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What would be a nice addition to the spell-check suggestions menu is a brief (3-5 words) definition of the word. I always find myself choosing the wrong suggestion, and a feature like this would help a lot.
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When I first saw John Gruber’s post post about Wavelength, I immediately dismissed it as yet another app I couldn’t use, forgetting that I actually do have devices I can try it on. So I’m trying out the Mac app now. First few minutes of using it: yeah, quite a nice app. We’ll see how we go with it.
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Currently reading: The Brand You 50 (Reinventing Work) by Tom Peters 📚
When three different bloggers you follow all write about the author retiring, you pay attention.
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First Posts Of The Day
It’s bit strange how the first post of the day can always feel like the hardest to get out. Every one after it is so much easier to write. I wonder if it’s because when faced with an empty text-box, there are these grand plans about what I’m going to write, as if everyone reading this is hanging on my every word: it’ll be my masterpiece of wit, inspiration, and insightfulness that will spread far and wide and blow the minds of everrryyywoonnneee1. Continue reading →
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Completely forgot how to commute properly. This is the second day this week I forget to bring my umbrella on a day with forecasted rain. I got lucky last time. Today, not so much. 🌧️
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Ugh! Mountains of work to do and only a week to do it all. Gonna be a bird-by-bird sort of day today. But first… coffee (well, coffee number two actually).
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Left work late and now caught in a train suspension due to an accident (someone got hit by a train). So… dining out this evening.
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Learnt a lot about digital video today. Fascinating stuff. Didn’t realise that frame rates can be non-integers (59.xx FPS). Turns out it’s a legacy of analogue TV, where they try to squeeze colour into bandwidth originally designed for a B&W signal. Shoehorns all the way down I guess.
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There are nice things about having separate IDEs for different languages — GoLand for Go, WebStorm for HTML+JS, etc. — but I can see the advantages of using a single one for everything. I was trying to resolve merge conflicts with my customised GoLand key-bindings and I was getting confused as they weren’t working. Turns out the reason was that I was actually using WebStorm, not GoLand.
The two IDEs are so alike I wonder if things like key-bindings shouldn’t just apply to all installed IDEs on a system. I guess since JetBrains is working on a brand new IDE it probably doesn’t matter at this stage.
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Love hearing from successful bloggers who’ve recently celebrated a major milestone (Manton, Ben Thompson, Kottke) that they thought that they were late to the party. Just shows that when you start is less important than just keeping at it.
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Got a small envelope with a US stamp delivered today. No idea what it was. Certainly wasn’t expecting anything.
(opens it up) Ah, my Incomparable membership notebook has arrived. How cool! I completely forgot about this, which makes it the best sort of mail to get.
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🔗 Google is killing most of Fitbit’s social features today
An amusing thought came to me while I read this: Google has an opportunity to play to it’s strength and act like the assassin for features or services. Don’t want to support something? Get Google to acquire you and inevitably shut you down. It’s such a unique niche that companies should be paying Google for this service.
I’m not a Fitbit user, but I know how it feels to be burned by Google’s obsessive need to shut down things I find useful, so I can understand all the upset over this.
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The Android Obsidian app has been playing up recently. Sometimes when I try to make a new note, I loose the ability to add new lines. I have no idea what’s going on, but it’s making me sad. The mobile apps were the reason why I tried Obsidian again. But they’re only useful when they work. 🙁
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Bocce at Carlton Gardens this afternoon. We probably played our fastest game of speed bocce today, clocking in at 13 minutes. Second fastest was 14 minutes, also played this afternoon. Amazing how fast you could go if parking tickets are on the line.
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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!
