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Seeing all these photos from those in the US with massive dumps of snow they need to shovel and clear makes me glad I live in a climate that doesn’t get snow.
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I’ve never understood a task asking me to “find out what needs to be done.” These are not big tasks that need a design or prototype. They’re a regular size coding task, with the output being another task of the same size to actually do the work. Why not simply do the work in the first task?
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Have pulled down the bit of fence extension that was falling down. I don’t think it was recoverable, or at least not with the wear it had endured plus my limited carpentry skills. But that’s fine. At least it’s neater now.
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Dusted off Podcast Favourites (last commit 25 April 2022) and fixed a longstanding issue of thumbnails being lost when they’re changed in the feed. Editing the feed properties will now force a refresh of the thumbnail URLs. Didn’t need to change anything else, which was a nice change.
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Ooh, what a milestone.
Today is 30 years since Delphi was launched, in February 14th of 1995.
— pikuma.com ([@pikuma.com](http://pikuma.com)) February 15, 2025 at 7:29 AM
[image or embed]I loved working in Delphi back in the day. I stopped after moving away from Windows and towards more cross-platform languages, but it always has a special place in my heart.
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So sorry to hear about the loss of @merlinmann's pet lizard, which I just learnt is a central bearded dragon (they're good looking lizards). I didn't include it in the clip but he had some really nice things to say about it.
Not to shift the topic to me, but I’ve only just started listening to RD #254 and I feel it’s timing couldn’t be better given my feelings over the past week.
Also, just a tiny bit of FU from the clip: Marge was talking about a potato. “It’s pretty big.”
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Kind of wish I can be more like Dave Winer and just write about what I’m working on without thinking too much about it. I spent the week moving posts about personal projects and questions are flowing through my head like, “should I be moving these posts? Would it better if they stayed here? Should I even be writing these posts at all?” I don’t know how this topic became such a source of doubt and indecision. I both want to write about it, and not want to write about it. I want readers to read it while also recognising that I’ll be the only one that would find any of this interesting. I want it to be a showcase of how I spent my days at the same time I want to burn it to the ground. In the grand scheme of things, this is small potatoes, yet it would be nice if I can come up with some answers to these questions.
Update at 21:25: I had a bit of a think, and a listen to Reconcilable Difference #254, and I think part of what was causing me to feel that this movement was wrong was that I was not making any forward motion. All that I was doing was cataloging the past. At this stage, I’m not sure that’s a good use of my time. So I’ve decided to not go ahead with moving all my project posts over there and continue to write about projects here. Sure it may make it more difficult to find them, but that’s okay. At least they’re documented somewhere.
Anyway, I’ve made some screenshots of what the site was to be. I do like the red colour.
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Apple AI in Mail and What Could Be
Apple AI features in Mail currently do not help me. But they can, if Apple invited us to be more involved in what constitute an important email. Continue reading →
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Lots of good things in Go 1.24, including weak pointers (finally) and a utility function for generating cryptographically secure random strings (good for IDs). This new os.Root, which acts a bit like
chroot, looks interesting too.Oh,
omitzerosupport in the Json marshaller! 🙌I do wish they added generic support on struct methods. I guess I’ll need to wait a little longer for that.
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🔗 Prefer Numbered Lists to Bullets
Good arguments for using numbered listed instead of bullets in chat communication. I don’t disagree with any of them. I will say that tend to preferred bulleted lists simply because the chat apps I use tend to make using numbered lists more difficult than it should be. Slack, for example, only starts a “real” numbered list when it detects you type
1.. And once you’ve started, there’s no way to skip ordinals within the same numbered list.
Note that "1. This" the only "real" numbered list, and has a different appearance. Even Obsidian’s implementation is not perfect. Despite making it easy to start a numbered list at an arbitrary ordinal, it’s still not possible to skip ordinals.
It’d be simpler if they didn’t try to automatically make “real” numbered lists at all.
Via: Jim Nielsen
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The Rules dialog in MacOS’s Mail needs some serious love. Aside from the fact that it’s teeny tiny, it’s also buggy. I couldn’t get the “set background colour” action to work, and selecting the condition to choose mail based on content doesn’t allow me to enter a value. Not good.
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Well, damn! I ate something with peanuts today. That’s going to knock me about for the next few hours.
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Here’s today’s face egging: my boss asked me to check if a list of countries we have included Åland Islands. Assuming that this list was in sorted order, I took a quick look at the countries beginning with A — conveniently at the top of the list — and came to the conclusion that the country wasn’t listed. Only after I told my boss that did I actually try to search for Åland Islands to double check, and sure enough: there it was, at the bottom of the list, right below Zimbabwe. Turns out the countries were sorted in code-point order, where Å comes after Z.
Not that this story warrants such treatment, but if this was a YouTube video, it could have the click-batey title “Developer looks for Åland Islands in a list of countries. You’ll never guess what happens next.”
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Request for any open-source projects that want to put banner ads on their site: please consider hard-coding the height of your banner to prevent the ad from reflowing the page. Otherwise, it may have an impact on the experience of those reading your docs.
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Oh, that’s nice. Looks like Obsidian allows you to set the starting ordinal for numbered lists.
This was something I wish vanilla Markdown had for a while, so it’s good to see at least one Markdown editor embracing this.
