Weeknotes 228

My latest trip down South was successful and restorative – LCD Soundsystem were right. My usual anxiety about the journey to and fro once again proved to be incorrect – it was fine, with the exception of the upper back soreness I got from all the driving. I’m looking forward to visiting for the final time this year around Christmas time.

Springs and Bounces in Native CSS

The magic of the linear() timing function.

I’ve been manually uploading torrent files to my web client, one at a time, for far too long. So this week I decided I’d had enough and wanted an easy way to perform this task. Ideally I wanted something at the macOS system level where you could right click on the files and choose to Upload.

The Shortcuts app was what I required. Like Automator before it, creating a Shortcut, as a programmer, is a frustrating experience where the easiest of things seem very hard, still I got something working as a “Quick Action” so it appears in the right click menu. It runs a very small shell script to upload the selected files using scp.

Already paying dividends. Chalk it up as one of those things I should’ve done ages ago.

I added a further two working Game Boys to my collection this week, and started a third, but that is still work in progress.

Game Boy Advance

This is the first finished Game Boy Advance I’ve completed. It has a new shell and IPS screen. It was straight forward, the only hiccup being closing it whilst getting all the pieces lined up.

The shell is fine (a bit on the cheaper end) but the screen is very nice.

Game Boy DMG

There was more wrong with this one. The sound was dodgy, and would crackle, especially when the volume wheel was used. I was surprised to find that cleaning the headphone jack with contact cleaner sorted it.

However, getting the screen in this one lined up was a nightmare. It’s made difficult by not being able to tell if it’s in the correct position unless it’s turned on. And you can’t really power it on until you put it together. After several adjustments I eventually got it.

This wasn’t actually the DMG I intended to work on. I was planning on building one with a laminated screen to start because it should be easier. Unfortunately, the screen arrived damaged and I am now being ignored by the manufacturer support, neat.

More incalculable contributions to Open Source.

When I bought the Voyager I’m failing to use of course I decided I should immediately pimp it out with a keycap tilting kit so that I could angle the keycaps in a more comfortable way so when I’m not using it I don’t get RSI.

The kit took over 6 weeks to arrive for reasons. The primary one being that the shipping tracking was non-existent which meant it sat at the Post Office for weeks before being returned to sender – but at least not Evri’s fault this time.

I fitted the kit and it looks pretty swish. I couldn’t tell you how they are at making me a better typist though.

Robby Russell:

And caring is still the rarest skill in tech.

Ain’t that the truth.

Safety First

It’s simpler than that - nine times out of ten, your engineers are scared to change things.

Every deploy gets batched up with loads of changes because deploys are painful. Which makes them scarier.

I remember working somewhere where the deploys were done quarterly. The whole process was framed around reducing risk, when in fact it did the opposite.

Here’s a fun bit of Ruby metaprogramming: get the name of the method that called the current method.

caller_locations(1, 1).first.label.split(" ").last

Handy.