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Since bringing home the ukulele, all I’ve been wanting to play on it is tracks from Mike Oldfield’s The Voyager. Here’s a test recording of my attempt at playing She Moves Through the Fair, which I think is actually an Irish folk song. Also wanted to hear how well my webcam mic performs with music.
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I’ve been listening to Marco talk about his user’s response to the Overcast rewrite with interest. I have no comment to make about the rewrite itself — I don’t use Overcast since I don’t use an iPhone — but listening to Marco on the latest episode of Under The Radar come to realisation that Overcast is now at a stage where he cannot only consider it his own is admirable. To have created something that has grown to be bigger than yourself, where the best thing you can do for it is to say “I may have started this, but this is no longer mine”, is a testament to how large and successful Overcast has been. If only we all could say we had that chance to do likewise in our own careers.
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Bought my blog-roll up to date to my RSS subscriptions. It’s clear that it’s been a while since I last updated it. They’ve been a couple of removals but quite a lot of additions, many of them blogs that I’ve been reading for months.
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First day of spring means the first day of swooping season. Chalk one noisy miner up for me on the swoop-o-meter please. 👷♂️
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Speaking of musical instruments: new toy acquired. My parents were cleaning out some clutter and found this ukulele. I always imagined them to be little more than small guitars, so I was quite surprised when I saw how they were tuned, with the outer strings being higher than the inner ones.
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Finished reading: Magician by Raymond E. Feist. It’s been a while since I read this, but it’s an absolute favourite. 📚
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While listening to the interview with Ben Thompson on How I Write, a thought just occurred to me: I was never interested in learning about writing online until I started writing online.
I may have had a passing fancy in the topic before I started writing here. I was a reader of Stratechery back then, among many other blogs, so if this interview cropped up back then, I probably still have listened. But I doubt I would’ve been as engaged in the topic, let alone been interested in seeking more about it. It’s certainly wasn’t something I found myself seeking out at the time.
Now, I lap this stuff up whenever I see it. The subject on talking about keeping a blog, publishing a newsletter, or working on the web is catnip to me, and if I find someone discussing the topic, I’m immediately attracted to them.
I guess there’s a lesson here about how being is downstream from doing. The only question that remains is whether what I write here can be considered writing? 🤔
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About Those STOP Messages
John Gruber, discussing political spam text messages on Daring Fireball:
About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.
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Immunised: whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus. 💉
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MacOS has a strange way of choosing which window gets focus when switching apps using Cmd+Tab. Instead of it being the previously focused window, or the window closest to what you’re switching from, it selects the left most one. Has it always been this way? Feels like something that can be improved.
Anecdata gathered over 5 minutes using two apps: Vivaldi and Terminal.
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It’s been 12 years since I last used Mercurial. And yet, I’m still typing
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Added a tag in a CMS with a case that differs from the others. The tags are case-insensitive but also case-preserving, and given that I can’t just delete or rename the tag, I don’t know how I can fix it (I’ve tried a few things). I wonder if I could ask the developer to go into the DB for me? 🤔
Ok, sent a support ticket to the developer. We’ll see what happens.
Developer responded and fixed the issue. 🙌
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It just occurred to me that the proverb “life is not all beer and skittles” is referencing the British pub game, not the hard-shell lollies.
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Got praised for a help guide I wrote at work for how to use an admin panel. Shame that help guides tend to have a half-life shorter than software if they’re not kept up to date. All those UI redesigns (it’s an admin panel for a Google product so who knows how long this guide would last unmodified).
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So weird seeing ads for podcasts and podcast player apps on public signs and billboards. I’ve been seeing them everywhere on my commute today. Curious to know why the sudden interest in pushing them.
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I agree with Craig Hockenberry here. The trust of any one site essentially depends on what is published there. And as more big-tech platforms embrace AI slop, the less you can trust those platforms to surface reliable information. It’s like that proverb of someone being only as good as their word. If one was to replace the concept of a person with a domain name, then I reckon you could say the same thing about websites.
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Huge performance gains in a DB loading tool I am working on. What took around 2 hours last week now takes less than a minute. The secret: parallel go routines, a DB connection pool, and query batching. Nothing fancy, but definitely worth the work to add them.
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Spent most of the day racking my brain as to why I couldn’t get this mutual TLS setup working. Was it that the server CA pool was wrong1? Was it that the client cert didn’t include the root CA? Should it? Turns out the root CA pool was expecting the certificates to be encoded as PEM data, and I was decoding the PEM first.
This is what happens when all your cryptography functions only work on byte slice. 😕
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I did also get the client CA pool wrong. ↩︎
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Whooping cough immunisation booked. Apparently the local chemist does it, which means no need to make a doctors appointment, which is great (the GP is a bit of a hike away). 💉
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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.
It’s in my journal now, so it’s not completely gone.
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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. I may have kept it up if we were doing likewise at work, but when AWS came onto the scene, the prevailing train of thought was to treat your servers like cattle rather than pets. Granted, it is probably the correct approach, especially when the lifecycle of a particular EC2 instance could be as short as a few minutes.
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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. I was hoping to get the fiction thing done by the end of winter, but it’s likely that timeline will slip. Maybe some time in spring.
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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. 🤷
Just heard it again and — to tie this post to the last one — it actually reminds me of an X’Trapolis train accelerating out of the station.
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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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