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Booked flights yesterday for Canberra. Got my itinerary and confirmation email. Ok, good.
Then got an email offering “ideas” of places to go in Canberra. Then one welcoming me to the booking agent’s newsletter.
Stop! Guys, you had it right after the second email.
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Day 18: random
Tails. #mbmay
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Day 17: hold
Holding my reusable cup as it’s holding my morning coffee. #mbmay
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WWDC Videos In Broadtail
Some more work on Broadtail. This time, I added the ability to use it to download Apple WWDC videos.
The way it works is based on the existing RSS feed concept. In order to get the list of videos for a particular WWDC year, you “subscribe” to that by setting up a feed with the new “Apple Developer Videos” type. The external ID is taken from the URL slug of the web-site that Apple publishes the session videos. For example, for WWDC 2021, the external ID would be “wwdc2021”.
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Currently reading: Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell 📚
So far an excellent read.
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Day 16: time
My kitchen clock, which occasionally breaks in such a way that it’s not even right twice a day. #mbmay
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Day 15: clouds
Taken during the Summer, which is usually when we get our most interesting cloud formations. #mbmay
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Watching the Google I/O presentation on Google Wallet reminds me of all the presentations I’ve watch over the years of products and frameworks that Google touted, then killed off. I wonder how long Google Wallet will last. 😕
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Day 14: fence
#mbmay
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Day 13: community
#mbmay
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Cloud Formation "ValidationError at typeNameList" Errors
I was editing some Cloud Formation today and when I tried to deploy it, I was getting this lengthy, unhelpful error message:
An error occurred (ValidationError) when calling the CreateChangeSet operation: 1 validation error detected: Value ‘[AWS:SSM::Parameter, AWS::SNS::Topic]’ at ’typeNameList’ failed to satisfy constraint: Member must satisfy constraint: [Member must have length less than or equal to 204, Member must have length greater than or equal to 10, Member must satisfy regular expression pattern: [A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}::[A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}::[A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}(::MODULE){0,1}]
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🔗 A New Hope for Object Storage: R2 enters open beta
I’ve been looking forward to giving R2 a try for a while.
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Is it really necessary for Amazon to prefix AWS services with “Amazon” or “AWS”? It’s not SQS, it’s Amazon SQS. It seems a little redundant to me. Maybe they’re leaving the door open for third party vendors to offer their services in AWS as well. 🤷
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Day 12: tranquility
Part of a walk I occasionally do, near Macedon. There’s nothing special about this particular spot, but I always feel at my calmest here. #mbmay
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It’s developer conference video watching time again! 🙌 The Google I/O videos are starting to come out, so I’ll be switching my TV viewing to these for a few weeks. Once I’ve gone through those, it will be time for the WWDC videos.
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Failing to keep things simple in the software designs I’m responsible for seems to be a problem I keep running into. I’m always coming up with designs that are more complicated than they need to be, and once they come up for review, they always seem to be rejected for something much simpler that can get the immediate job done in a shorter amount of time.
Not that I’m offended by that: I don’t want my team building something more complicated than it needs to be. I’m just curious as to why I keep doing this. My current theory is either that I’m prioritising future extendability over immediate needs — which sort of goes against the idea of “you ain’t gonna need it” — or that I’m bored and it’s just an attempt to put together a design that seems interesting. I suspect that it’s a little of both.
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Day 11: maroon
#mbmay
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Feed Rules In Broadtail
Generally, when there’s a video that I’m interesting in watching, I take a look at Broadtail to see if it’s available. When it is, I go ahead and download it.
However, some videos take a long time to download — we’re talking 10 hours or so — and they’re usually published when I’m not looking, like during the night when I’m asleep (thank’s time-zones). So I’d thought it would be nice for Broadtail to kick off the download for me when the video shows up in the feed.
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This week’s earworm: TUNIC (Original Game Soundtrack) by Lifeformed × Janice Kwan.
Favourite track: To Far Shores. 🎵
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Day 9: bloom
A bunch of bloomin’ wattles. #mbmay
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I use to enjoy reading tech blogs, like the ones from Slack and Shopify, that talk about some new framework or how they solved a certain problem. But now, when I look at them, I just feel exhausted.
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Day 8: union
Had some trouble with this one today, so I thought I’d hit it up in the textbooks. #mbmay
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Managed to setup Wireguard VPN on my home network this morning so I can remote in when on the road. Very simple setup at the moment: only a single host is accessible and no DNS or internet routing. But quite pleased with it, given my lack of experience in network administration.
