A blog about programming and whatever else irks me enough to write about.
This game was a lot of fun. I was a huge fan of the original—which I still think had a certain vibe none of the sequels matched—as a kid, played the other PS2 and PSP instalments, but then dropped off in the PS3 era. I did play the PS4 reboot/remake which was pretty good but didn’t displace the original for me. It’s quite nice to see they haven’t really changed the formula after all these years,…
I appreciated that they led with addressing some of the biggest concerns, especially from long-time Mac users. The changes to Liquid Glass are very welcome: real toolbars, sane sidebars (sane r —they’re still full height which is not great), and thank whoever you can for tighter corner radii. I had assumed that was an affordance for future touch Macs and that we’d be stuck with it forever, but…
I finally finished this. I’m struggling to remember when exactly I started it but I think it’s the only game I’ve played this year. I’ve enjoyed my 100 hours in it, but I’m quite glad I’ve finished as admittedly I was starting to get a little sick of it. With Breath of the Wild I went back and got all the shrines after I beat the main quest—I don’t think I’ll touch this again. It’s been long…
But for now, suffice to say: when I look around me at the impact AI is currently having, I see little reason for enthusiasm—let alone the little-questioned, quasi-religious belief that this fundamentally flawed technology will one day soon bring about some sort of economic, societal, and/or scientific revolution all on its own. Come to think of it, “religious” might be a good word to describe how…
I did Inktober this year (2025). It was fun! I used to draw a lot as a kid and wasn’t half bad at it. Unfortunately, it’s a skill I’ve let atrophy over the years. Still, I enjoyed doing these and some of them I’m even quite proud of. You can definitely tell that after the first few days I realised they were taking me way too long and settled on a far simpler theme. Click thumbnails to view full…
I love our 2022 Mazda3. It looks fantastic, it’s fun to drive, and it’s pretty efficient as combustion cars go. But most of all, I love it because it feels like one of the last bastions of sanity in the modern car world. The only software I need to directly interact with is the little rectangle that shows what’s on my phone, and even that is controlled via a physical dial and buttons. The climate…
I struggle with phone cases. For one, I enjoy the feel of the materials used in most high-end phones, as well as keeping things as thin and light as possible. For two, the vast majority of phones cases out there are horrifically ugly. Like truly, bafflingly ugly. The unfortunate reality though—at least for me—is that modern phones are too damn big. If I’m trying to reply to a text while walking…
🔗: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo Realistically this is the only thing they could have done. My understanding is that while the Snooper’s Charter allows for appeal, parties issued a technical capability notice must still begin work on implementing a backdoor while any appeal is ongoing. I’ve read much rumbling on Mastodon that this is another example of Apple rolling over at the…
The reason I’m so onerously explaining this is that I do not believe the majority of people hate technology, but what the technology industry has become in search of growth. In fact, I’d argue that deep down, many people love technology — we love that we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos with effectively anyone with an…
I completed Advent of Code for the first time. I’m probably not gonna do it again. Am I glad I did it...I think I am? There were certainly a lot of times where I regretted my stubbornness and should have stopped, and it’s safe to say that overall what fun and satisfaction I did get from solving the puzzles came nowhere close to offsetting the time I spent on it. This is all a “me” problem, of…
I’m not a fan of the current crop of generative AI products, as the folks I work with are no doubt already sick of hearing. I don’t discount them completely, and for something that an LLM is very likely to get correct I’m not above asking ChatGPT, especially with how god awful Google results seem to be these days. But I don’t feel good about doing it, mostly for the common reasons:…
Before Christmas, my wife mentioned it’d be cool to get a digital photo frame to put some of the many, many photos we both take on display, instead of locked away on our phones. Both our phones do the “memories” thing, but they’re never really on display anywhere. A week later I was listening to ATP and one of the sponsors was Aura . They’re far, far from the cheapest digital photo frame out…
I feel like it’s sorta common knowledge today, especially if you’re a developer, that most modern software does not give the slightest shit about gobbling up as much RAM and as many CPU cycles as it wants. Developer time is more expensive than hardware; especially if it’s someone else’s hardware you’re spending. It sucks, but it’s a known quantity at this point. What I was somewhat surprised by…
For desperate and frustrated people I’ve lost two seperate evenings to this so I might as well get a quick blog post out of it. If you don’t need my life story, here’s the tl;dr: OpenMediaVault expects to be in sole control of the machine it runs on when installed on bare metal (i.e. not as a Docker container) It will pick up the tailscale0 interface and attempt to create a Netplan config for it,…
Background Fluent interfaces are very common in the PHP world, as well as many other object-oriented languages. They can provide a very nice way to interface with classes, but they’re often misused—completely accidentally. For those not familiar with the term, it’s literally just when methods on an object return the object itself (or, more rarely, a copy) to support method chaining. Configuration…
For a while after I got serious about good test coverage, my tests would often end up quite sprawling, usually with only one assertion of any real value per test case. Since I started to lean more into PHPUnit’s Data Providers , my tests have become much simpler, and as a result easier to read, review, and maintain. Writing tests is usually not the hardest part of development of course, but I…
Disclaimer : as the title suggests, I’m still new to Go. It’s entirely possible that some of the things I mention in this post may be based on an incomplete understanding, or it might just be that there’s parts of Go I don’t fully appreciate yet. This is simply my initial impressions, now that I’ve worked on a few real-world projects. For reasons which are entirely uncontroversial and completely…
Back in January I opened a small pull request to the Laravel framework to enable query-time casting of Eloquent attributes. Laravel already allowed static casting, where an array $casts could be defined on a model, containing key-value pairs of attributes and the data type they should be automatically cast to. This is a very nice quality-of-life feature for things like dates or JSON columns,…