Weeknotes 214

August? Unacceptable.

We had the misfortune of catching some of War of the Worlds with Ice Cube this week. The part where he uses “View Source” was my personal highlight before we turned it off.

How would you transfer 1.7GB of photos to your partners computer? We’re both on the same WiFi network, and there’s no central shared file storage available. AirDrop is a reasonable approach isn’t it? Peer-to-peer transfer, job done.

Nope. AirDrop would consistently work until about halfway, and then just stall forever.

This sort of thing makes me feel completely incompetent as both a computer person and human. In the end we used WeTransfer. That’s right, we pushed 1.7GB of data up and then pulled 1.7GB of data back down. What a time.

Make IO.inspect colorful and readable in Elixir 🌈

My office has slowly been accumulating more and more stuff, so a tidy up was due. I’ve pretty much only succeeded in making a big ol’ mess though 🤦‍♂️

As part of my office tidy, I found some ticket stubs for various gigs I’d attended. Let me tell you, late 2015 to late 2017 was the glory years for live music and comedy. I’d completely forgotten that I’d even seen some of these artists.

Musicians: Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Father John Misty, The Hotelier, Touché Amoré, Jimmy Eat World, Silversun Pickups, Turin Brakes, and Regina Spektor.

Comedians: John Robins, Elis James and John Robins twice, Daniel Kitson, and Romesh Ranganathan.

(Please visit one of these links, it took ages to link ’em up 🙏)

My Programming Journey

I feel like I “lost myself” over the years. I got too focused on backend systems and business problems, too far from the creative drive that originally motivated me.

I feel ya.

Rails New, a beginner’s Ruby on Rails tutorial – Glad to see that the Rails Foundation have produced this beginners series for getting into Rails.

A Friendly Introduction to SVG – I haven’t been through all of this because concentration, but it’s extremely well done. This is the sort of web craft that is often missing these days 👴

👆 is where I found out about the Wotfard typeface — very nice. In fact, the atipo foundry has a ton of really nice fonts — I really like Bariol Serif and Noway Round in particular. Linking here for when I need a new font.

The new mattress was delivered.

In an act of hubris I turned down the offer from the delivery men to take it upstairs for me thinking “how heavy can a box be?” — turns out extremely fucking heavy. I could not lift the box. Instead I had to push it up, on its side, step by step, until I got to the top.

Despite transportation issues, so far we’re deeming it a success. Insofar as it’s comfortable, and we don’t have a mound in the middle of the bed anymore. Now to get rid of the old one….

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA – I’ve been waiting for the View Transitions API to become supported enough that we can stop the blight of SPAs we’ve all been enduring the last tens years or so.

My Plex server went haywire this week. We rely heavily on Plex in our house so when it goes wrong it can be very annoying.

It started when I visited the Plex dashboard to find all the media I’d added in approximately the last month missing 🙀 My “Continue Watching” was also not showing anything and some new playlists I pinned were also gone.

Panic immediately sets in as I imagine major disk corruption as the cause. But I run ZFS, and it has been super solid for me for years, so that seems unlikely. I find that the files are present on the filesystem.

I had rebooted the server the day before as a last ditch attempt at fixing some other unrelated errors, so it seemed likely that this might have triggered something.

I did a rescan and nothing seemed to happen at first but after a few minutes some files did appear, good, but they’re are all out of order from when I added them, bad/annoying.

It’s then that I start thinking perhaps the Plex SQLite database had become corrupted instead. I have automatic database backups turned on, so I went looking for them but found they didn’t seem to have run in the last month or so – weird. Why would the backups be so old?

Everything just seemed a bit out of date.

Then it dawned on me that I was looking at a different Plex server. I was looking at the system installed version. The version installed via apt years ago before migrating to Docker. It seems that I had left the old package installed and when I rebooted it started up the “old” Plex server via systemd and (presumably because of the way Docker networking works?) that server was taking priority over the Docker-installed version as they’re both bound to the same port.

I stopped the server with sudo systemctl stop plexmediaserver and my Plex sprung back into action! Everything present and correct – phew.

sudo apt remove plexmediaserver ✅

UK Government Warns Promoting the Use of VPNs Could Attract Fines

Our poorly thought out law isn’t quite having the effect we wanted it to so we’re going to use threats instead.

Well done guys.

Panama Playlists

I found the real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Many use their real names. With a little sleuthing, I could say with near-certainty: yep, this is them. Heard of the Panama Papers? That exposed offshore bank accounts. This is about onshore vibes.

Even if this is fake, still funny.

Elixir UsageRules development tool – This is an interesting tool to help with LLM usage.

Have you ever used a food/diet tracking app and hated every moment of it? Me too. They’re all generally terrible in some way. Some have good enough usability but terrible food databases. Some are awful to enter numbers into – essentially their primary goal.

I accidentally came across MacroFactor and it might actually be good 🤔 (gonna cost you though).

This app does crazy things like focus the text field that you need to type into automatically speeding up data entry dramatically 😮

A bit of care. A bit of craft.

It also apparently does some algorithmic gubbins to suggest what your macros should be. I’m less interested in that, but we’ll see.

Design platform Figma spends $300,000 on AWS daily

Daily. $300,000 per day.

In addition to the high hosting cost, Figma notes that its platform is entirely dependent on AWS’ performance and can be affected by outages.

Muppets.

Introducing Proton Authenticator – secure 2FA, your way – I am tempted to try this as I’m currently relying on Google Authenticator and we all know how relying on Google usually ends.

I think I’m listening to too many podcasts, especially at the gym. Being at the gym seems to be a podcast listening hour and less working out. I should be concentrating on getting swol. I also realised that I’ve been missing listening to music as much as I used to. Time for a change.