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I find using app stores, either Apple’s one or Google Play, to be an unpleasent experience. They seem built to optimise “discovery”, as if people just launch the app store with the hope of getting a dopamine hit. Maybe people do this, and I’m the strange one, but usually I know what I want and I have to fight my way through the irrelevant or scummy apps shoved in my face on my way to the download page.
So count me as someone who prefers to get apps from the web. I generally find out about apps from there anyway, either directly (web-searches) or indirectly (via blogs or podcasts giving recommendations). The fact that I can go directly to an app’s app store page via a link is one saving grace with using app stores for distribution — although I also dislike managing installed apps via the app store too — but I’m someone who’s not only happy to, but actually prefers, just downloading and installing apps directly.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is: app developers, please keep making direct downloads available if you can. And also keep making websites for your apps.
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Please, Go developers, do not use Testify’s suite package. There’s not much support for the de-facto tabular test pattern, where you have tests nested within tests. Plus, it lacks any IDE integration niceties, such as running specific scenarios. Just use the built-in test package.
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On Panic, iA, and Google Drive
I see that Panic is shutting down their Google Drive integration in their Android app, much like iA did a few weeks ago. This doesn’t affect me directly: even though I am a user of both Android and Google Drive, I regret to say that I don’t use apps from either company on my phone (I do use a few things from both on my Apple devices). But I do wonder why Google is enacting policies that push developers away from using Drive as general purpose user storage. Continue reading →
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Ooh, this is nice. Ever since installing solar panels on my house a couple of years ago, my bill was around $40.00 or so a month. This was way better than what I was paying, but I assumed the feed-in tariffs were just not high enough for me to actually fall into credit. That happened for the first time last month, when I received a credit on my bill. And today I got my second bill and I am still in credit. So now I’m finally on the free power train. Well, at least for now: we’ll see what summer brings.
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Someone at work expressed interest in starting a blog, but was put off with the thought of having to write long-form posts with titles. I’m trying to convince them that micro-blogging, in the traditional sense of the word, is a thing, and I shared with them a few such blogs (I didn’t share mine 🙂).
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One strike of the bell at 2:00? Someone will need to put the town hall clock forward an hour, since we’re now in daylight saving time.
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🧑💻 New post on TIL Computer: Exporting a Query as a CSV File From PostgreSQL
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A random thought I had while waiting in traffic today on a train replacement bus service: by definition, such a service must be worse than the train it’s replacing. Otherwise you might as well just have the bus.
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Congratulations to Dave Winer on 30 years of Scripting News. What an amazing accomplishment. Adding the countdown was a nice touch: can’t do that on social media. It’s just a shame that I missed it actually hitting zero (it was around 4 AM my time).
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My Nonna passed away this evening, almost a week after the stroke. It’s quite sad but if I am honest, we lost her a week ago when she was bought into emergency. It’s reassuring that she’s now at peace. At least I had the opportunity to say goodbye and that I loved her. ❤️
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Really enjoyed this YouTube interview with Dr. Alok Kanojia on the Diary of a CEO channel. Very interesting talk about mindfulness, stressors, motivation, amongst other things. 📺
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I love my sisters. They called me just now to ask how I was feeling with our Nonna slipping away. Still very sad but I think I’m moving from grief to acceptance. Still, it was nice of them to call (and I feel a little bad that I didn’t call them). ♥️
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Small achievement unlocked, but one that’s a long time in coming: I finally tried nasi lemak. And yeah, it was quite tasty, although spicier than I imagined.
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I’ve spent the last week working on a small puzzle game called Coasters, where you presented with two images and a clue, and you need to guess the word or phrase. One puzzle a day, sort of like Wordle. I’ve got 10 puzzles ready to go and I may add more but no promises. Check it out if you like.
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While on my walk, I stopped briefly to clear a stone from my shoe and this purple swamphen (or pūkeko for our Kiwi friends) came up quite close to me. Not sure why. Looking for food maybe?
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Bit of a wet day but the rain let up long enough for me to go for a walk. Though I had to take a detour as my path was blocked by a couple of families enjoying the weather. 🦆
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Baseball is not considered a major sport here in Australia, yet it definitely has a presence. I know of 4 baseball diamonds around where I live, and I usually spot flyers from local baseball clubs looking for new players. It’s not a recent thing either: my dad actually played baseball growing up.
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I’m not really capable of doing a lot right now, but one thing I did do last night was add the ability to synchronise the posts I write in that Kev Quirk inspired journaling app to a Git repository. I’m still treating it like a prototype, but I’ve been finding myself turning to it whenever I want to write a journal entry. Might be that this will eventually become my replacement for Day One, although ensuring that the posts are safe and sound was one of the last remaining hurdles to that happening. So it’s good to see this working now.
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How is it only 13:41? This day has been grindingly slow.
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It’s curious to wonder why Alstom, the maker of these trains, don’t track when passengers press the button just before the tone sounds. It happens quite often: they press it a second too early, stand there in front of the closed doors, press it again, and the doors open. Need to hire more game devs.
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Someone at work just discovered the killer app for Google’s NotebookLM podcasting feature: going through the terms and conditions of insurance policies.
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Passing
Three nights ago, and two months before her 94th birthday, my Nonna, my maternal grandmother, suffered a stroke. She’s now in palliative care and there’s no telling how much longer she has left. Over the last few years she was slowing down, yet was still quite aware and was able to do many things on her own, even travel to the shops by bus. She had a scare over the weekend but was otherwise in reasonably good health. Continue reading →
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The issue with adding caching to a system before you know you’ll need it is that doing so isn’t free. You’re paying the price of invalidation and split-brain bugs before you see the benefits of increases in performance, if any. It’s a classic case of premature optimisation.
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Testing and troubleshooting service side code, without an interactive debugger, that deals with single sign-on is the absolute worst. Do not recommend.
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Just updated to Go 1.23.1. It’s so nice being able to upgrade my dev toolchain without having to worry about upgrading anything on our servers: binary executables are binary executables. By far, one of my favourite things about Go.