I vaguely remember a movie I watched when I was very young, like 4 or something. It would’ve been released in the late 80’s and was like ET, but terrifying, at least to my young eyes (not that I didn’t get freaked out by ET too. This is why I don’t watch scary movies). I only remembered scenes of it and for a while I wondered if I actually imagined it.

Yesterday, I got confirmation that the movie does exist: this YouTube video covers it. Turns out, all those years ago, I was freaked out by poorly made corporate propaganda. 😏

Well, got my evening sorted. 😫

Gave Dave Winer’s Wordland a try today. I like it. It’s quite a nice writing environment to work in. Wrote a couple of long form posts in it, along with a few that were a paragraph or two, and the editor felt great to use. Does a good job growing with the length of the piece too.

I’m one of those few that hate the taste of coriander. I can’t confirm whether it tastes like soap — I’ve never eaten soap — but I do find it unpleasant. Actually had a bit of a reputation at a bánh mì shop on being the guy that didn’t want coriander on his sandwich.

Good on Obsidian for changing their license to allow free for commercial use. It can’t be easy walking away from money, but I couldn’t really see a way of getting work to pay for my use of Obsidian. And I use the heck out of Obsidian at work. It would’ve been hard moving to something else.

Prototyped a game I had in mind, sort of a 2D Sokoban-like thing, where you control a robot with a retractable pushing arm that is to push gems to a “receiver” tile. Not entirely sure if it’s fun enough to actually build.

Used PixiJS to build it. Not a bad framework.

Following on from my adventures in dealing with spam messages, it’s quite strange that Mail.app doesn’t have an option to always show the from address domain in the mailbox list. It took opening the message, plus an additional click to confirm whether a “spam summary” email I received this morning was a phishing attempt (it was). I rather not open those mail messages at all¹, if I can help it, and seeing the domain — which should be enough, given that it’s usually some junk domain like “funnybone dot com” — could allow me to dispose of these messages using the context menu.

Everyone knows that email is no longer a trust-by-default communication medium, so it strikes me as odd that these basic facilities are not available in MacOS’s default mail client. Seems like it’s barely change at all in recent years. Oh no, that’s not true: it now gives AI mail summaries that are totally useless. A feature like this would be much easier to add, and be much more useful to me.

I’ve started seeing phishing emails that try to simulate those email spam summaries you occasionally get from centralised spam-traps. I don’t usually get these sorts of messages so my suspicions where heightened when I saw these emails this morning, and after checking the domain — which takes too many clicks to do, Apple! — my suspicions were confirmed.

And it got me thinking: why didn’t Apple’s Mail summary indicated that these messages were spam? Not that I have any expectation for Apple’s AI do so, but the conspiratorial part of me started wondering whether it actually did, and report it as such in the summary. Here’s how the message looks in the Inbox list:

Could it be “spam report,” as in “this is a report on spam;” or “spam report,” as in “this is spam, and is made to look like a report?” I’ve not seen phishing attempts that try to look like these sorts of mail messages before, and I’m wondering if spammers and phishers are now trying to tailor their messages to try and fool the AI into producing an ambiguous dscription where the AI is trying to report the message as spam, yet the reader interpertes it to mean that the message is about spam.

Again, this is probably just conspiratorial thinking on my part, and I’ve just been one of the lucky ones to have not seen these phishing messages before.

Yesterday, I attended the DDD Melbourne 2025 conference. This was in service of my yearly goal to get out more, to be around people more often than I have been. So the whole reason I attended was to meet new people. That didn’t happen: I said hi to a few people I once worked with, and spoke to a few sponsors, but that was it. So although I marked it off my goal list, it wasn’t a huge success. Continue reading →

Saw a couple of spotters at the gym this morning: two brush tail possums. Mother and baby I’m guessing.

“Get out more” goal for February achieved. ✅

Attended the DDD Melbourne 2025 conference. Technically I’m still attending it, as it’s not over yet, but it’s close enough to finished that I’m calling it now.

Swanson St, Melbourne. Been a while since I’ve walked this.

I think I tend to overthink things too much, if last night is any indication. It’s probably good, to some degree, to consider all outcomes of doing something, for no other reason than to satisfy a need for certainty when events go a certain way. But it might be that one could spend too long doing so, and miss any opportunities that come from it. It’s always harder to see things go right than it is to see things go wrong, or at least that’s how I seem to be wired.

I’ve seen this in my job too, where I feel (and it’s only a feeling) that my designs are more complicated then they need to be for similar reasons. Might not be related thought; just a passing thought while I go through this reflection.

Free motivational slogan for anyone wanting to start a line of sports-related T-shirts:

This SHIRT, that HURT, could’ve hit the DIRT.

Emphasis intentional.

🔗 Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones

Someone at work showed them to me and let me try out their noise cancelling. It’s good. The best I’ve head so far. All the background noise completely vanished. Will need to check these out.

🔗 Letters from an American: February 1, 2025

Hmm, not entirely sure what’s going on over there in the US, but it doesn’t sound good.

🔗 The Gentrification of Video Game History

An interesting discussion on the slow erosion of local history around gaming in the face of a US-centric telling of history.

I enjoyed Cory Doctorow five year anniversary post on Pluralistic. Even better was falling down the rabbit hole of reading his other anniversary posts, then branching out to his other posts such as his one on blogging itself.

Debugging Edge Lambdas is such a pain due to how long it takes to deploy them to test something. Not helping is that different layers have standardised on names that use URL while others use Url. I wonder if it’s better to just pick one case for the names I’m using, even if stands out from the other names following the particular “standard”.

Oh crap, I’ve gotta watch myself! I just configured a parameter in prod thinking that I was doing it in dev. Should’ve seen the warning signs when I got a permission error and had to boost to the next level. The change should be benign, but I need to be a little more careful.