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Self-Driving Bicycle for The Mind
While listening to the Stratchery interview with Hugo Berra, a thought occurred to me. Berra mentioned that Xaomi was building an EV. Not a self-driving one, mind you: this one has a steering wheel and peddles. He made the comment that were Apple to actually go through with releasing a car, it would look a lot like what Xaomi has built. I haven’t seen either car project myself so I’ll take his word for it. Continue reading →
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From @jarrod:
You’re likely familiar with the Navy SEAL mantra of “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” I propose one more line: “And fast is fun.”
We’re going through a crunch at the moment, taking out a fair bit of tech debt in what we’re building. And it occurred to me that going slow might be slow now, but it’ll allow you to go fast later. On the other hand, you can go fast now, but it’ll slow you down in the long run. That tech debt will come due eventually.
So I guess the choice is, when do you want to go slow? Now or later?
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I should stop trying to multitask. What happens is that I kick off something that takes some time, and instead of just wait for it, I start work on something else only to forget the original task I started first. I should just wait the few minutes it takes for that task to finish.
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Release version 1.1.1 of Sidebar for Tiny Theme. You’ll need to upgrade Tiny Theme to version 2.7.4 or later to use it, but the good news is that it’s no longer replacing any templates of Tiny Theme itself. It’s all now working with hooks, which is a much nicer way of doing things (thanks, @mtt).
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There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit still to be picked in Numbers in MacOS. The basic stuff, like opening two worksheets of the same file side-by-side, or in different windows. Might be that code editors with tabs spoiled me with capability, but I can see this generally being helpful for others.
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Enjoying the latest ShopTalk about home cooked apps. What an amazing term for it: perfect. Also good to know that I’m not alone in doing this. 🎙️
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Canberra Railway Museum
Went to the Canberra Railway Museum this morning. Quite a wide variety of locomotives and carriages being restored, with many of them quite accessible to guests, including the cabin. Here’s a selection of the more interesting sites. Continue reading →
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🔗 Insanity in the Air: The crash of Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303
A facinating post. One of those posts where you know the writer knows what they’re talking about, and has clearly done a lot of research for the piece. Will definitely take a look at their other posts.
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Picnic train, now boarding. 🚂
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Currently in Ron Finemore territory (namely the Hume Fwy near Gundagai). 🚛
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On Post Headers
My answer to @mandaris question: How many of you are using headers in your blogging? Are you using anything that denotes different sections? I generally don’t use headers, unless the post is so long it needs them to break it up a little. When I do, I tend to start with H2, then step down to H3, H4, etc. I’d love to start with H1, but most themes I encounter, including those from software like Confluence, style H1 to be almost the same size as the page title. Continue reading →
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Was running into issues trying to buy a hamper from an online store in the UK. Turns out it was because one of the hamper items was alcoholic. I guess they’re not interested in dealing with the customs, and the associated headaches, in getting that over here.
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Sorting And Go Slices
Word of caution for anyone passing Go slices to a function which will sort them. Doing so as is will modify the original slice. If you were to write this, for example: package main import ( "fmt" "sort" ) func printSorted(ys []int) { sort.Slice(ys, func(i, j int) bool { return ys[i] < ys[j] }) fmt.Println(ys) } func main() { xs := []int{3, 1, 2} printSorted(xs) fmt.Println(xs) } You will find, when you run it, that both xs and ys will be sorted: Continue reading →
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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!
