www.rollc.at :: Posts
I like smart home stuff - in moderation. Some things end up too smart for my liking. So I got rid of my Homepods and got me a pair of KRK Classic 5s. These studio monitors sound great, and are fantastic value for their price, but have one annoying feature: the built-in circuitry that shuts them down when there’s no audio playing. It makes sense in a studio context, but sometimes I just like to listen to music quietly, and the shutdown threshold is just a little bit too low.
Some people have physically modded their speakers to permanently disable that feature, but I’d prefer to keep my warranty for now, and I actually do like auto-shutdown - just on my own terms.
Nothing reinforces one’s claim to a hacker badge than solving hardware
problems in software (or vice versa). I wanted something like macOS’s
caffeinate(1) command, except for audio.
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So I’ve participated in OCC v4 with my TiBook. Just like last time, I have some conclusions.
Conclusion (n.) - when you’re done thinking.
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To continue with our tradition of hand-me-down Macs, dkbox gifted me his ancient PowerBook3,5 (aka TiBook), which I’m now considering using as my main machine for the upcoming Old Computer Challenge v4 (update: conclusion).
The machine has pretty decent specs (for 2002): a 32-bit, single-core PowerPC CPU clocked at 867Mhz; 512MB of RAM; 40GB of spinning rust; a USB2.0 expansion card; and even digital video output via DVI! Most of that can also be upgraded/expanded.
This post is a bit of a free-form documentation of the machine’s quirks, a TODO list / what-if of a sorts, but also an appreciation of the era’s hardware, software, and design/aesthetics. I might update it at some point to reflect any fixes/upgrades I’ve done to keep it alive.
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Making up your own house rules can be a really fun part of playing board games. It lets you wear the shoes of a game designer - not just play the game, but also play with the game.
Sometimes changing the rules makes for some really spicy games, as even a trivial tweak can have a ripple effect and unexpected consequences. But we’re here to learn and to have fun - so let’s play, shall we?
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Hello, my name is rollcat, and I like playful domain names.
What I don’t necessarily like is hoarding stuff (especially when it
comes with a recurring expense), so instead I’m going to just throw
this idea out here, in the hope that someone will do something playful
and interesting with it: a domain name that starts with some form of a
negation, followed by one of those fancy new gTLDs, for example:
donttry.engineering, without.style, never.forsale,
forget.makeup, or unnecessary.website.
There are over 1500 TLDs! The possibilities are endless. Try searching on Gandi or Hover.
This is a reflection on PG’s famous essay, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. The fact I’m writing this while in the middle of producing a live stream is only a tiny bit ironic.
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I use getopt almost exclusively in all software that I write by myself, and often insist on using it when collaborating with others, even when the language convention is to use something else.
The reason is simple: getopt is a part of the user interface, and user
interfaces should strive to be simple and consistent. As an end user,
I find it jarring when, for example, I have to run a script by
specifying the interpreter by hand, or when the language-specific
extension is a part of the file name. This is an implementation detail
which should not concern me - the #! should take care of that for
me. Similarly, getopt is over 40 years old, is supported nearly
universally, and is easy to understand both for the user and the
programmer.
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Observation: most calendar software I regularly use (the default apps on Mac & iOS; World Time Buddy, & some others) is not great when dealing with events that end past midnight. For example, in WTB I can’t select a range outside the 24h period spanning the “home” time zone; Apple’s apps show the event on the next day as if it was scheduled ON that day (which Calendar Timeline doesn’t do); etc.
I consider this an accessibility problem, where accessibility is defined as “making your software accessible to everyone”.
Quick tip: if you want to inspect the filesystem of a running Docker
container, but it doesn’t even include a shell, let alone ls, you
can do the following:
docker export some-container | tar -tf -
You can also print out the contents of a single file with tar (omit
the leading slash):
docker export some-container | tar -xOf - etc/some/file.txt
Last week I had to work on a Django app again. Since Python is a very portable language that works on many different platforms, of course I’ve had to work on that in a Docker container, in a Linux VM in Qemu, on an arm64 Mac running macOS. Also because the official Docker for Desktop app is somewhat annoying, I’ve been giving Lima a try. Also because the standard Django development web server doesn’t offer the best debugging experience, I’ve been running an alternative server through django-extensions.
I’ve counted at least 8 distinct software vendors so far in that paragraph. When I’ve hit a bug that completely killed my productivity, it was far from obvious which one to look at. Let’s take a dive and see what happened.
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Quick tip: if your home server happens to be a humble PC tower, rather than a rackmount blade, you can insert a layer of styrofoam or bubble wrap underneath it, to reduce the noise transferred from the fans & hard drives into the floor or the desk.
One day: a fanless server, with all SSDs and no HDDs.
Today marks the last day of the challenge.
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Short update on the challenge: all the smart home stuff is so annoying.
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Days 1&2 of The Old Computer Challenge v2! I found that being almost constantly online during the working hours actually takes a lot away from the challenge - I’ve had to make a few adjustments.
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I’ve decided to participate in the The Old Computer Challenge v2. In this challenge, we pretend we’re on a 1990s-style modem (metered) connection, so we’re only allowed to be online for one hour a day (except for work).
My partner Alida has decided to join as well.
Check out all posts in this series.
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Day 0 of The Old Computer Challenge v2 went well. Even though it’s a Sunday, I’ve had to work a bit - which also meant I had to go online. Such is the life of a startup co-founder, I guess. I didn’t mind though, as it created an opportunity to listen to a live stream of up&coming Opera singers, and as a lover of ALL good music (thank you, Mańka), I couldn’t imagine a better reason.
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I’ve published my dotfiles on Github. The readme discusses some very simple and effective strategies for maintaining dotfiles, without the overhead of any third-party tools.
I’ve published a gist with my StarCraft II hotkeys. The readme discusses the design and philosophy - mostly focusing on ergonomics, improving at the game, and maintaining good habits.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve had to write a detailed post-mortem, and luckily this time the impact is very minimal - I’ve accidentally nuked the contents of the hard drive of my laptop, which I rarely use for any “serious” work. It’s made me reconsider disaster recovery plans, because mine didn’t quite stand the test.
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Merging is one of git’s most powerful abilities, but with great power, comes great responsibility. I use merging very sparingly, as I strongly prefer having linear history in my repositories.
Here’s how (and why).
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I’m recently becoming a fan of the text editor
mg(1). It is exactly what the man
page advertises it to be: a small, fast, and portable Emacs clone.
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TL;DR: welcome Hugo and Netlify.
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I’m a big fan of UUIDs. They make life better, wherever I need to organise things - correlating objects between vastly different data sources, storage formats, structures, non-structures, databases, caches, etc. I already use them as PKs in Postgres, filenames in S3, and many more; today I wanted to spread their usage to accounting.
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It’s been years since I last updated the page describing my stack, so here’s the new stuff.
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In April 2019, a friend gave me an iPhone. I gave it a try, and it made me question my life.
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Updated 2019-12-22: With dark mode CSS, it’s now possible to match your website’s color scheme with the user’s preferences. Finally!
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For whenever I forget random silly things like “how to exit vi” (I’m an Emacs
guy).
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I’ve pieced my rig together quite carefully, creating a rather unique stack. At the fundamental level it’s not so different from a hundred thousand other hackers’ stacks, and thus to comply with the #1 rule of custom stacks, it demands a dedicated post explaining how cool and unique it is.
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