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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!
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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
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. 😏
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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.
