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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.
I ran out of characters but the better platformers like Celeste allow the player to press the jump button just before the character lands on a solid, and it still registers it as a jump. That’s what I was alluding to with that game dev remark.
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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.
I gotta say, after listening to a few of these, that I find the quality of these auto-generated podcasts incredible. I don’t think it’s going to replace the jobs of any of the podcasters I listen to now (the style of banter doesn’t appeal to me) but the fact that it’s doable at all just blows my mind.
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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. So all of this is incredibly sudden.
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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.
Also Google Workspace is so buggy. Why does it take three attempts to add or remove a user from a group? They have the best tech in the world yet Active freaking Directory does a better job here.
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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.
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My current work laptop has a Touch Bar, and I think I will miss it a little when I get my next laptop that doesn’t have one. Having the ability to adjust the brightness and volume using a slider is much nicer than frantically pressing buttons. Oh, and also the ability to replace buttons without being stuck with the predefined glyphs. I replaced the Siri button with the Lock Screen button, which I use all the time, and it’s nice being able to see the proper Lock Screen glyph for it.
That said, those are probably the only nice things about it, and I would probably think otherwise if I wasn’t using an external keyboard with function keys. I’m certainly not using the Touch Bar for anything else, even while using the laptop keyboard.
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Keep forgetting that making a permalink to a highlighted bit of text on a web-page is a thing. Made such a link in Vivaldi by highlighting the text and selecting “Copy Link to Highlight” from the context menu. Worked like a charm.
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Working on Jira ticket number CLC-1836. The numerical congruity has not gone unappreciated.
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New path day. This was little more than a goats track last time I was around here, but was recently widened to something a little more “official.”
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Tools And Libraries I Use For Building Web-Apps In Go
I think I’ve settled on a goto set of tools and libraries for building web-apps in Go. It used to be that I would turn to Buffalo for these sorts of projects, which is sort of a “Ruby on Rails but for Go” type of web framework. But I get the sense that Buffalo is no longer being maintained. And although it was easy to get a project up and running, it was a little difficult to go beyond the CRUD-like layouts that it would generate (or it didn’t motivate me enough to do so). Plus, all that JavaScript bundling… ugh!
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I may never have a site as popular as those I read. I may never be in a situation where I can just rattle off a domain as if it was a business card. But it’s nice to have the option to do so. And, for me at least, it’s probably the best answer I can give when asked by someone “where is the best place to find you online," in lieu of giving out some social media handle. And I think, on the whole, that’s a good thing.
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I don’t have a blog post today. The well’s been pretty dry all week if I’m honest. Usually at times like these, I hold off posting until the evening, hoping that something worth writing about will come by before the day’s end. We’ll see if that happens today. But if not… well, there’s this. 🤷
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It’s a shame XML namespaces are not as widely used as they probably should be. I still see XML documents that escape nested XML documents as if they were strings, something XML namespaces were meant to be a solution for.
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There’s code spelunking, which can be rather interesting. Where you explore the depths of code and decisions past made and wonder at why it is and how it all works.
Then there’s Jira spelunking, where you’re just fighting with your rock pick.
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Reading about all the annoying permission notifications in MacOS Sequoias, I wonder how Apple devs actually experience this. Would they be using tools that would require them to record their screen as part of their job? And if so, are they experiencing any of these monthly notifications?
Might be that they’re using all in-house software for anything that would do this. I hear Apple’s pretty famous for doing so — going as so far as making an iOS app to order from Cafe Macs. And since Apple trusts software from Apple, it might be that they aren’t seeing these notifications nearly as often as their customers, who can’t run such privileged software themselves1.
I guess this is a roundabout way of say that maybe employees from Apple, up and down the org chart, need to run more third-party software on their work machines. That way they can get the full “experience” of using software stuck with throwing up a notification every month to do it’s job.
In any case, I think I’ll hold out on upgrading to MacOS Sequoias for the foreseeable future.
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It’s either that, or they are seeing these notifications and are told to just deal with it, which is probably worse. ↩︎
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Made an update to one of my projects today that’s been going on for 11 years, way back when I was still learning Go. Might be one of the oldest projects I’m still maintaining. Lots of Java-isms in there.
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🧑💻 New post on TIL Computer: HTMX And POST Redirects
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Just one of those days when I’m reminded that no matter how you think your users will use your system, there’s always someone that’ll push it to the breaking point. It’s also one of those days where I learnt that you can be a member of up to 113 groups in Active Directory.
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Ok, this is strange. My work MacBook screen occasionally freezes when I interact with windows. It can’t be the screen as the mouse cursor moves just fine. But when I type or scroll inside a window, it just stops refreshing for a few seconds. Interestingly, the second display doesn’t have this issue.
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Clip sharing is now available in Pocketcasts for Android! I was looking forward to this feature since I heard it was coming (this was why I was poking around About screens). Here’s my inaugural clip: a segment of Sharp Tech that I absolutely agree with. 🎙️
Gotta say, I don’t love the portrait videos it produces. I’d much rather landscape or even square. Would like to come up with some way to crop it somehow. Might need to start spelunking through various ffmpeg incantations.
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Weekly Update - 22 Sept 2024
No preface today. Let’s move on to the update.
Cyber Burger
Cyber Burger now has sound!
I started added some basic sound effects to the laser and the items flying across the screen. They may change, depending on how I find them after a while, but it’s a start. I do like how Pico-8 makes these easy to make: select a waveform, then just draw out the pitch and volume graphically:
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And that swoop-o-meter just keeps going up. We’re up to 4 noisy miners now. 👷♂️
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Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”
I know bugger all about the world of front-end web development. But seeing how quickly it takes me to get changes made and deployed using just these technologies, verses dealing with the mountain of JavaScript for an SPA, leaves me convinced that those that embrace HTML and CSS have a significant advantage over those that don’t.
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I couldn’t for the life of me find out how to use HTMX with import maps. Importing it into a JavaScript module seems to activate all the HTML attributes just fine, but I had no access to the
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Huh, that’s interesting. I just noticed that there’s an option to go to Automattic jobs page at the bottom of Pocketcast’s About screen. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it may make for a good way to find developers. Who else would go to the About screen of mobile apps? 😄
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Micro-fiction: Get A Horse
Trying something new here. I came up with the concept of this short-story while riding home on the tram yesterday. The rest of it sort-of fell into place when I woke up at 5AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. Hope you enjoy it.
Josh was riding the scooter on the city footpath, not trying super hard to avoid the other pedestrians. He was going at a speed that was both unsafe and illegal, but it was the only speed he knew that would prevent that horse from showing up. Besides, he had something that he needed to do, and it was only at such reckless speeds that he knew that that thing would work. Well, he didn’t know; but being at his wits’ end after trying everything else, he had to try this. He picked his target ahead and sped up towards it. Good thing he was wearing his helmet.
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