that column must be wrapped with a separate div.
- The body of each card must be rendered from Markdown as HTML.
The tool must take the Markdown as standard in, and write the HTML to standard out.
ChatGPT came up with something, and after checking it for obvious errors, I prepared a test board and gave it a run. Here’s the test board I used:
Here’s how it was rendered in HTML:
A good first attempt, and I was impressed at how it actually styled the page to actually display the columns as columns1. I was not expecting that. There were a few things that were missing, such as rendering card bodies. In fact, a keen observer may note that some of the TODOs that appear in the In Progress column actually come from the card body itself.
I requested these changes from ChatGPT and it had another go. And this is where it ran into trouble:
One issue was that the generated code decided to scan the input line-by-line, and maintain state as to whether it’s parsing a column heading, card title, or a card body. But it was not properly resetting this state when encountering the next column header (note how “#blocked Will not do” appears below the In Progress heading when it should be in the card above it). This also explains why the columns no longer showed up — there were divs that weren’t being closed.
So it was time for me to take over. I fixed a few bugs and added handling of the card body indentation. The end results looks like this:
Good enough for what I need.
All in all, it was an interesting experiment getting ChatGPT to start this off, and I’m impressed on how much it managed to do from the jump. But I’d be hesitant to say that what it produced is high quality, maintainable code. It was a little difficult to change, and it’s certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d choose to do it. If this was anything more than something for my own use, I probably would’ve junked it and started from scratch2. But hey, it works. And for what I need, it’s better than not existing at all.
If anyone’s interested in seeing the code, you can check it out here.
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Saw hot air balloons out flying this morning. Usually I see them in autumn, yet we’re not even half way through summer. Probably the earliest in the calendar year I’ve seem them operate. That said, it’s pretty good conditions for them this morning, if not a little warm.
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I started using the Obsidian Kanban plugin to organise work for my team. Working quite well for my needs. Only problem is, I can’t export it as a Kanban board to an interested team member. It seems like only exporting the raw Markdown is supported. I need to have a think about what I can do here.
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Keyboard Maestro is coming into its own as a way for scheduling recurring tasks. I’ve just set one up for a daily report I need to run. It’s little more than a shell script so I probably could’ve used crontab to do it, but is so much easier configuring and testing it in Keyboard Maestro.
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Spotlight has stopped indexing my apps again. Not sure what broke between now and the last time I tried to fix it, but I think it’s time to move to something else. So I’m giving Raycast a try. And yeah, so far so good. At least it lets me launch apps.
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Ugh, you know you’re getting old when you start seeing remakes of things you were too old for the first time around. 😏
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On the train home, and all the phone screens from the seated passengers act like tiny mirrors, reflecting the sun to where I stand. Have to face backwards to keep from getting blinded. Even doing that doesn’t completely stop the flashes of light. 🙈
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🧑💻 New post on TIL Computer: A Way To Resolve Redelivered Messages Stuck In A NATS Jetstream
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For anyone else interested in the trackside signage of Victorian railways. What got me looking was learning about coast boards. Seems to be instructions to the driver on what to set the train’s power output.
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Manuel Moreale wrote about Spotify:
[T]hey keep adding all these bizarre new things that I’m always left wondering if I’m a very odd user and other people’s use of Spotify is so much different than mine. Like who watches video podcasts on Spotify? Why is a music app getting into videos?
I’ve not used any feature built by Spotify that didn’t directly relate to playing music as audio, nor do I know anyone that does. They’re more likely to get in my way, making them less than useless to me. And yes, this includes podcasts1.
Who knows, maybe 2025 is the year I jump off the Spotify ship.
I’ve said this before, but now that I’ve got the means of (legally) acquiring DRM-free music from mainstream artists, I may aim to do likewise.
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I consider myself awesome for introducing everyone I know to Pocket Casts and the open podcast ecosystem. 😛 ↩︎
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I recently got a new phone, a Pixel 9 Pro, which meant I needed to bring Alto Player up to date. I probably could’ve gotten away using the version I was using on my Pixel 6. But I didn’t have a binary build, and I needed to upgrade Gradle anyway, so I decided to spend a bit of time bringing it up to date to API version 35, the version used in Android 15.0. Fortunately it was only a few hours in total, and once I got it running in the simulator, I side-loaded it onto my phone and started using it.
It worked, but there were some significant UI issues. The title-bar bled into the status bar, the album image in the Now Playing widget was cropped by the curved corners of the phone, and the media notification didn’t display playback controls.