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Day 7: park
The park in Benalla, taken last month during our drive to Canberra. #mbmay
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Imagine that there’s an open source project that has some modest traction but only one maintainer, and that maintainer wants to make a small change to fix something. Would it be okay for that maintainer to make that change directly on
main?Not entirely a hypothetical question. 🤔
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Day 6: silhouette
Photo taken by my boss in 2014 while we were in the Cook Islands for work. #mbmay
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Day 5: Earth
One of the first photos from Himawari-8, a JMA weather satellite that went online while I was working at the Bureau of Meteorology. The images it produced pushed our visualisation tools to the limit, but boy, they were absolutely stunning. #mbmay
(source)
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The Podcast Favourites App
In today’s issue of “useless apps that nobody but me would want to use”, I’ve managed to get a version of the Podcast Favourites app built and deployed. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it works quite well.
Here are some screenshots of it, starting with the main screen you see when you log in:
As you can probably guess, I listen to a lot of ATP. 😁
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Day 4: thorny
This plant was less thorny than it once would have been, although there’s at least one thorn that those dethroning it missed. #mbmay
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Day 3: experimental
An experimental Arduino sketch, built using Tinygo, to see if I could get something displayed on the LCD. #mbmay
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Although I don’t think it’s the full Go language. Many of the packages that don’t make sense for microcontrollers are not included, and I don’t think a garbage collector is even used, given how little RAM these things have. But still, I’m impressed.
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Have finally got an approach for producing signed and notarised MacOS apps that is invokable from the command line and that consistently produce archives that work. Incidentally, the next version of Feed Journaler has been released and is now available.
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Those that say “keep your user documentation up to date, not only for others but for yourself in the future,” are absolutely correct. You will forget, and you will need to go through your old code to remember how your tool works. Might as well update the docs while you’re at it.
Yeah, it happens. Today it was using something I wrote to make sequence diagrams. I couldn’t remember how I could specify the name of the SVG file so into the code I had to go. At least it’s written down now.
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The pièce de résistance of media with dynamic ad insertion (podcasts/streaming services/etc.) is being presented with same ad twice in a row. As much as I love being made to hear an annoying pitch once, I really love it when I’m made to hear it again. Great system guys. 😒
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Part of me is wondering whether it makes sense giving Mastodon a try, maybe setting up a domain and instance hosted by Masto. The only thing stopping me is wondering what I would post there that would be different from what I post here.
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Day 2: photo
The only photo of mine that I have on the wall. #mbmay
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Day 1: switch
I usually sit at that table. But today, I decided to switch to the other side. #mbmay
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Our council has started using electric garbage trucks for collecting waste from park bins, which I think is a great move. If I had one suggestion, it would be to add some artificial engine noise to these vehicles. Given their size, I think they’re just a little too quiet.
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GitLab Search Subscriptions with NetNewsWire
I’m working (with others) on a project that’s using GitLab to host the code, and I’m looking for a better way to be notified of new merge requests that I need to review. I cannot rely on the emails from GitLab as they tend to be sent for every little thing that happens on any of the merge requests I am reviewing. For this reason, any notifications sent by email will probably get missed by me. People do post new merge requests in a shared Slack channel, but a majority of them are for repos that don’t need my review. They’ve also been days where a lot of people are making a lot of changes at the same time, and any new messages for the repos I’m interesting would get pushed away.
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Woke up at 5 AM this morning for an early coding session today. Really want to fix this process of notarising a Mac app from the command line so that I can get a distribution prepared with a single button press, as it were.
Got to the point where I’ve got a Python script which will build the archive, export the archive as a signed app (I think), and upload it to Apple to be notarised. The app gets notarised successfully after running all this, or at least it’s reported to be notarised successfully.
Now waiting for a Mac to be provision in MacStadium so that I can test it. My previous tests have failed so far, either because Apple claiming that the app is notarised doesn’t actually mean that it’s notarised, or I’m corrupting the notarised archive in some way during my previous tests as I move it around the file system. Hopefully with this new process I find out which of these cases is causing the problem.
Was this activity a good use of my time? Really can’t say. Maybe, maybe not. But I was already awake a 5 AM anyway so it’s arguably better than simply lying in bed.
