• Oof, someone save me. I just realised that my flight to Europe would’ve got me a day earlier than my hotel booking. Thankfully I manage to move the flight a day later. But boy, I’m so glad I checked! 😮‍💨

    Now to go through every booking and make sure all the dates line up.

  • In-Band vs. Out-Of-Band Error Codes In gRPC

    Is the NOT_FOUND response codes in gRPC an actual error, or could one use it to indicate a resource doesn’t exist — and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t — on the happy path? There seems to be a bit of disagreement to what degree non-200 OK error codes should be used to signal non-error conditions. I’m generally of the opinion that all the 4xx HTTP response codes are not actually errors, and should be available to the developer to indicate that, while the method execution was not quite as expected, it wasn’t adverse in a way that warrants error logs or PagerDuty alerts. Continue reading →

  • 📺 Sophie Koonin – This Website Is under Construction, a Love Letter to the Personal Website

    Saw this boosted on social.lol. A really good talk on why having your own place on the web is worth it.

  • Twitter, Public Alerts, And Federated Protocols

    So apparently Twitter’s leadership team has discovered the value it has for public alerts: Of all the changes Elon Musk has made to Twitter, blocking emergency and public transit services from tweeting automated alerts might have been his least popular. User backlash roared, as National Weather Service accounts got suspended. Then, one of the country’s largest public transit services, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), had so much trouble tweeting, it decided to quit posting updates to Twitter. Continue reading →

  • I just got news today that work has decided to move office. Somewhere with much better public transport links (i.e. a tram line). As someone who’s been on this frickin bus for 40 minutes, I couldn’t be happier.

  • Seen a few posts on Micro.blog over the last few days about people sleeping badly. Might be that those posts are contagious because today it’s my turn to post about how badly I slept last night. Worse was that I had to get up at 5:40 to go into the office. Ah well. Hopefully tonight. 😫

  • I’ve found myself using ChatGPT to do quite mundane things recently, like get the postcodes of cities around the world. It feels like I’m barely pushing the limits of what it’s capable of. I just prefer the chat-like interface it has.

    And I think that’s the danger that people running “real” websites have when it comes to these chat bots. I’m sure there’re a bunch of sites out there that can get me the postcode for any world city I throw at it. But dealing with a crappy web interface filled with ads does not sound appealing to me. Much better is the clean chat interface that ChatGPT provides, complete with a history of all my prior requests that I can just look back on.

    Also, and this is just my current use case, I’m not too phased with how accurate these postcodes actually are. These are all for test addresses to test a Stripe integration. So near enough is good enough.

  • Much of the personal stuff I’m currently doing outside of work involves writing. Lots of writing. So much writing. It’s not like a novel or anything: just a couple of websites I’ve decided to work on. Even so… still doesn’t give me the same buzz as coding does.

  • Hmm, either Daniel is super obsessed with the Beths (or at least posting about it), or there’s a bug somewhere. 😀

    Multiple entries in the Micro.blog timeline of danielpunkass post about the Beths being his new obsession.
  • Content Warning: About A Spider

    This spider was hanging around my garage door opening button for a few weeks now. I didn’t think much of it until today, when I noticed that it was actually a redback. Not the largest redback I’ve seen, but one located pretty close to a button I push quite frequently. Photo of said redback (it's small, but the photo is a close-up) If you look closely you can see a bit of the classic red stripe on the spider's abdomen. Continue reading →

  • I’m going to be putting on my “I don’t like fun” hat for a minute and say I’m so glad there’s no “verb” for posting on Micro.blog. No tweeting, tooting, truthing, skeeting. None of that. Just good old fashioned “posting”, like the blogging gods intended. Okay. Hat off.

  • I’ve abandoned any further thought of self hosting my code, at least for now. As predicted, I found other shiny things to distract me away from that path to madness. I can still use custom domains for Go packages if I wanted to, so I’m not really loosing much by keeping it all in GitHub.

  • I’ve set up an instance of Linkding within PikaPods this afternoon. I’m going try it out as my bookmark manager, given that my Pinboard subscription has expired.

    Screenshot of the main page of Linkding with a list of bookmarks on the left and tags on the right

    So far, so good. Importing my bookmarks from Pinboard was a breeze. The UI is cleaner that Pinboard as well, although I wish I could change the colour scheme (the purple is a but much).

    Bulk editing of links was easy to do. Just run a search and click the “card” icon next to the search box. Checkboxes appear next to the links and you can select the ones you’d like delete, archive, or add or remove tags to. All pretty straightforward.

