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Updating Bocce Scorecard
I didn’t get to a lot of side-project work this week, but I did have to make a large change to a project we use to track scores for our “bocce club”. So I’d though I’d say a few words about that today.
We had our bocce “grand final” a few weeks ago, and one of the matches resulted in a tie between two players. Unfortunately, the Bocce Scorecard web-app I build could not properly handle these, which meant that I had to fix it.
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Doing some changes for a hobby software project I’ve made for a few friends. The whole “software is never finished” can be a drag sometimes: you’re forever on the hook to make changes. But I guess the flip side of that is that your friends find value in what you built. Otherwise, they wouldn’t ask.
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Doing some web UI development at work. It’s actually kind of nice doing complex UI work again: fussing about colour and layout, playing with apps like Sip and xScope. You don’t get to do that when you’re working with servers and AWS.
Of course, it’s only nice because someone took the time to setup a working React development environment. I probably would be enjoying it half as much as I am if I had to do all that as well.
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For anyone else that needs to know, if you need to look at the API docs for Deno, you’d want to go to Docs → API. Don’t go to Modules → Standard Library. That has the docs as well but arranged by the source file they appear in, which is useless to you unless you need the import statement.
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Now that in-person events are happening again, tech meetups are beginning to cross my radar once more; and so too is the tension between feeling I should go to them to, you know, “make connections” vs. being a shy introvert that rather stays away from others. Fun.
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🔗 The Command Line Is the GUI’s Future
It has always been a truism that what we have gained in ease of use by switching from the command line to the graphical user interface, we have lost in efficiency.
[…]
What Microsoft just showed completely changes this calculation. Their LLM-based user interface is both incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to use. In fact, it’s so easy to use that there almost seems no point in even having a traditional GUI.
Swings and roundabouts. 😏
Honestly, it’s kind of exciting to see the two UI styles married this way. Point and click is fine, but sometimes, when I know what I want, I just want a way to “tell” the computer what to do, rather than go through the motions “guiding” it to my desired state. This is why I prefer the command line over a GUI for certain tasks. And yeah, Office has scripting but unless you’re in there constantly, you find yourself relearning it every time. Having a prompt like this might be where the sweet-spot lies.
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Having an AI write code for you is less interesting than having an AI that ingests all the code across an entire organisation, then allows you to describe a problem you’re experiencing (this service times out when taking to that service) and it suggests a fix. Really could’ve used that this morning.
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In today’s look at the Spam folder: some emails from Amazon’s Alexa Dev. Rel. team. Given all the recent layoffs in that division, I’m surprised I’m still getting these. They can’t completely shut it down, true, but are they still serious about keeping it alive that they’ll try get new developers? 🤷
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Reheating Chicken Schnitzel in a Microwave
Some tips for heating up chicken schnitzel that you had for dinner in a 1.1 kW microwave for lunch the next day. This is something I occasionally do, and today I found a process that works that I’d like to document for the future.
First, don’t use the high setting on the microwave. A minute at high will heat the schnitzel up, but would also harden the crumbling, making it rubbery and unpleasent to eat. Even worst is using a plate instead of a container. That would ruin the meat even more and make a mess of your microwave.
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Getting some pretty strange spam emails sent to my Gmail address (which I still use). It’s the same badly formatted multi-MIME message body with different From and Subject lines. They’re trying to get… something from me? Logins, maybe? Worst phishing attempt ever!
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Updates To Dynamo-Browse And CCLM
I started this week fearing that I’d have very little to write today. I actually organised some time off over the weekend where I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on side projects. But the week started with a public holiday, which I guess acted like a bit of a time offset, so some things did get worked on.
That said, most of the work done was starting or continuing things in progress, which is not super interesting at this stage. I’ll hold off on talking about those until there’s a little more there. But there were a few things that are worth mentioning.
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One of the photos I was going to use in my last post was this photo, which was modified using Google’s Magic Eraser. You can compare this with the original photo in that post (it had two people in it). It’s far from perfect, but it’s still quite impressive.
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Photos Of Churchill Island
Yesterday, my parents and I went to Churchill Island for afternoon tea and a walk around the homestead. Here are a few photos of that outing. Apologies that some of them are not great — they were taken in a bit of a hurry.
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Rode an eBike for the first time today. Can definitely recommend. Even with the assist engaged at the lowest level, it made a huge difference going up hills. Great fun.
