Leon Mika

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:16:50 +1000

Trains out. Now taking backup route out of city. Trying a new one: 86 tram to La Trobe Uni for a connecting bus. Tram is chockers.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:30:59 +1000

Just learned that Steve Yegge has changed blogging platforms again. He’s now writing on his own site. Sadly no RSS, but I also learnt that XCancel allows subscription via RSS to someone’s Twitter feed (HT @sod). So, doing the best I can under these less than ideal circumstances.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:25:16 +1000

Had an urge to work on Cyber Burger this past week. Added an interactive tutorial, plus a harder “B mode” with a few new elements. Just managed to get under the maximum size of the cartridge, although it was touch-and-go for a bit, and I did have to pull out the onboard help.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:50:00 +1000

Was the MacBook Neo ever offered in Macha Green, or did I just imagine/wish it was?

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:45:37 +1000

Enjoyed Adam Wunn’s post about FileMaker, via ATP. I’ve never used FileMaker, but as an avid reader of the technology section of the Green Guide back in the day, I always saw ads for it and wondered what it was. I guess one could, if they were be uncharitable, describe it as something akin to Microsoft Access. Anyone remember Access? Does Access remember Access? 😉

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:38:24 +1000

I must say that I happy to be so lucky my taste in music is such that the pieces I listen to could never be mistaken for AI slop. It helps that most of the pieces I usually listen to predate the frickin’ Internet.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:14:47 +1000

🛠️ Obsidian Headless

See what happens when you fall down rabbit holes? You learn about things you’ve been wishing for a while. It’s beta at the moment but I tried it out on a headless Linux server and it seemed to work (at least in one direction). This opens up the possibility of using Obsidian for things. At the very least it gives me a better way for backing my vaults.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:49:25 +1000

2026 census done. ✅

Just in time for NPM to finish installing a few billion packages. 😜

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:06:42 +1000

🔗 Kev Quirk: Linkception

So many links in one post. I ended up going down all kinds of rabbit holes off the back of this single post.

Followed Kev down that rabbit hole and I agree. It was quite the journey.

The backbone of the internet is the hyperlink, so go forth and link out to your fellow bloggers with reckless abandon. It’s what makes the web, the web. 🕸️

Paying it forward in kind. Thanks, Kev, for the links.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:08:36 +1000

🔗 Unsung: Paste And Match Style is not the answer

The problem is that PAMS is drunk with power and flattens everything on its way: [bold, italics, etc.] None of these are “style.” This is actual information that should not be removed. If you wire PAMS as your main ⌘V shortcut, or even if you use it occasionally, you might remove valuable data from text you’re moving around, without even noticing.

I can sympathise that styles might be valuable information to some, but there must remain a way to remove this, leaving only the text. Too many apps implement styles badly, and most of the time, I find it much easier to copy as text and apply the styles again, despite how long it takes. That’s if I want to maintain the styling at all (most of the time I do not).

Simply appealing to apps to improve Paste won’t give us that. Remove PAMS if you must, but for the love of God, make sure there’s something like a “Paste Without Styles” which allows me to paste text as plain text. And make it easier to set this as the default systemwide: why are we still rebinding system shortcuts to get this feature?

(I did not expect to feel so strongly about this, but I just more fired up about this opinion as I wrote this. Paste as it’s implemented now just frustrates me sometimes).

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:41:47 +1000

I’m liking Zed but there were some features that Goland really excels at. Their handling of Git, for example. Rebasing, resolving conflicts, and doing branch comparisons on a single file were easier to do in Goland compared to Zed. Debugging is another one. Might keep that Goland license around.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:03:03 +1000

Coding agents love to write code. Sometimes the act of operating these things involves telling them not to. Worse is sometimes better. Not always: I wouldn’t put that opinion in their system prompt. But sometimes.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:25:36 +1000

