Weeknotes 226

We went to see The Divine Comedy as planned. They were fantastic and played most of the hits I wanted to hear 👏

Our friends visited as planned and we took the opportunity to take them to Whitby for the day. We hadn’t been there before either. It was very windy and very cold, which did somewhat dampen our experience. Still, it was nice enough and we had fish and chips which is the law when you visit Whitby.

Comparing GPS coordinates in Elixir

When working with GPS data, comparing two coordinates directly is unreliable. Due to natural precision loss and device variations, even two readings from the same spot can differ slightly in latitude and longitude. Instead of checking for equality, you should compare their distance — for example, ensuring they’re within a few meters of each other.

llm_rescuer

In 1965, Tony Hoare invented the null reference and later called it his “billion-dollar mistake”. Well, we’re here to fix it by potentially spending a billion dollars in OpenAI API tokens! 💸

Because clearly, the best way to solve a problem caused by the absence of a value is to throw artificial intelligence at it until it hallucinates a reasonable response. What could possibly go wrong?

OverType

OverType is a transparent textarea over rendered markdown. Plain text simplicity, WYSIWYG beauty, zero complexity.

A way in which I used AI this week.

I was shopping on-liiine and there were many variations of the same product. Some were larger, some smaller. Some came with an extra battery. Etc etc. The thing is each variation was on a separate web page, and I was dealing with some of the most inconsistent “web design” possible. Very bad websites. The sort of website where you would ordinarily just go somewhere else to buy it. Unfortunately these products are only sold in a few places and this was the least worst option.

I could not make head nor tail of what I was looking at.

So, I asked Claude.

I gave it the URLs to compare and it downloaded them and summarised the differences. It wasn’t perfect by any means but it dragged me out of the analysis paralysis I was stuck in, and my credit card is thankful for the opportunity to spend once more.

In the last week I have been working on my note-taking approach for Neovim some more and even had moments of enjoyment writing Lua. I may not be completely lost.

My first months in cyberspace

It was a miracle and it changed my life. All of our lives. Not always for the better: even those of us who were, at times, slightly cynical early on were naive about how ruthlessly and literally carelessly businesses would turn the technologies to their own narrow ends.

Oh, the nostalgia! I missed out on quite a lot of this – I never Gophered, or used Finger, and only became aware of Usenet in terms of warez much later, but the World Wide Web hit me in a similar fashion in circa 1997/98.

The Transition of RubyGems Repository Ownership – Definitely seems like the right home for Rubygems, despite the obvious damage control.

I tried out the bottled ink for my fountain pen this week. I was expecting to make a right ol’ mess during the filling process, but it was surprisingly disaster-free. I filled the Z28 Converter for Lamy Safari with Imperial Purple from Diamine – lovely colour.

The ink seems to flow very well, perhaps too well. I might have to change back to a finer nib to see what the difference is.

I’m not sure what the correct term is, but I’m still finding that occasionally I miss parts of the stroke when writing certain letters. I had considered that maybe this was an ink flow problem, but it could also be the pen, or, heaven forbid, me.

How to Use Pattern Matching to Locate Elements in a Hash Array

I still can’t get used to the pattern matching syntax in Ruby.

Rails 103 Early Hints could be better, maybe doesn’t matter

I’d never heard of the 103 HTTP status code.

I can’t actually get 103 Early Hints to be returned all the way to me in any of my production environments. Likely because there is a network device, reverse proxy, load balancer, CDN, or something that’s blocking them.”

Never mind 😆 Doesn’t matter.

The CSS Reset, again – I learnt a lot of CSS properties from this article.

Menu Drop

Another cool little Menu Bar app. I’m not sure I AirDrop from my Mac enough to warrant taking up menu bar space, but it might be worth it to you.

Capacity Planning for Multi-Tenant SQLite Applications

What do you do when you need to paste some text somewhere before pasting somewhere else? You can open an Apple Note note, or TextEdit document, or something else?

I was thinking about using Tot for this as I find myself doing this more often than I thought (perhaps because of LLM usage?), but then I remembered that I am already entrenched in the Raycast ecosystem, and they have a Notes facility built in.

My needs as limited at the moment so I will try it out.

How the UK is fixing its parking app nightmare – is this…progress?

I see a future in jj

jj is being used in projects as small as individual developers and as large as one of the largest monorepos in the world. That’s a big deal. It can show the social proof needed for others to give jj a chance.

I’ve been aware of Jujutsu for a while, but always thought it would be too difficult to adopt even if it was considerably better than git.

(Software doesn’t just “win” by being better. A lot of people thought Mercurial was nicer to use (still do!), but it did not win.)

I really like git. When you’ve used Visual SourceSafe you will like git – trust me. It’s one of those programs that really changed my developer life. And despite it’s clearly poor cli UI.

The fact that jj can use git as the “backend” really does change things. Without that, I would not be even thinking about trying it.

I went to see Tron: Ares this week on a whim (don’t bother, probably). I always get a kick out of seeing real-life commands in films regardless of their use. This time I spotted sudo systemctl and sudo killall.

Searching Ruby’s documentation

This documentation (and any documentation built with rdoc 6.15.0 or greater) now can be searched using a query parameter. Check it out!

I am very pleased to see these documentation improvements.

I appreciate that Kagi’s “bangs” are open source and accept contributions

This is also neat, I didn’t know these are open.

This has happened quickly! Not one, but two options to turn the Lego Game Boy into a real Boy.