Weeknotes 218

Giving away a mattress for free is harder than you’d think.

Is a page with 218 links on it too many links? Part of me thinks I should start paginating the home page of this here website, and the other part simply cannot be arsed. The page is 5.4kB, loads fast, and renders fast – who cares?

Base – “The best SQLite database editor for macOS”

I’ve been looking for a decent GUI SQLite tool.

HTTP is not simple

I often hear or see people claim that HTTP is a simple protocol. Primarily of course from people without much experience or familiarity with actual implementations. I think I personally also had thoughts in that style back when I started working with the protocol.

The primary author of curl knows a lot about HTTP.

The Long Game: why Rails survived the hype cycle and what it means for your startup

Substage

Convert, organize and more: control your Mac and its files with natural language.

This is cool/terrifying/inadvisable.

I’m planning a trip south in a couple of weeks to see a friend. It is surprising how overwhelming I found organising everything.

Build Better Agents With MorphLLM

I’m an audiophile, which is a nice way to describe someone who spends their children’s college fund on equipment that yields no audible improvement in sound quality.

What is a color space?

Color is an unreasonably complex topic. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it reveals a whole new layer of complexity that you didn’t know existed.

This is partly because it doesn’t really exist.

Look, I’m not going to read this website, you’re not going to read this website, but my god what a lovely piece of work. In a world of mediocrity what a breath of fresh air it is – beautiful.

Beyond data-confirm – Nice tutorial on replacing those fugly browser dialogs

Due to a supermarket chilli plant surviving more than a week I found myself with an abundance of red chillies. There was nothing else to do but attempt chilli jam. Never ignore the opportunity for botulism to thrive.

I ended up with something more akin to a thick syrup which was hot AF 🥵 so I re-boiled it the next day and now it has set to something more resembling jam.

Google is shutting down Android sideloading in the name of security

Android zealots assemble!

Introducing Wubular: Rubular Reimagined in Ruby+WASM

Since Ruby 3.2, MRI itself can be compiled — thanks to Yuta Saito (@kateinoigakukun) — to run in WASM environments. WASM is essentially assembly for the web: safe, fast, portable bytecode that browsers (and other runtimes) can execute. Combine it with WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) and you get access to basic system features like files, time, and randomness — enough to run full Ruby apps.

That flips the old Rubular model upside down: regex evaluation (and any Ruby code) can now run entirely client-side.

Maybe I’ve not been paying enough attention but this is the first time I’ve really felt like WebAssembly is the perfect solution for something.

rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool

I was skeptical going into read this, but then I see “Sam Stephenson” and I take notice. I am usually in favour of more generic tools for managing versions of things, that’s why I currently use asdf as it can handle Ruby, but also Redis or Postgres etc.

From rv plans:

Get rid of rvm, rbenv, chruby, asdf, mise, ruby-build, ruby-install, bundler, and rubygems, all at once.

This has more ambitious plans though so I will watch with interest.

And if it stops people using rvm even better.

Lego Bondi Blue iMac G3? Yes, please!

About a year ago the competing Elixir LSPs decided to come together and create the defacto LSP for Elixir. Now the first release is available.

I have set it up regardless, and it seems to do things.

Embarrassing to admit perhaps but I still don’t really use LSPs in any big way. I’m not even sure what to expect from them with Neovim. I’m hoping someone is going to create something on YouTube to school me.

The speed with which Nic’s Fix fixes Siracusa’s HomePod is very impressive even if the soldering did raise some eyebrows 🤨😆

We watched The Thursday Murder Club. I like Pierce Brosnan but he should just stop doing accents. Like in MobLand, the man just can’t do them. We’re not talking Ray Winston levels of bad, but bad. The film is fine.

I finished Alma’s Not Normal Season 2 and enjoyed it, but it didn’t hit me like the first, perhaps because I left a long time between seasons. The cast are unbelievably good though, and Sophie Willan is a real talent (she’s great on Taskmaster too).

After my initial excitement over Alien: Earth I think I reluctantly need to admit to myself that it isn’t holding together as I had hoped.

When the great re-potting took place I thought I’d avoided the usually inevitable fugus gnats. I was wrong. Very wrong. The little fuckers have arrived in full force and god they’re annoying. But I’m fighting back 🥊 I’ve deployed a Nemotode army and sticky traps 🤞