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My first experience with a distributed SCM systems was Mercurial. Running
hg branchcreated a new branch and automatically switched you over to it.When I moved to Git, I occasionally fell into the trap of typing
git branchand expecting to change over to the new branch. I fell for this quite often for a long time, for several years at least. It was happening frequently enough that I actually hacked Git to tell me that I haven’t actually changed branches yet:$ git branch xyz-123 Branch 'xyz-123' created, but you're still on 'develop'I’m using OhMyZSH now, which shows the current branch in the prompt. This has helped a great deal, and I fall for this much less often than I used to.
And yes, I know about
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Using tools I’ve built to help me at work and all I see are features not implemented. Never-mind that the tool didn’t even exist a year ago. It exists now, so why doesn’t it do the thing I need it to do at this exact time? A person’s expectation is just insatiable, I guess. 😏
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It’s amazing what a difference going to the gym can make. This afternoon I was feeling so lethargic, like all I wanted to do was crawl into bed. But I decided to crawl to the gym instead. I really didn’t want to, and I usually don’t go Mondays so I had an excuse not to. But I’m so glad I did because afterwards I got my energy back and I was eager to just do stuff.
Partial credit goes to coffee. It also helped with getting over the slump.
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Photos of Fitzroy Gardens, while we play our bocce comp. grand final. Perfect weather for it. Also lots of weddings going on.
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Dev Log - 2023-03-12
Preamble
When I moved Working Set over to Micro.blog, I’d thought I’d be constantly writing micro-posts about what I’m working on, as a form of working in public. I found that didn’t really work for me, for a few reasons.
I’ve got a strange relationship with this blog. I wanted a place online to write about the projects I’ve been working on, but every time I publish something here, I always get the feeling that I’m “showing off” in some way: ooh, look what I’ve done, aren’t I cleaver? And okay, I’d be lying if there’s not a part of me that wants others to see how I spend my time. If I didn’t want that, I’d be content with these posts existing in a private journal.
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It took me a while to get use to it but I’ve grown to like The Verge homepage redesign. Having the micro-posts there seems to work well, especially considering that certain microblogging services have effectively cut off API access.
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I know UI designers like using either Sketch or Figma — and after signing up to Figma this week, I can see why. But I’m going to give a shout-out to Balsamiq Wireframes (nee Balsamiq Mockups). I’ve found it to be a great tool for demonstrating a proposed layout for a UI without worrying too much about the details. It’s so quick to put together and the hand-drawn motif makes it clear that the drawn UI is just a concept.
I also love how they use text to represent visual content. An example is items in a table-view: instead of using the mouse to draw each row by hand, you configured it by effectively typing out a CSV with some Markdown. Use commas to separate the columns, use
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Do sites that just load their articles with (video) ads, pop-overs, requests for emails, etc. see any improvements in their metrics after doing this (more clicks, longer visit times, more ad revenue)? Or are the just in a cycle of diminishing returns and think that adding more crap will help?
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🔗 After 6 long months, an Android phone finally cloned the iPhone 14
The screen-shots of this “mini capsule” are hillarous. The animated waves that appear when the capsule is expanded; the fact that the only thing it can display is the battery level since there’s nothing like Live Actions. The capper is the “90%” on the right side of the capsule, right next to the 90 in the battery indicator. You know, just in case you need reminding that the battery is at 90%. Champions indeed!
Hilarity aside, it’s a little sad seeing these Android OEMs doing everything they can to rip off Apple’s design. And it’s not just those in the long tail of OEMs either. Seeing Samsung half-arse features months after they debut on the iPhone, just to abandon them months later is really cringeworthy (anyone remember “AR Emoji”, their rip-off of Animoji). It’s past time they developed some taste on their own.
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Hiding Your Attachment Folder In Obsidian's Outline
A useful little CSS snippet for anyone using Obsidian that wants to hide their attachment folder from their outline.
.nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"], .nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"] + .nav-folder-children { display: none; }To use:
- Go to the directory
$VAULT/.obsidian/snippetswhere$VAULTis the directory of you vault. If thesnippetsdirectory doesn’t exist, create it. - Copy the CSS snippet into a new CSS file.
- Open you vault settings and go to Appearance.
- Scroll to the bottom to where you see CSS snippets.
- Click the reload button. You should see the CSS file you’ve just created appear in the list. Turn it on to apply it.
This’ll work if you’ve configured Obsidian to store attachments in a folder called “Attachments” located at the root of your vault, like I do. But I suspect the
Continue reading →data-pathattribute holds the folder’s path so you could use whatever CSS attribute selector you need based on how you’ve configured attachments. For example,[data-path*="/Files"]selector will probably work if you’ve configured attachments to be in folders called “Files” that sits alongside your notes (I haven’t tested this so YMMV). - Go to the directory
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Working with some GitHub access tokens last night left me wondering why there’s no way to just renew an expired token. Dealing with the secret is not as tedious as dealing with the token permissions. Get that wrong and you’ve wasted several minutes of work.
