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Leon Mika
Software engineer in Melbourne, Australia.

  • TIL you can enter a photo description in Google Photos. Select a photo, click the Info icon, and a free-text “description” field is revealed. Not super sure what the description is to be used for, but I’m hoping to use it for photo captions.

    Screenshot of Google Photos in Safari with the info plane reveal and a sample description entered just above the photo metadata. The sample description reads: This is a description. I guess it can be used as a caption if you want it to.

    Screenshots

  • caffeinate.me

    A bit of nonsense I made while fighting off jet-lag. Built using mmm.page.

  • Tip for anyone traveling to Australia via Dubai: do not buy a bottle of water to drink on the plane. Drink it before you board, otherwise it will get confiscated at the gate.

    And yeah, this just happened to me. And yeah, I’m kinda annoyed by this. šŸ™

  • Last day in Switzerland, and indeed Europe. Did little aside from seeing a bit of ZĆ¼rich. I enjoyed my visit, but it’s good to be heading back home.

  • Nerding out at the Swiss Transport Museum, in Luzern. Super interesting! Can definitely recommend.

    A collection of stem locomotives in an exhibition centre. Tail of a Swiss Air aeroplane Cross-section of the Gotthard Base Tunnel outside exhibit.

    Photos

  • Mark one more off the bucket list: travelling through the Gotthard Base Tunnel.

    A picture of a monitor inside a train carriage with some logos below it. The monitor has the following message: World Record! We are now travelling through the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which will take around 20 minutes. At 57 kilometres, this is the world's longest railway tunnel.

    Photos

  • Hired a car and spent my last full day in Italy exploring a bit of the wider Veneto region. Visited the town my grandparents grew up in and also went on a small bush-walk up at Cansiglio Forest. The landscape was absolutely breathtaking. The photos I took do it no justice (and I took a lot of them).

    An alpine forest track, with a paddock with a small building on the left side, and a pine forrest on the right and middle distance. In the background are some mountains, with bare peaks that have a little bit of snow.

    Photos

  • I know Venice is known for its canals, and they’re certainly something to behold, but this single rail tram-line blew me away.

    A red tram approaching tram-stop with the track consisting of a single rail.

    Edit: it occurred to me that these ā€œtramsā€ are running on regular tiers, and use this rail for the return current. That means they can get away with using just one overhead wire instead of two. I guess they can also use the rail for guiding the vehicle around curves as well? Seems like a bit of a disadvantage over other trolly-bus systems with trolly polls that can move around traffic.

    Photos

  • Venice in the morning.

    The grand canal of Venice with two boats and a Bastille in the background, with a slightly cloudy sky.

    Photos

  • Vincentā€™s post about Tinylytics recognising www sub-domains is a welcome one. Iā€™ve had a domain setup for a week in Tinylytics that was recording zero hits. I thought it was because I placed the script tag in the header. But, no: I naturally forgot the ā€œwwwā€ when registering the URL. šŸ¤¦

  • Dealing with the coin laundry driers suck. You buy more time by putting more money in, but the laundry points don’t make it clear that you’ve already paid for time and all you need to do is press start on the machine. I paid for drier time I didn’t want twice on this trip.

  • I was wondering what to do for my second day in Bologna until something told me that Florence was less than an hour away. So I decided to take a day trip.

    Florence skyline, with the dome of the cathedral, and buildings alongside the river.

    Photos

  • Spent a bit of time in the small but lovely university botanical gardens in Bologna this morning. Walking around a new city, Iā€™ve found myself being attracted to parks and gardens. A bit more serene than the hussle and bussle one finds at buildings or squares.

    Under the shade of green trees of various species.

    Photos

  • Breakfast in Parma. Naturally parmesan cheese is on the menu.

    Plate on a place-mat with a wholemeal dinner roll, some parmesan cheese, slice of Jarlsberg cheese, and prosciutto. A silver knife and fork are beside it.

    Photos

  • Helped someone set up their eSim this morning. His phone only allowed an eSim setup by scanning a QR code, so I had to take a photo of the Airalo QR code, just so he could take a photo of my photo. The process worked, but the experience was utter crap (fix your software, Samsung).

  • Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, in Parma, on a warm and lazy Sunday afternoon. The street was closed off for an event but most of the other streets were just as quiet.

    Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, a two story palace made of yellow stone, with a clock tower in the center. The front consists of umbrellas for outdoor dining of the cafe. In front of that is a street made of cobblestones, surrounded by bollards, and with trolly-bus overhead wires. The sky was sunny and cloudless.

    Photos

  • On the shore of lake Como. Plenty of boat activity on the water today. For myself, I was happy to stay on dry land.

    Lake Como, a large body of water with some small waves, with a fountain in the middle distance, with green mountains in the background, with a slightly cloudy sky

    Photos

  • Oof! It looks like one of my friends I’m traveling with, the one who did all the planning and was the most enthusiastic about seeing the places we’re visiting, has come down with something and is out for the day. Poor guy. I feel so bad for him. Really unfortunate timing.

  • View from the top of Torre Castello San Vigilto, in Bergamo.

    Houses near the terracotta tiled roofs near the top of a hill, in the near distance, with mountains in the background

    Photos

  • On the subject of Google Maps, I think itā€™s time the app had something akin to tabs, so we can have multiple instances of Google Maps at one time. If I have a journey in progress, and I need to search for something at our destination, the only way I know how to do it is to stop the active journey, do the search, and start the journey again from scratch (which involves entering all the details again).

    Iā€™ve started getting around this by opening Google Maps in a browser tab, but itā€™s just not as good as the mobile app. Having separate map tabs would go a long way here: have the active journey in one tab, do searches in another, and simply switch between them without loosing anything. You could even use it to plan jouneys in advanced, then when youā€™re ready to start them, just go to the tab and tap ā€œStartā€.

    A resonably elegant solution to avoid backing out of active navigations or typing things in three or four times.

  • TIL you can save planned journeys in Google Maps for later. You make the plan, select a suggestion from the list, and instead of starting it, you ā€œPinā€ it. Then you can recall that journey from the ā€œGoā€ tab. Not the most intuitive UI there is, but Iā€™m glad that this feature exists.

  • A day of site-seeing around Milan. Going through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on our way to Duomo di Milano, the cathedral.

    The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, an open air mall with four spokes eminating from a central point. Around three stories up is a glass ceiling with a dome at the central spot. This was taken from one of the longer spokes, facing the dome and the opposite long spoke that opens out to the plaza.

    Another sunning building, the Duomo di Milano. A lot more ā€œtraditionalā€ than the Sagrada FamĆ­lia but still very impressive.

    Inside the Duomo di Milano, the cathedral. Looking through the stone pillers and valted ceiling towards the alter and stain glass window at the back of the cathedral.

    Photos

  • On The Reddit Strike

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Long Form Posts

    Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday: Reddit is miffed that Google and OpenAI are taking its data, but Huffman and team didnā€™t create that data: Redditā€™s users did, under the watchful eyes of Redditā€™s unpaid mod workforce. In other words, my strong suspicion is that what undergirds everything that is happening this week is widespread angst and irritation that everything that was supposed to be special about the web, particularly the bit where it gives everyone a voice, has turned out to be nothing more than grist to be fought over by millionaires and billionaires. Continue reading ā†’

  • Arrived in Milan. It could just be the trams, but this feels like the closest city to Melbourne that Iā€™ve visited so far. Of course, Melbourne doesnā€™t have buildings like the Castello Sforzesco.

    Front of Castello Sforzesco, a castle, with a large tower above the front gate, with a slightly cloudy sky

    Photos

  • This safe uses a curious choice of font for the keypad. I’d guess they wanted to go with something more interesting than boring Helvetica? But they didn’t go all in with maintaining the allusion, breaking it for the B, which would normally be shown in lower-case on a real seven segment display.

    A numerical keypad on a safe with digits 0-9 and the letters A and B on either side of the zero in a seven segment display font. The left side of the B is a solid line, used to distinguish it from the loops of the B which are represented as they would appear on a seven segmented display. To the left is the safe's breading, which is a T in a circle.

    Photos