Interesting seeing how the verbs around vibe-coding are developing, since it hard to justify describing one partaking in such an activity as “coding.” I’ve seen a few describe it as “directing” the creation of an app, like a film director creating a movie. That’s a little fancy for me, and implies a level of hands-on that I feel is lacking in my vibe-coding sessions. Hence why my preferred term is “commissioning,” asking something to make it for me. Do what you need to do, and just tell me when it’s ready. I may have things that need changing, and I’ll come back to you about them. Otherwise, no news is good news.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:51:37 +1000

Well, the “glow” of my new monitor lasted a whole… what? Five days? Last night I noticed a dead pixel near the middle of the display. It’s frickin’ tiny so I don’t think it’s worth going through the hassle of getting it replaced. I’ll see if I can live with it for now. 😩

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:33:48 +1000

I wish something like HyperTexting was available for Android. I hate to admit it, but having something mindless to scroll while commuting would be welcome, and the social apps I use have a bit too much “person X said thing Y that I hate.” It’s exhausting. What HyperTexting has feels right.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:13:07 +1000

Unsung: “Gravity is worth asking about.”:

Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.

Perfect analogy about how the existence of something in a UI usually results in more of that thing down the line. Code might be infinitely malleable, but it still takes effort to change. And as soon as you’ve paid it for adding just that one thing, adding thing two is significantly cheaper. This also applies to backend too.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:56:20 +1000

What is taste? Is it deciding what to publish? Maybe, but equally important is choosing what not to publish. Maybe more so. 🤔

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:10:46 +1000

Maybe my colleagues are right: maybe I can learn to like working on infrastructure. I’m migrating something from a EC2/systemd service to Kubernetes Cronjob at the moment, and it’s an interesting task. Must be the novelty of it all but hey, a bit of novelty is never a bad thing.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:44:09 +1000

Moonset over station.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:09:33 +1000

Got another track done for my Godot game. While originally intended for the grassland levels, I plan to use it for the coastal world as it sounds better suited to those. It’s based on a riff I recorded ages ago that I stripped to the essentials, and I think sounds better for it. Less is more.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:13:12 +1000

Listening to my co-workers talk about their side projects and just coming away thinking “wow, that’s ambitious.” I then reflect on the relatively modest things I’m working on. Sigh. Maybe I need to get some of that ambition my colleagues seem to have in spades. Working on less things might help.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:54 +1000

While visiting NWS in Maryland, back in 2016, I spent a day walking around Washington, DC. The Americans will cringe when they hear that I passed by this body of water and thought for a moment that it was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “A bit more natural than I was expecting,” I thought. I kept walking until I ran into the real thing: “Oh, that’s it.” 😅

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:53:11 +1000

The AusAlert system is based on the US one so we were told that some of us would see “Presidential Alert,” rather than critical alert or whatever it was. I thought the number of those seeing that would be quite small (it’s based on the phone OS version) but I know of at least three people who received such a message. They were all using OEM Android devices that are maybe a few years old so maybe their version of the core OS was missing those changes.

I actually knew a guy that worked on the US alert system. He was working at National Weather Service while I was working at the Bureau, and the project we were both on involved us working relatively closely together. He talked about the alert system when he was visiting the Bureau, and although I can’t remember anything about it, it sounded fascinating.

He was based in Maryland, and we would have a few phone-calls early morning my time and late afternoon his time. The Bureau required all international calls to go through reception, which wouldn’t open until 9:00, so I built a little Twilio server which would listen on a local number, say something like “Connecting your call” (or maybe even “Hello world”), and connect me to his number. In 2016, I got the opportunity to visit NWS centre at the University of Maryland as part of this project, and he invited us around to his place one evening and cooked us burgers with melted cheese on top. He was a nice guy. I wonder how he’s going.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:02:13 +1000

Test successful. Happy AusAlert Day to all who celebrate.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:44:39 +1000

Those concerned about the software industry regressing due to gen-AI needn’t worry. The software industry regressed long ago when JavaScript was chosen as the de-facto language for everything. 😒