Weeknotes 199

The Last of Us is back with Season 2 🙌

Ants have invaded the kitchen. This means I’ve been going on a killing spree every couple of days. I don’t like it, but they won’t be herded, and they won’t leave.

Trademarking “Dev mode” – nice one, Figma 🙄

Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features “Dev Mode.” It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023.

The US Patent and Trademark office doing a fine job, as usual, too.

I’ve been watching, and enjoying, MobLand solely because Tom Hardy is so excellent in it. However, the Irish accents, especially Helen Mirren, blimey.

Gridfinity

The modular, open-source grid storage system

If I ever needed an excuse to get a 3D printer, this is it.

If I don’t have a list of to-do items in Things things don’t get done. I put everything in there. I even retroactively add them so that I know I’ve done something in the day. A way of combating the “What have you even done today?” thoughts that plague me.

But adding items can become laborious so I’ve started taking advantage of the iOS Text Replacement features to add vim-style mnemonics for oft done tasks. So typing pwo is changed to Put washing on, and so on. And, because I’m fancy, I also add an emoji in there because the iOS emoji picker is awful, and it jazzes-up how everything looks.

Unexpectedly these text replacements also automagically sync across to macOS, which is nice ✅

What the Critical Erlang SSH Vulnerability Means for Elixir Developers – This is potentially bad, very bad, but the average application is likely unaffected, thankfully.

Hot air reworking takes more skill than I thought, of course. Still, some success during the couple of practice sessions I’ve engaged in this week.

The old motherboards arrived from eBay. There is a good variety so I’m happy with the purchase. The only potential issue that I noticed in retrospect is that they are all quite new, from fairly recent laptops it seems, whereas my ultimate goal is to apply hot air to boards that are 30+ years old. Whether that matters is to be determined.

I did manage to remove fairly large chips from a couple of the boards. I think they were QFP chips which are soldered underneath as well as at the sides. This means (I think) that they soak up a lot of the heat making it more difficult to melt the solder beneath. Or something.

Re-applying is not quite as tricky, but predictably pointed to the need for a microscope - of course it did - something I’ve been trying to avoid for a while now. The pins are just so physically small that it’s hard to see if they’re connected or bridged. Paying a mortgage is overrated anyway.

It was a nice surprise to see my blog name checked.

endoflife.date is a nice idea. It is annoying how hard this sort of information it to find sometimes.

End-of-life (EOL) and support information is often hard to track, or very badly presented. endoflife.date documents EOL dates and support lifecycles for various products.

Why does Britain feel so poor?

A long time to-do list item was started and partially completed this week – changing my business address details – hurrah!

The thought of breaking something has kept this on the back-burner for a long time, but now I’ve decided upon and purchased an account with a virtual office address provider, so I can start updating my address all over the place.

That will continue next week.

TIL Royal Mail have a service called Poste Restante

Imagine being able to pick up your post when you’re travelling around the UK or abroad. Well now you can – thanks to Poste Restante

Potentially very handy.

I wrote some code for the first time in quite some time this week. Then it got hard and my interest waned. Why am I like this?

Still, I found the use of Anthrophic’s Claude 3.5 absolutely invaluable. It’s like pair programming but without the social anxieties attached.

Now that I’ve finished Love, Death + Robots, and following Siracusa’s lead, here are my Top 10 favourite episodes, in no particular order.

• Sonnie’s Edge
• Three Robots
• Automated Customer Service
• The Tall Grass
• All Through the House
• Three Robots: Exit Strategies
• Bad Travelling
• Night of the Mini Dead
• Swarm
• Mason’s Rats

Season 4 is released 15th May.