I grew up in the east coast of the USA. During that time, I would climb trees, I would sit under trees, I would go into the forest, the trees en masse, and enjoy myself.
I have lived overseas for a number of years and in a number of countries as an adult. One thing that I have noticed, from East Africa, to Eastern Australia, to Southeast Asia, is that trees overseas are mean. You cannot climb on trees, for the bark will cut you. You cannot sit under trees, for the ants will bite you. Forests are still OK I guess, but given the distance one needs to maintain between body and tree, travel at own risk.
I miss kind trees. Trees that let me enjoy a nap, not worry if I have updated my tetanus booster recently.
I have used macOS on and off since 10.2; I was never a younger Mac Fan. In fact, I was one of those who thought the, “one Mac guy,” was a bit odd. Of course, I was educated on Mac computers in school, but those were school.
Anyways, that was all an unnecessary setup for me to say, I still don't understand how Mac thinks about windows. Who finds Expose (or whatever they call it) and effective tool? Why is alt-tab so infuriatingly terrible? Why do I need to install a discontinued Rectangles just to get proper keyboard-controlled tiling?
The biggest annoyance though, the one that prompted to write this post first thing before even checking work emails, is that I also cannot anticipate how an individual application manages it's windows' state? If I close a window, but don't close the App, why do some restore when I say, “Bring to Front,” while others force me to click their dock icon (WhatsApp and Zoom, I am looking at you!)?
If I go based off that first-party apps, it seems that if the Window Menu item is an actual named window, it should launch, and it should show only a deactivated, “Bring All to Front,” menu item. This does not always seem to be the case.
Or maybe I am still just, “not used to it,” as some Mac fans offer. Sure, not used to it, after 20 years....
In my Firefox extensions, I run the DDG Extension, DecentralEyes, PrivacyPossum AND uBlock. Needless to say, mainstream websites don't always work on first load in my browser. However, despite running all of the privacy oriented extensions, I am quite willing to turn them off on a site-by-site basis. I know I will be tracked, I just want the illusion of control these extensions offer me; that the tracking is a conscious choice I am making, not just some drive by effort of every copy-pasta web developer out there.
The need to turn these extensions off does not usually catch my eye, regardless of the website I am visiting. What DOES catch my eye is when I am repeatedly needing to turn them off for the same website, time and time again. What is going on there...
In my day job, I need to work with OData feeds. This is not a flamewar article on Odata vs other HTTP-based API specs, because, well, they are all terrible :) However, it is a bit of a gripe about the OData ecosystem, or it's complete lack thereof. So that's the gripe, the ecosystem sucks. At least for end user applications.
It seems dominated by Microsoft, probably because they drafted the spec. Sadly, they drafted it in 2007 when the open source and loud minority internet developer celebs were very much anti-Microsoft. That's just a wild assumption I am going to make without actually trying to figure out if it's true. Feel free to correct me, I just don't have the energy to research.
Anyways, the other, other problem is that the Microsoft Power Query product that lets you consume OData in Excel and PowerBI is FREAKING AWESOME. A seriously good product.
This is a problem because it's Windows-only. I run a mac. FML.
I've always wanted to be able to write lazy debug statements in python. I am not a professional programmer/coder/software engineer. I am a hobbyist at best, a dabbler more truthfully, and I am also lazy. There is nothing I dislike more than going back and removing debug prints from code. Well, except for implementing proper logging of course.
Why couldn't I just have a flag somewhere, “DEBUG,” and the system just know to only print when I had the flag on. I would hack a debugprint function, but then I would need to retrain my muscle memory to type debugprint instead of just print.
Python has these inverted inline conditionals (I'm sure that's not what a programming language designer would call them, but see above). I use these probably too much, but they are quite nice.
Python also has this ellipsis syntactic sugar for pass. It's one character shorter, and it's also less travel time, so, again, cheaper.
I just now realized I can put the two of these together.
Enough people/bots seem to visit this site. Enough that I wanted to know what they were reading. Enough that I went back and re-titled posts that didn't have titles, so that I could know what they were reading.
It's 2023. Or 1999... Whatever. Personal sites are back. Blogs are back. RSS is back. Owning your data is becoming real. Raspberry Pi will hopefully be in stock soon and before you know it, we will all be running little single-app, “appliance,” servers in our homes or renting them from the internet mom-and-pop equivalents of the hosting world.
It all makes me a bit happy.
Of course those are big brush strokes filling in a paint-by-numbers picture. I was never good at coloring. I could neither create my own pictures, nor stay in the lines of a paint-by-numbers. I don't know what that makes me, but I always felt like a little bit of a failure. I'm not left brain or right brain... #sad.
I do find it fascinating that one of the big differences between 1999 and 2023 is the inversion of the compute pyramid between client and server. We all walk around with very powerful clients, (“edge,” devices?), but can run all of our server-side apps on little Raspberry Pi. A little Mastodon server here; a little Writely server there. Cotainerise them all and run them on your home NAS (OK, maybe then you would need a bit more compute...). It's feeling exciting again!
Today I learned that the English language word, “Goodbye,” is a modern spelling of, “Godbwye.” The, “God,” meaning God; the, “bwye,” being a shortening of, “be with ye.” Ye in this case was just another way to write, “you.” Goodbye is basically l33t/texts-peak for, “God be with you.”
Factoid courtesy of Made in America by Bill Bryson.
I have learned a sad truth today: the internet does not have a good, “PK Fire,” meme. I feel with the number of times, “ok,” is mistyped to, “pk,” one might have plenty of opportunity to meme-drop some PK Fire love. I guess not.
