Weeknotes 188
2nd February, 2025
“Storage solutions”
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You can trigger macOS Shortcuts from the menubar.
If you enable the option to “Pin in Menu Bar” for a Shortcut a clickable menubar icon will appear which shows a menu from which you can execute the Shortcut. It’s a shame that you don’t seem to be able to have an icon per Shortcut, which would make this a lot more appealing.
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New pursuits demand new storage solutions. I have lots of bits and pieces that need to be stored somewhere now. Like most things lately, it seems, this is just an excuse to exercise my capitalistic tendencies. B&M is your friend for such purchases.
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How will I find newly stored stuff?
Am I cool and do I own a label printer? Yes and YES. I do.
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This week I was able to continue my Corne keyboard build now I had all the parts I needed. Although most of the delay was waiting for packages to arrive, regrettably I found that I was procrastinating over starting the build again since I’d taken a break from soldering and I didn’t want to fuck it.
Well, I fucked it.
The next step was to solder the new sockets I bought to the PCB. I was expecting this to be easy. You push the legs through holes in the PCB and solder them to the board. When I did this it was a very tight fit such that the socket stayed in place whilst I soldered. Or so I thought. I soldered all the pins and then realised that the socket had slipped slightly. This is a problem because the sockets need to be flush to accommodate the other components on the board. Bugger.
I managed to remove the wonky sockets after a lot of trial and error, but it took ages. And there’s a good chance I’ve damaged some of the traces on the boards too (it’s fairly easy to do if you scratch or scrape with a metal object like tweezers).
I’m trying not to be too hard on myself because I have learnt how you’re meant to do it now (you’re supposed to solder one leg, check for flushness, then solder another leg diagonally across from the first, check flushness again, then solder all the rest - this is what I did after and they are all flush on the board) and I now have the sockets soldered.
Whether they’ll work or not is another matter. I’ve been putting off testing them.
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Introducing Ant: a simple background job processing library for Elixir – it’s good to have options.
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You already knew this, but I am a fool. I made myself setup this new computer. How? I dunno. I used Migration Assistant to migrate over using a Thunderbolt 4 cable and…it just works. Everything just works. Even my SSH and gpg keys worked (with minor permission issues solved by a
chmod
).The main reason I procrastinated over it for so long was that I just assumed it wouldn’t work. I am too used to computers. I was wrong. However I am yet to setup any dev stuff because I don’t want to program computers at the moment.
/uses
is updated too.The screen is absolutely lovely. Size-wise, it feels much bigger whilst not actually taking up much more space. I swear it sounds better too, through AirPods Pro at least.
Will I learn? Will. I. Fuck.
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With my new computer setup it meant I could focus on fixing a couple of niggles with that old heap I was using five minutes ago. Namely, the fact that Mocha-gate caused one of the ports to stop working, and also that the battery is not holding the charge it once was.
I have AppleCare+, so I booked it into the nearest Apple Store to have it looked at.
For the port issue I thought it would be a case of replacing the USB-C port (which I learnt from a YouTube video meant replacing both ports as they come on a single board) but when the technician ran a diagnostic on the computer it showed that the ports are both working, but the battery needed replacing. I don’t understand this, but who am I to argue. The fix is apparently to replace the battery at no additional charge (not even an excess) which will hopefully fix both my issues in one go and cost me nothing. Excellent.
The battery wasn’t in stock (which, incidentally, I think is incredible – this computer is 4 years old, how do you not have a battery for this in-stock?!) so I had to take it back once the stock arrived. It’s with Apple now and I should get it back in a week.
I was slightly disappointed in a way as I was looking forward to buying the part on AliExpress and having a go myself 🤭
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OpenAI Alleges DeepSeek Used Its Models for AI Training
The discovery centers around a technique called “distillation,” where developers use outputs from larger AI models to train smaller ones. The practice is common in AI development, but OpenAI claims DeepSeek crossed a line by using it to build a rival model.
Boo, and I cannot emphasise this enough, hoo.
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We desperately need competition in the Ruby web framework space. Mike Perham is sponsoring Hanami. I’m not sure what $12k can do but it’s a start and I hope I’m wrong.
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For those eager for Game Boy updates, I have news 👾👾👾
Procrastination took over, as usual. It seems obvious in hindsight that the thrill of buying cheap (ish) Game Boys on the Internet is a far easier way to obtain dopamine than the actual reality of having to work for it and fix them. All of my projects are of my own devising and yet when it comes to work on them I feel overwhelmed.
When you’ve bought 8 retro consoles and don’t possess any of the requisite skills to fix them, which one do you start with? Well, I started at the beginning with the first DMG Game Boy I got on eBay.
This console has a few ailments, but it’s not in terrible shape. Nearly all the consoles I’ve bought are dirty and disgusting, so that is a given for this one too, but it also had no sound and the screen was showing vertical lines on it where pixels should’ve been.
I decided to tackle the sound issue first as it felt like it would be easier. There was sound if you plugged in headphones, but not from the speaker. It wasn’t necessarily a broken speaker though. A common issue that occurs with these is that the headphone port gets corroded such that the console thinks that headphones are always plugged in and that turns off the speaker. However this wasn’t it; it was a broken speaker 😉 In the process I learnt how to check the headphone port and speaker for continuity using a multimeter. Learning this will make future repairs to other consoles much easier. I desoldered the old speaker and soldered on a new one I’d already bought from AliExpress.
Fixed sound ✅
The screen was also a common failure. As these consoles are 30+ years old the connection to the screen becomes degraded. This causes vertical lines on the screen where nothing shows up. If you gently rub a soldering iron along the bottom of the screen you can bring the missing screen lines back to life, which is what I’ve done.
Fixed screen ✅
Next up for this console is a good clean, maybe a retr0brite-ing (to de-yellow the plastics), and new screen lens.
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On ATP 624 Marco Arment said that Apple have “debilitating hubris” and I think that is a perfect description of them.
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I attended a retro gaming fair on Sunday. Given my recent interest in the area it seemed like I should go along with it being so close. I’m glad I went and enjoyed myself, but I in and out in an hour.
It was absolutely rammed with people. In retrospect this was partly my fault. The tickets are timed, the idea being that the earlier you get into the event the better pick of the goods on offer you have. I bought tickets for the first time slot, so naturally is was really busy. It was so busy that looking at anything became a bit of a task.
There wasn’t as much Nintendo Game Boy merchandise as I had imagined there might be. When I think “retro”, I think “Game Boy”, but due to the passage of time there are now many, many consoles that fit into that bracket competing for floor space.
I had also hoped that there might be parts and supplies for refurbing and modding consoles, but unfortunately there was nothing like that for sale. I guess the people selling their wares at the fair are the ones who’ve already done the refurbing and modding in order to sell the consoles on.