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Completed the release of Dynamo-Browse 0.2.0. Most of the work in the last week was updating the manual, especially the scripting API. Some more updates need to be made for the query expressions as well, but I’ll publish what I have now and update that over time.
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It’s 2023 now, and I still hate code reviews.
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Seeing Mastodon posts from Jason Snell about his trip to Aotearoa New Zealand prompted me to check when I travelled to Queenstown for a holiday. It was 10 years ago to the day: 7th March 2013. Would love to go back there again some day.
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Follow-up from my earlier post about ChatGTP this morning, it turns out I probably should’ve RTFM:
Thanks to @andreab@social.lol for the tip.
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Oh, AWS. Once again your brilliant UX design chops shine through in the products you release. I always wondered why copying an API keys from an SSO login session took just one click. It’s great that it now takes two, plus a whole lot more reading of small text. 😒
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Remember in Gödel, Escher, Bach when they were saying that a (then) theoretical AI is less like a calculator and more akin to the human mind; and just like the human mind is likely to produce errors in the answers it gives? Well…
For reference, macOS Ventura is the current latest release.
Update: Turn’s out the reason for this is that ChatGTP’s data-set only goes back to Nov 2021. See follow-up post.
P.S. I know this is not new news, but experiencing this this morning just got me thinking of GEB.
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I wish more app developers built websites for their apps.
There are many benefits in doing so. It’ll allow others to see what the app does without getting kicked out of the browser and shoved to an app store, or when they’re using a device that can’t even access the app store.
It’ll also give others a nice URL that can be linked to or bookmarked. I’m sure App Store URLs are stable, but I wouldn’t call them “nice”. Not much meaning in a URL like apps.apple.com/us/app/id413897608.
I can appreciate that this is asking a fair bit. And I get it: after making websites for a few open-source projects, I know how painful and time consuming they can be to put together.
But I think there’s still value in having a simple, single page website for an app, especially when it’s gained enough traction that people are writing about it. It doesn’t even need to be a standalone site, a blog post would be just as good. But something more than just a listing on the App Store.
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Evidence that I didn’t sleep well last night: for a split second I thought this was actually a note I made. I even remarked as to how neat I made it.
The neatness is what eventually tipped me off. None of my notes look as good.
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A lot of track work going on this weekend. I enjoy seeing these trucks that can go both on roads and rails. You don’t want to be waiting for them to transition, though. It’s usually done at level crossings and they don’t rush it.
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Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for workingset.net/2022/12/2… my Chips Challenge “fan game” I’ve been working on.
I’ve been designing a few levels for it recently, but since moving to a new Mac, the level editor I was using was going to be difficult to port. It’s QT application and the QT bindings were a pain to setup, and I rather not go through that again. I was using a Mac at the time I started working on it, but I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on MacOS. So to hedge my bets, I decided to go with QT as the UI toolkit.
This was 5 years ago and I’m unlikely to go back to Linux, so choosing QT was a bit of a bad decision. I think if I had my time again, I’d go with something like AppKit.
Anyway, the level editor still works but I have to log into a screen share to use it. I’d like to be able to edit levels on the machine I’m using now.
The code for the original level editor was still around but it hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s basically an SDL application — the same graphics library I’m using for the actual game itself — and the SDL v2 bindings I’m using are still maintained, so updating those were quite easy1.
One thing I did have to pull out was the Lua VM2. The editor was using old C Lua bindings. Better Lua VMs written in pure Go are now available, so I didn’t want to keep using these old bindings anymore. In fact, I didn’t want to use Lua at all. Lua was originally used for the level scripts, but I replaced this in favour of another language (which is no longer maintained 😒, but I’m not changing it again).
The original CCLM Editor So far the editor boots up, but that’s about it. I can move the cursor around but I can’t add new tiles or load existing levels. There seems to be some weird things going on with the image name lookup. I originally thought image name were case insensitive, but after looking at the image name lookup logic in the game itself, I’m not so sure.
How much time I’d like to spend on this is still a bit of a question. It all depends whether I’d like to release the game itself in some fashion. There are still questions about whether I’m allowed to, given that the graphics are not my own. Still need to think about that.
But in any case, good to see the old editor again.
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To Wordpress Or Not To Wordpress
I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.
I’ve been asked to setup a new website for someone who wants to stand up a new business. In therory this is something that I can do quite easily. I know HTML and CSS. I’ve made a living building backends for web-apps. I do have an undeveloped eye for design, but I like to think I have an idea of the principal of good website usability; and as long as I’m not too ambitious, and aim for a minimal usable site, I can probably put together a simple static website.
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