• Caught up on the WWDC announcements (did Ars Technica have a live blog this year? Must’ve missed it). The scratch maths feature for the iPad looks pretty good. If my Apple Pencil wasn’t always flat, I’d definitely make use of it.

  • The view from the top of Mount Rogers Reserve.

    Auto generated description: A scenic landscape showcases grassy fields and shrubs in the foreground, with a backdrop of rolling hills, distant mountains, and a clear blue sky.
  • To get to Bundanoon from Canberra you have to drive past Lake George. I’ve always seen it empty but yesterday I saw it with water, so I had to stop and take a photo.

    A calm, expansive body of water stretches towards a distant shoreline with rolling hills under a clear blue sky, with a rocky shoreline and some vegetation in the foreground.
  • Day Trip to Bundanoon

    Decided to go on a day trip to Bundanoon today. It’s been five years since I last visited and I remember liking the town enough that I thought it’d be worth visiting again. It’s not close, around 1 hour and 40 minutes from Canberra, but it not far either and I thought it would be a nice way to spend the day. Naturally, others agreed, which I guess explains why it was busier than I expected, what with the long weekend and all. Continue reading →

  • I enabled notifications on Vintage Logo as I wanted to be notified when new logo designs were release. Today I got two nusience notifications prompting me to open the app, the last one raise mere hours after I last launched it. So now I’ve turned off notifications. Why do apps do this to themselves?

  • Photos of the poor patient, sitting next to the clumsy human. Rest assured, she’s getting a course of pain killers, plus a lot of apology head scratches.

    Auto-generated description: A small white and gray bird is nestled between the cushions of a dark leather seat next to one leg of a pair of tanned trousers. Auto-generated description: A small white and gray cockatiel with a prominent crest is perched on a dark leather couch between two cushions next to one leg of a pair of tanned trousers.
  • Bit of a stressful morning, involving injuries and unplanned visits to the vet. Things are well now, and the tension is starting to dissipate. But what a way to spend the morning. 😮‍💨

    Yellow tea-towel on a display with the phrase 'I need a hug' in large letters, followed by 'huge margarita' in small letters. The first three letters of 'huge' were borrowed from the word 'hug'.
  • Working with PostgreSQL is an absolute joy. Such an amazing database. Just goes to show that the fun tech out there is not always the new and shiny. The battled hardened, featureful, bread-and-butter tools that tends to get overlooked can be just as good (Linux falls into that category as well).

    Created using Vintage Logo: a poster with a vintage car and the headline ‘PostgreSQL’ and sub-headline ‘Still Effin’ Amazing’.
  • 👨‍💻 New post on AWS over at Coding Bits: AWS Secrets Manager Cached Credentials Error

  • Attempting to give head scratches while recording video is more difficult than it looks. 🦜

  • Speaking of bad UIs, volià: my first attempt at building something with Gio:

    A screenshot of a window with the title Gio, a connection header, a left pane showing a NATS message to send, and a right pane showing messages that can be received

    It doesn’t do anything now, but I’m hoping this will be something I can use to test NATS. I will say Gio shows promise. Not a huge range of controls to use, but having everything run in a single memory address is nice.

  • An Unfair Critique Of OS/2 UI Design From 30 Years Ago

    A favourite YouTube channel of mine is Michael MJD, who likes to explore retro PC products and software from the 90s and early 2000s. Examples of these include videos on Windows 95, Windows 98, and the various consumer tech products designed to get people online. Can I just say how interesting those times were, where phrases such as “surfing the net” were thrown about, and where shopping centres were always used to explain visiting websites. Continue reading →

  • I found this video on the failure of the Star Wars Hotel by Jenny Nicholson to be absolutely fascinating. A great example of Disney enshittification and promising more then they can deliver. Many of her other videos are great as well (I actually went on a binge session over the weekend). 📺

  • 👨‍💻 New post on Go over at Coding Bits: Disabling Parallel Test Runs In Go

  • My Pile-Up Poker result for today = $840.00. Decent result for a first game.

    Pile-up poker result screen

    Also, I’m not sure if sharing my actual “solution” is consider a spoiler, so click through to see that.

  • Some More Thoughts On Unit Testing

    Kinda want to avoid this blog descending into a series of “this is wrong with unit testing” posts, but something did occur to me this morning. We’ve kicked off a new service at work recently. It’s just me and this other developer working on it at the moment, and it’s given us the opportunity to try out this “mockless” approach to testing, of which I ranted about a couple of weeks ago (in fact, the other developer is the person I had that discussion with). Continue reading →

  • I’m not on Threads but I do click through sometimes to post shared on Mastodon, and I’m a little confused by the web-based video player. It auto-plays, which is annoying enough, but it does so with the sound off and there’s no way to pause or scrub back to the beginning. Is that by design? Do I just have to always refresh the page whenever I want to watch something just so I don’t miss the beginning? Very strange.

  • Must say I’m really enjoying M. G. Siegler’s new blog Spyglass. I’ve liked pretty much every post I’ve read so far. Definitely worth subscribing to.

  • “What about your Savoys, Mrs. D?”

    Auto generated description: A supermarket shelf displays various brands of crackers, including Arnott's Jatz, Ritz, and Clix, with a price tag indicating $5.50 for one of the products.
  • A black swan event.

    (And yes, I took this photo just so I can use this caption).

    Auto generated description: A black swan with a red beak is swimming in a body of water near a concrete step.
  • Returned to Tuggeranong this morning for breakfast and a walk around the lake. Really enjoy going to “Tuggers” when I’m in ACT. I can’t quite explain it, but I always get New Zealand vibes whenever I visit.

    Auto generated description: A tranquil lakeside scene features autumnal trees, still waters reflecting the landscape, and a backdrop of rolling hills under a cloudy sky.
  • If Slack’s looking for features to add, my vote would be for personal “annotation” messages in threads, similar to what Hey mail has. Many a time I receive a support request as a Slack thread, and it’d be nice to add notes such as customer IDs as a message that only I can see.

    Here’s a mockup:

    A concept mock-up of a Slack thread showing interaction between a support person and the author, with the private note message highlighted in yellow with the disclosure 'only visible to you'

    Edit: I knew I talked about this before. And looking through On This Day, I found this post, where I professed my wish for FastMail to add the same feature. Probably a good hint that such a feature should be table steaks for any system involving other people.

  • New offering at the Cockatiel Cafe: the “breakfast bar”. 🦜

    Auto-generated description: Two cockatiels are standing on a kitchen bench scattered with seeds, with one bird near the edge and another closer to the middle.  Auto-generated description: Two cockatiels, the same two shown on the previous photo, are eating scattered seeds on the kitchen bench.
  • 👨‍💻 New post on Databases over at Coding Bits: PostgreSQL, pgx, sqlc and bytea

  • Wish TLDraw offered a cylinder shape. I know my needs are quite niche, but I really like using this app for back-of-the-napkin architecture diagrams of software systems, and having a cylinder shape to represent a database or queue would really come in handy.