• 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.

  • 🔗 Spyglass: Apple Lives Long Enough to Become the Ad Villain

    People pay a lot of money for these devices from Apple. And part of the implicit bargain is that they won’t have adware or ads themselves shoved at them in every direction.

    Now I’m no marketing expert, but I do know that understanding one’s customer base is important for success. And I understand that Apple’s is generally made up of people who pay a premium for a good user experience. I wonder if Apple understands this. I also know that generally pissing people off with stunts like this will not get them to come to your party.

  • 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.

    I guess my point is that it’s nice to be able to run specific unit tests directly from the IDE, and that’s difficult to do using the Suite package.

  • 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

    Auto-generated description: A close-up view of a weathered, cracked wooden post with leaves and debris collected in the center.
  • 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.

    Given how often the instructor rags on competing products, I’d be surprised if the exam doesn’t have a question like “why does our competitor suck?” 😏

  • 🔗 Omer: you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand

    they don’t just ship features anymore, they ship vibes. onboarding becomes a performance. the ui is the brand. the founder’s blog post is the manifesto.

    it’s not about what the software does.it’s about who it’s made for.

    I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. Software construction is like any other human endeavour, where the person making it puts a bit of themselves into it. How can they not? But I enjoyed how this essay explored this phenomenon.

    Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes

  • Day 24: bloom

    #mbjune

    Auto-generated description: A tree with vibrant pink blossoms stands against a backdrop of a partly cloudy sky.
  • 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.

    Oh actually, the bullet point is highlighted in the Canvas. Okay, that’s something. Maybe they can make it clearer it’s associated with the open thread? It’s the same colour as the “this is new content” highlight.

  • 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.

  • I.S. Know: An Online Quiz About ISO and RFC Standards

    An online quiz called “I.S. Know” was created for software developers to test their knowledge of ISO and RFC standards in a fun way. Continue reading →

  • Day 23: fracture

    #mbjune

    A fibreglass building with a window with slatted glass panes and a green recycling bin nearby, surrounded by grass and foliage.
  • Brief Look At Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor

    Kicking the tyres on Edit, Microsoft’s new text editor for the CLI. Continue reading →

  • Day 22: hometown

    #mbjune

    Hot air balloons float over a city skyline near a river during a calm evening or morning.
  • On MacOS Permissions Again

    Some dissenting thoughts about John Gruber and Ben Thompson discussion about Mac permissions and the iPad on the latest Dithering. Continue reading →

  • Returned to Tuggeranong for breakfast and a walk around the lake. The morning was quick crisp, and there was plenty of frost on the ground, but it was quite nice in the sun.

    Auto-generated description: A serene lake reflects the surrounding mountains and trees under a clear blue sky, with dry grass in the foreground. A narrow dirt path winds through a frosty park with scattered trees, leading toward a distant building by a body of water.
  • Day 21: silhouette

    #mbjune

    Two parrots perched on tree branches are silhouetted against a cloudy sky.
  • Out early in yet another bracing morning. Didn’t even know this temperature gauge showed negative numbers.

    A car dashboard shows a speedometer, check engine light, and a digital display indicating the time as 9:21 and the temperature as -2°C.
  • Being in meetings most of the day has left my voice hoarse and completely tired out. I don’t know how people who talk for a living do it (my suspicion is a decent microphone and regular vocal training).

  • Day 20: gather

    #mbjune

    A spacious, elegantly decorated banquet hall features rows of chairs and round tables facing a lectern set up for an event beneath a high, beamed ceiling with large windows.
  • Was writing “Airbus” in a message and mistakenly typed a P instead of a B. Found the results amusing, so I fired up ChatGPT’s image generator:

    An AI generated image of a cartoon cat dressed as an airline pilot gives a thumbs-up with an airplane in the background above the word AIRPUSS.
  • From the archives — key ring:

    Image of a keychain with the phrase 'Everyone I know has gone to Europe and all I got is all this work to do' with stars below Europe, and laptop and briefcase emoji below 'Work to do'

    Was true a year ago and is currently true today.

  • Done. Removed the Discover feed from BlueSky. I was getting a little too obsessed with it and depressed from it. It’s reverse chronological from here on out.

    (Honestly, I should probably cut down on social media altogether, but one step at a time.)

  • Day 19: equal

    Full disclosure: I used the Google Photo AI erasure tool to remove the front number-plates from these two silver Toyota Echoes (if you’re a regular reader, you can probably guess why). #mbjune

    Two cars of the same make, model, and colour are parked side by side in a parking lot at night with a building in the background.
  • Found a particularly interesting bug in Safari when I tried adding a background transition to radio-button labels styled to look like regular buttons. Tapping the labels on the iPad causes the background colour to flicker:

    Fixed it by working around the problem: I only need the transition when the user taps “Submit”, so I held-off from applying the transition attributes until that happens. But wow, what an weird way to fail.