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Ok, I may have gone slightly overboard tonight, but so annoyed was I with Google TV’s recommendation that I decided to install a 3rd-party launcher. And wow! I should’ve done this way sooner. It’s like a breath of fresh air. 😌
This Reddit thread has all the details. I’m using Projectivity Launcher.
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Wish there was a way on Google TV to mark a recommendation as “I never want to see something like this recommended to me again.” Yes, I felt that strongly about it (strong enough to type out a recommendation using the remote). And no, it wasn’t about news or politics.
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I discovered Andor last night. The hype is justified: it’s a really well done TV series.
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If there’s any evidence needed to prove that what we’re building doesn’t actually need to be implemented as micro-services, it’s the fact that we’re essentially building a monolith backend-for-frontend (BFF) layer to serve the web-app and orchestrate the calls to the various backend services.
Not only does this prove that the whole idea of micro-services is essentially just a waste of time (if you’re building one large monolith for serving the web-app, why not just bundle all the application logic there?) but it also results in wasted effort. Want to limit how much a user can use a particular resource? It should go either in the BFF or the backend. Ideally, it should only go in one of the services. Well, if you have two devs working on two separate systems, and you’re in a bit of a rush, you’ll find that it’s implemented in both systems. Worse, you’ll find that the backend service has it set to 20, but the BFF service has it set to 30.
Luckily this one was caught during code review. But now you need to choose which one to keep. Maybe you decide to keep both since you don’t have time to change it now (again, you’re in a rush) but that now locks you into something that’s just harder to change. I want to make this configurable per environment to make it easier to test in Dev, but that’ll mean making the change in the BFF as well. Or I’ll need to remove one of the implementations. Again, duplicated effort that was unnecessary on the whole.
Argh, so frustrating!
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Release version 1.0.2 of Sidebar for Tiny Theme. Biggest change is that the sidebar is no longer using
after-post-listmicro-hook. This should fix any styling issues for sites that are using thebefore-post-listmicro-hook. It also frees up this micro-hook for site authors.The downside of this approach is that this plugin now overrides the
_default/baseof.htmltemplate of Tiny theme, by installing the sidebar just after the main content. This is arguably not good, and will probably need to be changed in some way (might be that we’ll need to add another micro-hook to Tiny theme). But it should work for sites currently using version 2.7.1 of Tiny theme. -
Is it okay to post about things you’re doing that might be a complete waste of time and go nowhere? It is? Ok, good. So roped myself into starting yet another level editor for something. It’s either start from scratch, or try and get QT working on my machine. I know where I’d rather spend my time.
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We’re going through a bit of a dry spell at the moment, where we haven’t seen decent rain in weeks. So naturally I thought it would be safe for me to wash my sheets. Nope! 🌧️😒
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I’ll be honest, I don’t like berry compote. I’ll eat it as it’s the “healthest” component of my dessert. But I’d be happier if it was just the cream and créme brulée.
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Oof, so glad it’s a Friday. Work’s been quite busy this week. It’ll be busy for the next few weeks as well, unfortuately. But at least I’ll have these two days to recover. 🍻
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Been thinking about, and reading about, AWK recently. It’s a facinating tool: not as specialised as
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The YouTube algorithm surfaced this delightful channel this evening of someone reviewing home music keyboards from the 80’s and 90’s. Really enjoying it.
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Kinda wish that Keyboard Maestro has a way to retrigger the last invoked macro. It would be nice to bind that to ^ ⌥ ⌘ ., much like . is used to repeat the last command in Vim.
I did do a quick search online to see if such a feature existed, and the solutions I found in their Discourse suggested doing things like parse the log file, extract the last macro name from there, etc. Oof! I won’t be doing that.
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Subscribed to a bunch of oneamonth.club members this morning. It was enough for my bank to call me about it. I guess making several transactions of $1/£1/€1 each does look a little suspicious.
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Immensely enjoyed the ATP member special where John goes through his window management. Very illuminating. I do recommend watching it on YouTube rather than listening to it as a podcast.
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From Merlin’s wisdom project:
Related: most kids can be surprisingly entertained by your making them just a little bit terrified.
Not sure I was ever entertained by being a bit terrified as a kid. I think I left feeling more angry.
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You know how iA Writer shades anything coming from an LLM to indicate that an AI generated it? I wish Goland did the same thing for copy-and-pasted code. That’ll save me from missing changes of a pasted code fragment that’ll inevitably show up as duplicates in the review.
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Spun out the sidebar I added to my site into a standalone Micro.blog Plugin, called Sidebar For Tiny Theme. This can be used to add a sidebar with your blog-roll recommendations to any blog that’s using Tiny Theme. Click through to see usage and examples, and let me know what you think.
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I feel envious of those that are happy to work on one thing — project, job, cause — for a lifetime. I’ve never felt that myself: after a while, I need to move onto something else. I wonder if it’s the same feeling one gets when they fall in love. Can’t say myself (I’ve never fallen in love either).
