๐Ÿ”— Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

A really great read.

Iโ€™ve never been on a cruise. This, plus the many jokes Iโ€™ve heard from comedians that have worked cruises, is probably the closest experience Iโ€™ll ever get to cruising. After reading it, itโ€™s definitely not for me.

Oof, glad I bought an unbrella. Even if itโ€™s a $10 piece of junk with half the stretchers broken. At least half of me will be dry after the walk home. โ˜”๏ธ

๐ŸŽฅ I’ve released a video tutorial on how to use and configure the Sidebar For Tiny Theme. This walks through the process of creating and using a custom Micro.blog theme to configure the sidebar with custom HTML. Hope others find it useful.

It strikes me as odd seeing articles from those that continue to mourn the loss of Twitter and complain about itโ€™s owner, only to go on and continue to use Twitter.

Of course, Iโ€™m the one that continues to read these articles. So whoโ€™s really the odd person here? ๐Ÿ˜

Day 6: windy

Sails of modernity. #mbapr

Modern power generating windmills in a field.

Day 5: serene

The Remarkables, Queenstown, NZ. Taken March 2013. #mbapr

The Remarkables, Queenstown, NZ with a bit of vegetation in the foreground and Lake Wakatipu in the middle.

Vivaldi can learn a thing or two from Safari about being able to copy and paste a HTML table into a spreadsheet. Safari does quite well here:

Screenshot of Numbers for MacOS of a well-formatted paste of the AWS RDS DB instance details table copied from Safari

Vivaldi, not so much:

Screenshot of Numbers for MacOS of a badly-formatted paste of the AWS RDS DB instance details table copied from Vivaldi. Instead of the cells of a row from the original table being formatted as a row, each cell appears on a new row

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.

This led to the thought that it was well within Apple’s existing capability to release a car. They would’ve had to skill up in automotive engineering, but they can hire people to do that. What they couldn’t do was all the self-driving stuff. No-one can do that yet, and it seems to me that being unable to deliver on this non-negotiable requirement was one of the things that doomed the project. Sure there were others โ€” seems like they were lacking focus in a number of other areas โ€” but this seems like a big one.

This led to the next thought, which is why Apple thought it was ever a good idea to actually have the car self-driving. What’s wrong with having one driven by the user? Seems like this was a very un-Apple-like product decision. Has Apple ever been good a releasing tech that would replace, rather than augment, the user’s interaction with the device? Do they have phones that would browse the web for you? Have they replaced ZSH with ChatGPT in MacOS (heaven forbid). Probably the only product that comes close is Siri, and we all know what a roaring success that is.

Apple’s strength is in releasing products that keep human interaction a central pillar of it’s design. They should just stick with that, and avoid any of the self-driving traps that come up. It’s a “bicycle for a mind” after all: the human is still the one doing the peddling.

Day 4: foliage

Spot the visitors. #mbapr

A photo of green leaves against a blue sky with corellas eating in the branches

From @jarrod:

Youโ€™re likely familiar with the Navy SEAL mantra of โ€œSlow is smooth, and smooth is fast.โ€ I propose one more line: โ€œAnd fast is fun.โ€

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?

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.

๐Ÿ“บ Andor: Series 1 (2022)

Quick review of Andor: Series 1 (2022), created by Tony Gilroy. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm generally a fan of Star Wars but the level of story telling that went into this made it so much better. It's not perfect โ€” Andor's arc felt a little fragmented (he was sent to prison forโ€ฆ reasons? That had nothing to do with the garrison?) โ€” but it didn't detract from the whole. Other than the plot, the acting, casting, scoring, etc. were all excellent. Definitely recommend. Rated: great

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).

Day 3: card #mbapr

A Thank You card with coloured balloons printed on the front, on a wooden table.

Day 2: flowers #mbapr

Flowers in a vase on a table in an old fashioned dining car.

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.

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. ๐ŸŽ™๏ธ

Day 1: toy #mbapr

A model train set.

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. Hereโ€™s a selection of the more interesting sites.

๐Ÿ”— 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 theyโ€™re talking about, and has clearly done a lot of research for the piece. Will definitely take a look at their other posts.