Evolution of the window insets, from left-to-right: before any changes, version with the album cover and margin, final version with no album art. I set about fixing these issues today, starting with the title-bar and Now Playing widget. These was an issue with the views not respecting the window insets, and after a quick Google search, I found this article showing how one could resolve this by adding a ViewCompat.setOnApplyWindowInsetsListener and reacting to it by adjusting the margins of the view.
val topLevelLayout = findViewById(R.id.top_level_layout) as CoordinatorLayout ViewCompat.setOnApplyWindowInsetsListener(topLevelLayout) { v, windowInsets -> val insets = windowInsets.getInsets(WindowInsetsCompat.Type.systemBars()) v.updateLayoutParams<ViewGroup.MarginLayoutParams> { leftMargin = insets.left bottomMargin = insets.bottom rightMargin = insets.right // applying a top margin here would work, but will not have the toolbar // background colour "bleed" into the status bar, which is what I want. } val t = v.findViewById<Toolbar>(R.id.toolbar) t.updateLayoutParams<ViewGroup.MarginLayoutParams> { // make the toolbar a little "narrower" than full height topMargin = insets.top * 3 / 4 } WindowInsetsCompat.CONSUMED }It took a few attempts, but I managed to get this working. Just using the top inset for the toolbar margin made it a little larger than I liked, so I adjusted the height to be 75% of the inset. This means the toolbar will actually encroach into the area reserved for cut-outs like the front-facing camera. This is arguably not something a “real” Android apps should do, but this is just for me and my phone so it’s fine.
I went through a few iterations of the album artwork cutoff on the bottom right corner trying to find something I liked. I tried bringing in the horizontal margins a little, but I didn’t like the alignment of the album art in the player, particularly compared to the covers that appear in the track list screen. One thing I didn’t try was raising the bottom margin so that it would fit “above” the curve. But those corners curve in quite a bit, and doing this would sacrifice a lot of vertical space. So I settled on hiding the album art altogether. It’s a bit of a shame to loose it, but at least it looks neater now.
The next thing I looked at was fixing the playback controls in the media notification. After some investigating, I found that this was because I was not setting the available actions in the PlaybackStateCompat builder. This, if I understand correctly, is used to communicate to various systems the current state of the playing media: what the track name is, whether it’s playing, whether one can skip forward or back. I have my own types for tracking this information — which is probably not correct but I wasn’t completely sure as to what I was doing at the time with Android’s media stack1 — and when I needed to convert this to a type understood by the framework, I made instances of this builder without setting the available actions. Earlier versions of Android seemed not to care, and the controls always appeared on the notification. But I guess they changed that.
Evolution of the playback notification, from left-to-right: before any changes, the request to show notifications upon first launch (this is defined by the system), the playback notifications with controls again. One other thing I needed to do was to explicitly ask the user permission to show a notification before I could publish one. This is also relatively new: my experience with Android goes back to the early days where these permissions were disclosed up front when the app was installed. But I can completely understand why they changed it, as it was easy to simply tap through those screens with reading them. I am wondering whether media playback notifications are in some way exempt from these permission checks, as I was actually getting one to appear before I made this changes. But I figured it was probably worth doing anyway, so I added this permission request on first launch. Arguably I should be asking for this permission when playback starts, but again, this is just for me.
One final thing I needed to address were long album titles. The text view displaying the the album title had a width that autosized to the title itself, and the start and end constraints were set such that it appears centred in the view. This worked for “normal” length titles but when the length became excessive, the text view would fill the entire width of the screen and the title will appear left justified.
Before (left) and after (right) shot of the fixed album title. The fix for this was to set the text width to be calculated by the start and end constraints (setting
layout_widthto0dp), bringing in the margins a little, and making the label text centre justified. I did this already for the track title, so it was easy to do this here too. Not sure why I didn’t do it earlier, or why I haven’t done it for the artist’s name yet.
This was all rushed, and I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing. I was going down the route of trial-and-error to get this working, mixed in with web searches and a trip to ChatGPT. And yeah, the methods I used won’t make this a portable Android app that would work on every phone out there. But I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out.
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This is still true to this day. ↩︎
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Seems like Substack is not giving up on their Twitter clone. I only just discovered that if you tap on a post’s author, it goes to their Notes page. Not sure what I was expecting (maybe an About page, but would that make sense given their target market?) but I wasn’t expecting this.
