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Unboxed my new vacuum cleaner. First, love how all the packaging material is cardboard and paper: only thing I needed to throw in the bin was a bit of tape. Second, love how this comes with a stand. I was actually wondering where I was going to stow this (it won’t be the living room 😄).
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Been listening to The Truman Show soundtrack after watching it again on Friday. One of my absolute favourite soundtracks. So good. 🎵
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Amazing what you overhear in cafes. Guy a few metres from me is talking about the bridge repairs he’ll be starting next week. Talk of floating barges up the Yarra, getting jacks and permits, deploying buoys. Facinating to hear.
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Loading a bunch of data from my laptop to a database in the US just brings into sharp relief that as fast as the speed of light is, it would be nice if it was faster. Guess I shouldn’t hold my breath. 😏
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I’ve never seen a “confirm cancel” box that seemed to have the right sort of copy. Here’s one from Google that feels like they missed the mark:
I wonder if it’s better to avoid arbitrary verbs, and use copy involving Yes or No:
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I enjoyed reading Kev Quirk’s post about building a simple journal. I’m still using Day One, but I am still thinking of moving off it. So I was inspired to build a prototype similar to Kev’s, just to see if something similar works for me. Built using Go instead of PHP, but it also uses Simple CSS.
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Big day today at work. Can’t say too much about it unfortunately, which is a shame. But one thing I did learn: there is a right and wrong way to plug in a fiber optic cable. Don’t get the orientation wrong. And don’t forget to plug it in all the way.
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Reminded again why I enjoy the commute to South Melbourne more than Port Melbourne, despite being the same length: all-change events at Flinders St. no longer affect me.
The irony is that I do have to go to Port Melbourne today, although not until the afternoon.
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Got a large blog post written up lamenting my decisions about the project I’m working on (in short, I choose complexity when I had something simple that worked). Might leave it unpublished, as we ended the day at a good spot and I don’t feel half as bad as I did this morning.
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My Home Computer Naming Scheme
I enjoyed Manton’s post about the naming scheme he uses for Micro.blog servers. I see these names pop up in the logs when I go to rebuild my blog, each with a Wikipedia link explaining the origins of the name (that’s a really nice touch). Having a server or desktop naming scheme is one of those fun little things to do when working with computers. Growing up we named our home desktops after major characters of Lord of the Rings, such as Bilbo, or Frodo, but I never devised a scheme for myself when I started buying my own computers. Continue reading →
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Coding Bits, the blog I keep to write down things I learnt while working with software, has now reached 17 posts. So, like Workpad, the time has come for a proper domain and an avatar. I’ve decided to rename it TIL Computer. I’ve also moved it to Pika, as I was interested in trying it out.
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Agree with John on ATP #600 that a Google style “permission summary” is a better way to regularly confirm app permissions on MacOS. Maybe the issue I had/have with their proposed weekly permission confirmations is that Apple’s designers lacked the imagination to do something better than throw up a bunch of confirmation pop-ups for each app. A single, well designed “summary” disclosure of app permissions, shown once a month, is something that I can definitely tolerate, maybe even support.
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Project Seed - A Pico-8 Prototype
Oof, another long stretch between updates. This has not been a productive winter. Much of the project I’ve been writing about here are, shall we say, “on ice”. UCL is still being used for the project it’s been built for, but there’s been no further work done on it recently. I think we can safely say Photo Bucket is dead, at least for now. Blogging Tool and that interactive fiction project is still ongoing, but both are running on a slow burn. Continue reading →
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While we’re talking about suburban sounds, chalk me up as someone who doesn’t like the sound of a reversing Tesla. I mean, I guess my response is not to like it: more like to get out of its reversing way. In that case, maybe sounding unpleasent is simply part of its job. 🤷
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Gonna train nerd here for a minute: It’s a shame that the Comeng train horn has been changed to sound like that of the X’Trapolis. Hearing that old A major chord was a staple of growing up in the suburbs. Now it all sounds like someone blowing a loud, detuned trumpet in a cathedral.
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Love how all these cooking and home reno shows are cut. The actual building or cooking scenes are all in fast motion, yet there’s ample time to show all the shopping and browsing scenes in real-time. 😄
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Trying out the stoot Micro.blog plugin by Mandaris. Click through to see a test post:
Works like a charm, and looks pretty good. Excellent work, @mandaris.
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🔗 Collective Nouns for Groups of Various Birds
Many of the ones I expected, but there are some interesting ones I’ve never heard of: a dole of doves, a kit of pigeons, a pandemonium of parrots.
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Doing something about my dodgy vacuum cleaner. The one I have really sucks, mainly because it really doesn’t.
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Protecting my “super premium” monitor riser with coasters as a certain creature likes to chew it.
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Something going on with my Bluetooth headphones and my Android phone. No problems with either connecting with anything else, but it takes about 5 minutes to connect them together. Very strange.
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It seems to me that Patreon would’ve been better off not offering an iOS app and just have a really well built website. I can’t imagine many creators would be discovered via the app. At least for me, it’s always via their work: their YouTube videos or podcasts. Apples shenanigan’s not worth it.
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Wow. Now I’m getting messages from creators about how their revenue will be affected by Apple’s attempt to extract their pound of flesh from Patreon.
Boo! Dick move, Apple! You so desperate for a service narrative you’d stoop to this level? 👎
Hopefully enough supporters sign up via the web that the impact of this is minimal.
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Must be the types of podcasts I tend to prefer, but I do get a bit put off by shows where the hosts are clearly reading either a script or a really detailed outline (like one might have it they’re giving a conference talk), and trying to present it as casual discourse. Through in some less-than-funny humour, and it’s just a little — as the kids say — cringe.
That’s not to say that the podcasts are bad. They’re still informative and interesting to listen to. It just feels like a bit of a trope now.
