-
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. Continue reading →
-
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.
-
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. Continue reading →
-
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.
-
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
git checkout -b, but typingcheckoutto create branches was a bigger change to me than simply learning thatgit branchdoesn’t change branches. -
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. 😏
-
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.
-
Photos of Fitzroy Gardens, while we play our bocce comp. grand final. Perfect weather for it. Also lots of weddings going on.
-
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? Continue reading →
-
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.
-
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
[ ]to indicate a column should have checkboxes. Such a great idea. -
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?
-
🔗 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.
-
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/snippets where $VAULT is the directory of you vault. If the snippets directory 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. Continue reading →
-
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.
-
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.
-
It’s 2023 now, and I still hate code reviews.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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. 😒
-
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.
-
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.
