Before I left for Canberra, I handed my broken kettle lid to my dad who offered to repair it. I haven’t got it back yet so this past evening I’ve been using my kettle without one. And I can now tell you what happens when you do: it doesn’t shut off. The water starts boiling and will continue to boil until I manually cut the power (it’s one of those kettles which an induction coil so it’s just a matter of lifting it off the base).

I looked into it and apparently a typical kettle has a bimetallic strip¹ which is heated by the steam. This strip doesn’t require a lot of stream before it deflects due to thermal expansion, and when it does deflect, the power is cut. I guess it requires a relatively closed chamber to be effective, and having such a huge gaping hole at the top makes this completely ineffective. It’s probable it would shut itself off eventually, but that’s an experiment I didn’t want to make.

Anyway, the lid is ready and I’ll be picking it up today.

Looking forward to the rail link to Melbourne Airport. Can’t come soon enough

It’s funny that I find myself downloading 4 hours of podcasts for an hour-long flight. On the flight up here I barely got through a 30 minute Stratechey weekly article.

Before I started studying computer science, I didn’t even know how to spell Vi. Now I know how to quit from it. 😛

(This is a bit of an inside reference that I’m not expecting anyone to get. Maybe one day I’ll explain it.)

Day 27: collective

Last day in Canberra. Spending some time being in the company of these two before we head over to the minder. #mbjune

So I hear Dennis Villeneuve will be directing the next Bond film. Not sure the city of London is large enough for his typical establishment shot. 😏

I kid. I like his work on Dune. I’m confident he’ll do a good job here.

Day 26: bridge

#mbjune

I can understand the move away from gas for home heating to reverse cycle, but I think I will miss it. Reverse cycle for heating is not perfect. I’ve got the thermostat set for 20°C and I still feel quite cold. I don’t get that toasty feeling that comes from central gas.

There’s no reason to use Testify’s Suite package for Go unit tests anymore. It’s possible to do whatever you need to do with Go’s builtin test runner. Furthermore, most IDEs are smart enough to detect and run sub-tests that use t.Run(). So save yourself some trouble and just use the defaults.

Marco Arment @marcoarment@mastodon.social

This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.

Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?

Oh wait, that’s already what happens.

Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.

They truly have no standards anymore.
https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss/114738626109660386

2:12 PM • June 24, 2025 (UTC)

Maybe Apple can start putting ads for their F1 movie in their permission dialogues. Goodness knows how often I see those. 😛

Day 25: decay

#mbjune

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.

Day 24: bloom

#mbjune

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.

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.

Day 23: fracture

#mbjune