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First Impressions of the Cursor Editor
Trying out the Cursor editor to build a tool to move Micro.blog posts. Continue reading →
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Playing Around With MacOS Image Playground
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Was a little concerned that I was running out of time to meet my “get out more” goal for February, until someone I used to work with pointed me towards a day-long dev conference. Bought a ticket then and there. So should be able to check off the goal for this month (if the fates allow).
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Ok, I admit that I probably should’ve looked through the settings menu before writing a post, because it looks like my new cooler does has a shutoff after N hours feature. It also allows you to set the fan speed. Why it’s on page 2 of the settings menu is beyond me, but it’s there and it works.
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We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.
Wheels are not the same. If I need a wheel for a wheelbarrow, I don’t want to use a wheel for a tractor just because it exists. The same is true for software. If all I want to do is minify some JS without all the transpiling crap that comes from using React or Typescript, why not eschew Webpack for my own handwritten build scripts?
Via: Simon Willison
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I thought the need to use these isolators — which, when opened, will shut off power in the overhead line flowing from north to south — was the reason why the train replacement busses are where they are. Turns out I was wrong, as these isolators are still closed. Must be some other reason.
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So many people on bikes today. Have not seen this many cyclists in the park for a while. Guess the cool weather has brought people outside. 🚲
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Moving all my project posts onto a separate blog… again. I tried writing them here, but I still feel like they belong elsewhere, where I have a bit more control over the layout and the design. Spent the morning configuring the theme, which was going to be orange but I had to change it to red as the orange didn’t provide a nice contrast for reading (you had to darken it almost to brown). I’m not sure if I’ll move the old posts over to it yet. Maybe the one’s on UCL.
Update on 14/2: No, changed my mind again. See this post.
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UCL: Some Updates
Made a few minor changes to UCL. Well, actually, I made one large change. I’ve renamed the
foreachbuiltin tofor.I was originally planning to have a
Continue reading →forloop that worked much like other languages: you have a variable, a start value, and an end value, and you’d just iterate over the loop until you reach the end. I don’t know how this would’ve looked, but I imagined something like this: -
Enjoyed this week’s P&B with Lou Plummer. I enjoy reading linkage.lol and I know people I work with who also follow’s Lou’s work. His blog recommendations look interesting too.
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Released a new plugin for Micro.blog: Sidebar for the Bayou theme (yes, another sidebar plugin). Thanks again to @Mtt for making changes to the theme to support adding the sidebar. Can be installed from the plugin directory (please ensure you have Bayou version 1.1.3 or later).
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What a cruel irony it is that the instinctive response to an itchy eye is to rub it, which doesn’t provide relief and only prolongs the irritation. The only way out is to ignore instinct and practice self control. There’s a metaphor here somewhere I’m sure.
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About My New Cooler's Programming Feature
There’s lots to like about my new cooler, but the programming feature is not one of them. My old unit had a very simple timer with two modes: turn cooler on after N hours, or turn cooler off after N hours. Anything else requires manual intervention.
The old control panel (turns out I did have a photo, albeit an old one). Set the mode: cool/vent (fan), the power setting, then tap Timer Select to choose between turn on or off after N hours. I really liked this simple setup. Many times in summer, when the days are warm but not hot, and the nights are cool, it was nice to turn the cooler’s fan on and set the timer to turn it off after 2 to 3 hours, maybe longer if the days were a bit warmer1. The cooler will simply pull cool air from outside and circulate it around the room. This was enough for me to get to sleep, at which point the cooler would shut itself off in the middle of the night.
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I don’t understand YouTubers who start their videos with a hype bumper. Just get to the frickin’ interview. You got my attention already.
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Keep forgetting to give my keep-cup a proper clean when I get home. Now today’s morning coffee taste like yesterday afternoon’s lemon and ginger tea.
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I had a Ventolin inhaler expire on me, a first in my life. It was a little smokey yesterday so I used it, and sprayed… something into my lungs, resulting in a coughing fit. I still feel the effects a bit today. Hope I didn’t cause too much damage.
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🔗 Animating Rick and Morty One Pixel at a Time
Using OpenGL Shading Language, which is apparently supported by browsers, to produce an animation of Rick from Rick and Morty. I’ve yet to go into this post in any great detail, but it certainly looks very interesting.
Via: Simon Willison
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My unread items in Feedbin are starting to pile up again, largely because I’m “keeping them for later.” Need to decide when later is now. May as well have later be now now. 🧐
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May have gotten to the bottom of a problem that was stumping people at work. The cause, yet to be verified, looks to be a change in the integer value of a gRPC enum value. Suspect that it may have been a manual change to generated code (yeah, try to avoid doing that if you can help it).
One possible reason it got missed is that we’ve configured our SCM to hide generated files in merge requests.
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It’s a shame online integrations assumes that everyone’s using GitHub. I can understand why they build their products that way, and I knew that I’d loose much of those integration niceties when I moved to my own setup. Still, it would be nice to see more integrations work with any Git-based SCM.
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Trying out Bayou theme by @Mtt on a test blog. Lots to like about it, especially the idea of having the latest micro-post appear in the form of a status message. Very unique.
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New AC installed and doing the best it can on this slightly humid day, although it’s performing better than the old unit. I forgot to take a photo of the old panel, so here’s a photo of the new one (the lower one is for the heater).
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Was not expecting the 10 mm of rain we had last night. Not sure anyone was, not even the Bureau. Put a dampener on my plans. I thought I was being super smart washing my towels in the evening and hanging them on the line to dry overnight so I could use the line for other washing today. Ah well. 🤷