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This is probably worth trying. I know for myself that I get lost in the day-to-day activities of work that I loose a sense on what we’ve accomplished during the week. Besides, Confluence has got this blogging feature which never seems to get used.
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Dreamt that I was writing a blog post about software design and how it relates to eating vegetables. Not sure the analogy works so I won’t be writing it here. The setting was nice though: I was drafting it on a Swiss train pulling into Geneva where I was to meet up with family at the station.
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I’ll bring the lighter fluid. #burn-all-computers-to-the-ground
(sorry, it’s been one of those days 😼).
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This year’s Ides of March started with some stormy internet weather this morning. May have been behind a few production issues we had. Always a fun way to start a Friday. 😒
Internet weather’s fining up though.
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Matt Bircher made an excellent comment about UI design sensibilities:
I get the feeling a non-insignificant contingent of commentators have taken this to the point where they think people who aren’t them are just dumb idiots who can barely figure out how a fork works, let alone how to use a piece of software that does more than one simple thing.
I get this sense as well. Of couse there will be those that arn’t interested in going beyond the basics. But what about those that are? Those that are willing to invest time and effort in your software? Surely they’re worth serving, no?
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Oof, not feeling great today. Tired and spaced out. Hope I’m not coming down with something. 😩
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Adding A Sidebar To A Tiny Theme Micro.blog
This is now a standalone Micro.blog Plugin called Sidebar For Tiny Theme which adds support for this out of the box. The method documented below no longer works, but I'm keeping it here for posterity reason.
I’d though I’d write a little about how I added a sidebar with recommendations to my Tiny Theme’ed Micro.blog, for anyone else interested in doing likewise. For an example on how this looks, please see this post, or just go to the home page of this site.
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Blogroll ported to Micro.blog and placed in a sidebar on the post list screen using Tiny Theme Microhooks. I’ve yet to port the Blogroll page, and may trim some of the recommendations appearing in the sidebar, but not bad for a first pass.
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Spent the last two hours combing through logs trying to find the root cause of a problem, only to solve it by just restarting a random Kubernetes pod out of desperation. If this is not the modern day, software equivalent to bashing the side of your TV to get a picture, I don’t know what is.
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🎵 Stationary Loops, by Lee Rosevere
Bought when I needed a few screenshots of Alto but growing to like it. Quite nice ambient chill out music. Got hints of Tangerine Dream and Jene-Michel Jarre.
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Alto
Date: 2020 — present
Status: Rockin'
The year was 2020. The pandemic was just beginning and I was stuck at home, not being able to do much of anything. Worse, rumours came around that Google was shutting down Google Play Music, my music player of choice. They were going to force everyone onto their streaming service instead. Oh, they may have a place for all the music you’ve downloaded (or written) yourself, but not in the first version. Maybe they’ll get to it later.
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Hmm, this is a new one. Apparently Telstra is blocking the site to Whisky app for some reason. Going to the website gave me this:
Suspecting that the Whiskey devs just got their certificate missconfigured, I tried viewing the source using
curl --insecure. Here’s what I found:
We blocked this website because it may contain malicious content and could be harmful to your devices.
You haven’t done anything wrong. We automatically block potentially dangerous websites. We recommend you leave this website.
[…]
Copyright © 2023 TelstraI’ve submitted a request to unblock it just now. I’m suspect this to just be a mistake but I am curious to know how it got blocked in the first place.
I did manage to get Whisky via a VPN.
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Photo Bucket Update: Exporting To Zip
Worked a little more on Photo Bucket this week. Added the ability to export the contents of an instance to a Zip file. This consist of both images and metadata.
I’ve went with lines of JSON file for the image metadata. I considered a CSV file briefly, but for optional fields like captions and custom properties, I didn’t like the idea of a lot of empty columns. Better to go with a format that’s a little more flexible, even if it does mean more text per line.
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I’ve being reading several posts from Aaron Francis recently around doing work and talking about it in public. All really good posts on the topic, particularly this one I’ve read a while ago which still resonates with me today.
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It’s always better to go outside if you can, even if it’s just for a bit. You may feel crappy, and feel resistant to do so. And it’s not like going outside will solve the problems you’re facing. But you will feel better, or at least you won’t feel worse.
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People say AWS is expensive, but somethings it’s worth it. We’ve been seeing one of our pods crash randomly the last few nights because it’s loosing connection to a self-hosted NATS cluster. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be experiencing this if we just used SNS and SQS.
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Enjoyed the discussion about AI and independence on Ruminate #179. I agree with Robb and John: websites created by people will definitely have a leg up amongst all the sites that are little more than AI generated “content”. 🎙️
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Photo Bucket Update: More On Galleries
Spent a bit more time working on Photo Bucket this last week1, particularly around galleries. They’re progressing quite well. I’m made some strides in getting two big parts of the UI working now: adding and removing images to galleries, and re-ordering gallery items via drag and drop.
I’ll talk about re-ordering first. This was when I had to bite the bullet and start coding up some JavaScript. Usually I’d turn to Stimulus for this but I wanted to give HTML web components a try. And so far, they’ve been working quite well.
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