Weeknotes 110

The side project has fallen off a cliff. I’ve lost interest. I will try and progress it next week.

Legal Lullabies

Lull yourself to sleep with the soothing white noise of your favorite tech giant’s terms of service. Close your eyes, drift away, or scroll down to join the 1% of technology users that claim to have read em’ from beginning to end.*

POST data to a URL using curl and stay completely silent except when there are errors.

curl -S -s -o /dev/null -d "Some data" https://example.com

As you know, I’m a professional Bash programmer, so I was updating a script this week to notify me (using ntfy) when it finishes doing work. This allows me to have notifications going to my Apple devices via a simple curl.

I found myself once again asking “Why am I doing this?”. I have Ruby at my disposal and it can do the basic things in a much saner way than Bash. But here I am.

Remember Free Public Wi-Fi?

Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the Wi-Fi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I remember, a Motel 6 that was not blocks away but within line of sight ended up filling the role. But even up there, 62 floors from the ground, there was false promise: Free Public Wi-Fi.

This week I discovered that you can move the macOS Picture in Picture window (of whatever is currently playing) to any corner of the screen with a quick two finger flick gesture ✌️ Nice.

Marianna in Conspiracyland. I enjoyed this recommendation by Discoliam.

What happened to the people who fell down the rabbit hole into a world of conspiracy theories during the pandemic?

It’s very scary how quickly people can persuaded to believe utter nonsense. The episodes are 15 minutes so you can zip through them.

Behind “Hello World” on Linux from Julia Evans is very interesting. It’s amazing that anything works at all really. Apart from the great explanation of what is going on technically, I love the way Julia is not afraid to say when she doesn’t know something (which is not often!).

I watched the first episode of Bridget Christie’s new comedic drama The Change after hearing about it Richard Herrings’s podcast RHLSTP (rhlstp) and thought it was great.

Justin Searls on his creative process.

A lot of people I run into—even people of similar privilege—have their own interesting things to say but nevertheless seem to be waiting around for permission to say them.

I’m not sure I qualify as “interesting things to say” but these week notes definitely provide me with an outlet for expression which I’ve been missing up to now.

Bram Moolenaar has passed away 😢 Vim has been a major apart of my daily life since 2011. I still use Neovim today. Bram had a massive impact on software, there’s no doubt about that. RIP.

I’ve seen Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in the last two weeks and all I have to say is TURTLE POWER! 🐢🔌