    No social features though, which makes sense given that this is something you host yourself. But I never used the social features from Pinboard, so I won’t miss that at all. Poking around the settings it does look like you can make links public, but I probably won’t need that anytime soon.

    One thing I’m excited about is that it sets the title of new bookmarks to that of site automatically if I don’t set one myself. Thank you! Finally! The fact that Pinboard didn’t do this, and just set the title to “No title”, really annoyed me. Such a bleeding obvious feature to add as well, and I don’t know why Pin… okay, breath, not a problem anymore. 😮‍💨

    So yeah, we’ll see how this goes.

  • Dentist today. The only mistake I made with arranging the appointment is booking it for today. Seeing the dentist doesn’t feel like a Thursday thing. Feels more like something for a Tuesday, for sure. Maybe even a Monday. Not Thursday.

  • 🔗 Cheating Is All You Need

    New post by Steve Yegge. I always enjoy his writing but please, can someone buy Steve a domain name? He changes blogging platforms so often it’s difficult to follow him (well I guess Twitter would have worked at one point).

    Via: birchtree.me

  • 🔗 CSS Wish List 2023

    I’ve wanted attr() to be more widely accepted in CSS values since, well, I can’t remember. A long time. I want to be able to do something like:

    p[data-size] {width: attr(data-width, rem);}
    

    I realize adding this would probably lead to someone creating a framework […] where all the styling is jammed into a million data-*attributes […], but we shouldn’t let that stop us.

    Is it too late to vote for this? I’d love to be able to do this for background images. Relying on JavaScript to get the URL from the attribute and style the element is such a hack.

    Via: Jim Nielsen

  • April usually means controlled burns, and they’re conducting these burns at a bush reserve near my place. I was afraid that the smoke would be an issue, but so far it’s been such a non-issue I was wondering if the burns were actually called off. Apparently not.

    Bush with burnt undergrowthBush with burnt undergrowth

  • About Those Checkmarks

    This posts going to be about Twitter. Yes, I know; another one out there. It’s also going to be a bit speculative in nature, so feel free to skip it if you like. I’ve been reading the coverage over the “retirement” of the legacy verification system, both in the news and on the socials. And what I find interesting about this whole affair is all the new Twitter Blue subscribers complaining about people that had the checkmark choosing not to sign up. Continue reading →

  • Note to self: a shell script will always be quicker and easier to write than a Go program for a throwaway thing, no matter how much you wished it to be otherwise.

  • Day One and Project Jurassic

    So, Day One is in danger of being sherlocked by rumor’s of Apple’s upcoming journaling app: Mayne echoes the sentiment of several app developers who have been frustrated when Apple launched in-house competitors to the apps they have introduced to the ecosystem, often copying features those apps innovated and adding functionality that only Apple can offer, per the iPhone’s privacy and security policies and APIs. I’m a user of Day One and I have my doubts that Apple’s app would be a drop-in replacement for my journaling needs. Continue reading →

  • Nerd Counterflex

    You know that Washington Post article that has the list of websites Google used to train Bard? I been seeing people post screenshots of their sites in the training set on their blogs and Mastodon. This morning I read a post from Chris Coyier about it: My largest corpus of writing to date is on the web at css-tricks.com (along with many other writers), so naturally, I’m interested in seeing if it was used. Continue reading →

  • Options For Self-Hosting Code Repositories

    I’m considering something that some might say is stupid: I’m looking at options for self-hosting my personal code repositories. I’m coming around to the idea of having my own domain for things like Go packages. It’ll provide more opportunities for adding some structure to my repos, rather than having them all hang off a single github.com/lmika namespace. Plus, my personal code management system is reasonably good at the moment so, naturally, the time has come to change all that 😛. Continue reading →

  • It’s always fun playing the “which faraway land is closer to me” geography puzzle when setting up an online services that doesn’t have a presence in Australia.

    Options to select a location for a new server with choices of 2 cities in Germany, 1 city in Finland, and 2 cities in United States

    The answer is Hillsboro, OR — 13,021 KM from Melbourne.

  • Dear The Economist,

    Please restore the witty headlines you use for your articles to the digital edition. That’s one of the reasons why I read you. I know you include them as postscripts at the bottom, but it’s not the same.

    Sincerily,

    Me

  • Sunny day today, yet a bit chilly. So the hat and jacket ensemble is out at the moment.