Weeknotes 197

Would you use ChatGPT to calculate tariffs with other countries?

Me neither.

AV1 is supposed to make streaming better, so why isn’t everyone using it?

We were meant to go and see a show last Sunday evening, but we couldn’t be arsed. So we didn’t. What is being wasteful and what is being an adult with the agency to make decisions?

My desk has finally been upgraded with the addition of the M-m-m-Megadesk (Yes, I am persisting with that) and it was not nearly as scary as I anticipated. The biggest part of the job is getting the controller casing open in order to swap the PCB over.

Check out this completely silent timelapse I made of the disassembly process featuring my big head.

The desk now has programmable memory positions which can be accessed via the ⬆️ button. Pressing ⬆️ ⬆️ now lowers the desk to the perfect sitting position and pressing ⬆️ ⬆️ ⬆️ raises the desk to standing height.

Nice ✅

Another new app from Sindre Sorhus — TextLens

Extract text from anywhere on your screen. Select any area containing text - from images, videos, PDFs, or presentations - and instantly convert it to editable text.

I don’t need this is as I already have this functionality built-in to CleanShot but if you’re not a CleanShot X user you might. I’ve previously mentioned TRex which is another alternative.

Stacked PRs: Code Changes as Narrative – The best developers I’ve worked with have done this. Small, focussed PRs that tell a story. The worst; just a grab bag o’ changes they want to merge.

(And squash merges are still bad).

Phoenix 1.8 is nearing and it’s another solid release as usual. A couple of things stood out to me in particular.

The context guide has been rewritten.

The context guide has been broken apart into a few separate guides that now better explores data modeling, using ecommerce to drive the examples.

The core team have obviously been listening to community feedback with this one as I’ve seen a fair few people not understand what to do with Contexts, myself included. The idea of a Context is a good one; separate your data access from your core logic. It can be confusing knowing how to apply though, so I think this change is great.

The second thing is that Phoenix is moving to using Daisy UI by default (although you can, of course, opt out). I came across Daisy UI a while ago and thought it looked nice but it didn’t seen “ready” yet. It has come a long way. It won’t be the preferred choice for a lot of people I suspect, but there’s a lot to be said for having your web app look fairly decent by default and I suspect it’s quite a big contributing factor when people choose their web app stack.

Isn’t it wild that in 2025 certain requests to eBay are still routed through a DLL? (look out for eBayISAPI.dll in the URL).

eBay must have a hell of an enterprise support contract set up with Microsoft.

This alert must die – it really must.

Another thing I’ve been meaning to get to for a while since I refactored my Neovim config to use lazy.nvim was to setup completion and LSP. It wasn’t as hard (are you sensing a pattern?) to get the basics working as I had imagined, but it is tricky to know what is working for me as I’m not in full coding mode at the moment.

I decided to try the “NeoVim way” for keymaps. Completion is typically Tab and Shift + Tab for a lot of editors, but that is not the default for vim. The pattern of CTRL-n and CTRL-p is seen in many places throughout vim and the makers of blink.cmp (the completion plugin I’m using) think you should continue that pattern (although you can configure otherwise if you chose).

So now I have CTRL-n to navigate to the next item, CTRL - p for previous, and CTRL-y for accepting the suggestion.

I’m still getting used to it. Time will tell whether I revert back to my Tab safe-space.

Snippets are also something I want to start using, and I am in the process of setting that up now. Where those are concerned you do use Tab and Shift + Tab to navigate through the placeholders.

Take Home Pay / Salary Calculator (2025/2026) – This seems like it might be worth remembering.

Gumroad have open sourced their code

With Gumroad, anyone can earn their first dollar online. Just start with what you know, see what sticks, and get paid. It’s that easy.

Because I’ve been so successful in my new electronics hobby I’m plowing ahead with even more advanced soldering techniques and I’ve bought a hot air station to aid in the soldering of tiny components, and in particular the removal of them. I expect this to follow the same unsuccessful path I’ve been following until now, but I guess at least I’m trying.

Also, retail therapy dopamine is super effective.