Got some answers about the recent train shutdown. Reason why busses couldn’t run from our station had nothing to do with the overhead lines. It was just logistics; turning the busses around was easier to do at the station they did run from. Okay. Interesting to know that.

TIL: CR2420 button batteries are not the same as CR2032, no matter what your eyes say to you.

I’ve started keeping links to interesting posts and software packages on a separate link blog. These links would usually go into my Linkding instance, but I may repurpose that for things I’d like to revisit later, whereas this site will be more of an archive of things I’ve seen.

This site, now served from Europe. 🇪🇺

I don’t think I’ve ever regretted spending money on a solo or small team’s online publication. Sure I’ve cancelled subscriptions when I lost interest, but it’s not like I’ve said to myself that I wish I’ve never signed up in the first place.

I always felt a little sorry for the front-end developers on their team: always under the pump when UI changes come through, and well… (whisper) the tooling. So it was a suprise to hear one frontend dev who’s starting doing backend work that he always felt sorry for us backend devs: having 10 different services that we need to change and worry about.

The grass is always greener… eh. Well, actually it’s more like the reverse: as in our grass is greener and we fell sorry for our neighbour who just can’t get a lawn established.

One thing I’m noticing on Bluesky: very few hashtags in posts, including those in the Discover feed. I expected a hashtag-per-post ratio closer to that of classic Twitter, but it seems closer to that of Mastodon. It’s nice.

Now that trains are running again, it got me wondering whether my temporary commute, where I drove to a nearby station, is worth keeping. I don’t think it is. It got me into work earlier, which is nice, but with all the road traffic, getting home was slower and more of a hassle.

Seeing sponsored features in Vivaldi is… well, it is what it is: they need to make their money somehow. And atleast they’re easy to remove. But I’m left wondering if Netscape’s attempted approach of charging people for a browser was the better way to go in the long run.

Still wishing for MR review software that allows one to make private notes. Some of the reviews I’m looking at today are quite large, and it would be good for me to annotate things I’ve seen. I could use notes or something, but UI for marking up the code is already there.

I’m finding, as I go through my Godot journey, that a good indication that a particular approach to a problem is the one preferred by the designers, is the amount of “infrastructure” that goes into making that approach easy to execute.

Case in point, I ran into an issue in my Godot game yesterday, where a nested scene, one included in another nested scene, was unable to get a unique node near the root of the tree. After a bit of reading I learnt about groups, which look to be a way of collecting nodes, regardless of where they are in the tree, in a group that is easy to reference later.

This indeed solved my problem, but it was’t my first approach. There were ways of traversing the tree to find the node in question that I explored first. And I probably could’ve gotten that to work with a bit less-than-great of code. But given that there are 10 methods that deal with groups on the SceneTree class, along with UI in the editor to create and manage groups, it’s clear that groups was what the developers intended as the right approach.

Frustrating to be facing a task at work where my answers to when it will be done look like:

I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
Ok, it’s done.

“Vibe coding” I can take or leave, but this poster’s point on iOS distribution is spot on:

I recently built a small iOS app for myself. I can install it on my phone directly from Xcode but it expires after seven days because I’m using a free Apple Developer account. I’m not trying to avoid paying Apple, but there’s enough friction involved in switching to a paid account that I simply haven’t been bothered.

I had a passing interest at looking at the iPhone SDK when it came out. What steered me towards learning the Android SDK was learning that any app I built for the iPhone had to distributed via the App Store¹. That wouldn’t work for apps that I built for myself, or maybe a few friends, which is pretty much what I was interested in doing. Such apps are a completely different kettle of fish than building something meant for the whole world to use.

I don’t know what it’s like now, but despite how locked down Android is now, compared to those early years, it’s still seems to me to be much more opened to these sorts of apps than iOS.