Weeknotes 93

Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything

No-one enjoys writing boilerplate. The more straightforward it is to write, the duller it is to summon into a text editor.

This is great; I found myself nodding my way through it.

Phone doesn’t have signal after travelling in a car. Toggle “Airplane Mode” in a vain attempt to gain a signal. If it’s really stubborn, turn the whole phone off and on again. Is it the phone? Is it the network carrier?

Computer won’t connect to WiFi. Disconnect the VPN so the captive portal can ask for my personal information. Type “google.com” into a browser to see if it’s actually connected. The VPN has done something awful to the networking stack. Disconnect, reconnect, toggle Wi-Fi on and off.

Is it now normal to have to turn anything wireless on and off again to make them work?

I found myself wanting to conditionally build a query this week. When I’m normally building this sort of thing it’s to filter a large collection by adding a serious of where clauses,

query = Model.all
query = query.where(some: condition) if condition.present?
query = query.where(other: thing) if thing.present?
query

In this case I was trying to find a single record. Because of that I didn’t want to start with Model.all because I risked returning a random record from the collection. I wanted a Model or nil.

Model.none
query = query.where(some: condition) if condition.present?
query = query.where(other: thing) if thing.present?
query.first

I’m doing some work on my “homelab” moving quite a lot of software to Docker containers – for which Docker is ideal – and it prompted me to investigate how Docker networking works. I knew you could route traffic for one container through another, but I didn’t know that a container can have more than one network attached.

Arc is the new Neovim – I think there’s a possibility that Arc might end up replacing my Pocket use. Because of the organisational tools Arc has, and the new mobile app, I’m finding myself just sending/moving/sharing a page into certain spaces.

Autonomy is good, but it leaves a space that my brain wants to fill with anxiety, worry, imposter syndrome. Sometimes feels like you can’t win 😅

My bathroom renovation is complete ✅ Another thing ticked off.

The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

Have you ever been working on something for a period of time and then realise, towards the end, that the approach is incorrect? Yeah, that. This is the reality of software development sometimes, but it doesn’t stop it stoking the fire of imposter syndrome. It also ruined the long bank holiday for me a bit.

CAN Injection: keyless car theft

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft.

I got a new PB on my trap bar deadlift and bench press this week, so that’s something to be pleased about 💪 Small wins.

If only I could stop eating myself to death.