Weeknotes 237

Monday came, back to work for many. I too, was glad to be back into my normal routine, for as long as that can last.

Hive by Basic Apple Guy – new year, new wallpaper. Not only does it make your computer look nice but it also saves money as setting a new wallpaper feels like getting a new computer.

Elon’s Spies by Tortoise Investigates – You know, I think this Elon guy might not be a good person. If the Nazi salute wasn’t enough for you, maybe this will be.

There have been many reports on Reddit of Bambu A1s doing a tiny bit of melting 🔥 This is apparently caused by a faulty NTC thermister component which likes to get very hot and has, on occasion, melted through the plastic casing of the printer. Bambu keep saying that this is “by design”, which I find hard to believe. (I mean, I can believe that it is a safety feature in terms of it burning out and stopping further serious fire, but having a component regularly melting the case cannot be the preferred outcome.)

It is not clear which models are affected, and Bambu are staying tight-lipped.

In order to mitigate any potential fire I decided to install a fire prevention device, aka paving slab. It is a low cost way to stop any potential fire, and I had already thought about getting one to help with stabilising the printer anyway.

Hopefully Bambu get their act together and do the right thing.

ISBNDB – do you need book data? This seems cheap to me to save all the trouble of curating your own? 🤔

Next Thing Will Not Be Big – this is worth your time.

There’s no need for another streaming service if 100% of your leisure time is already committed to TikTok, YouTube and Netflix; famously, Netflix has already considered sleep its primary competitor for close to a decade - years before the pandemic.

Reverse Engineered Vape Circuit Boards – nice use of e-waste.

Via Paul Battley.

Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live onstage during hacker conference

‘Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website — maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,’ Root wrote.

Nice one, Martha 🤣

If you’re going to put BBC licence payer funded content exclusively behind BBC Sounds the least you can do is make the BBC Sounds iOS app decent. The UI…needs work (still). It’s hard to know what is available to listen to and what I’ve previously listened to. Basics, basics, basics.

A Technical Deep Dive: Securing the Automation of ACME DNS Challenge Validation

When DNS is compromised, a malicious attacker can easily intercept all the connections directed toward your email or other protected service, terminate the TLS encryption (since they can now prove ownership over the domain and get their own valid certificates for it), read the plaintext data, and then re-encrypt the data and pass the connection along to your server. For most people, this would be very hard to detect.

An in-depth article about ACME DNS challenges I was talking about last week.

A local news website stopped publishing it’s feed from some reason this week so I restored it, to a certain extent, via FetchRSS. Not sure how it will work out.

It’s been bloody cold (“feels like” -9 as I write this) so I treated myself to some new gloves with “innovative touchscreen pads”, which means I can stay glued to my screen even in the cold. How I like it.

And to top it off, I got a pair of USB-C rechargeable hand warmers which are surprisingly good at taking the edge off chilly hands despite using them feeling like carrying a potential fire in your hands at all times.

Claude is growing tomatoes

Via Dries Buytaert.

This week I was trying to organise my “projects” and my “learning”.

Procrastinating by creating big lists of things is a good start. I use Things to organise my life. There are several YouTube playlists that I wanted to watch, but in a Things Project I wanted a heading for each playlist and then a TODO item for each video – this is laborious to do manually; a lot of cutting and pasting. We can thankfully do better.

Get a list of all video titles in a playlist, in order:

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print title <playlist-url> | pbcopy

Go into Things, create heading in a project, paste. You should get an item for each.

"…the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business"

I was always surprised, and impressed, at creating a business from a CSS framework. Genuinely. This is a shame regardless of what you might think of Tailwind.

Via Robb Knight.

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons – Alan strikes again.

On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple! Let’s drink to that. Happy New year!

Scathing.

Open Printer

Finally, an open hardware printer you can actually understand, repair, and upgrade

Ruby 4 has a lot of cool new stuff. My favourite is probably the newest default gem: win32-registry.