Weeknotes 260

LNER eventually agreed, after I sent an email every week since April, to give me my money back. They are also apparently crediting my account as “a gesture of goodwill”. I have yet to receive any credit. I’ve got nothing but time, access to an email account, and a growing sense of exasperation.

Mailway — Route mailto links to any email app or webmail – This was almost an instant install for me but I think I’ll wait until I next get annoyed by Apple Mail suddenly opening.

Homebrew 6.0 has been announced

<validation-enhancer> – I forgot to mention this when posted the HTML-first link last week. This looks to be a nice way to improve the standard browser required attribute behaviour.

Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe – I’ve actually been thinking about getting a Kobo for a while, but this has put me off. I want a device with better EPUB support than a Kindle, not some weird situation like this.

If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort

Seems reasonable.

TIL that Plex can Auto-Sync Subtitles

This is accomplished by having the Plex Media Server analyze the primary (first) audio stream in the video file to detect when dialog occurs. Using that information, compatible subtitle files can then be dynamically adjusted during playback.

There are prices increases and then there are Hetzner price increases — blimey. 2 or 3 times increases across the board. Where will Rails zealots host their poorly maintained Docker containers now?

I was reminded about zfs.rent this week. I wish I had a reason to use this as the idea of sending ZFS snapshots across the Internet is very appealing to me. Alas, I do not, and if I did I wouldn’t be able to afford the hard drive.

I used git worktrees for the first real time this week. It wasn’t hard, turns out. I don’t understand the raving about them though. Maybe I’m missing some magic. Just a shallow clone?

Mandating pair programming isn’t very inclusive, is it?

I’ve successfully “pair programmed” with colleagues in the past, but I’ve also had some terrible experiences which have no doubt contributed to various periods of burn-out.

This industry is obsessed with finding the One True Way ™ of software development. Let me shock you, there isn’t one. Pair Programming can contribute to producing good software but it is not the only way. I know we’re computer people but our thinking doesn’t always have to be binary.

I’ve been actively using GitHub this last week and now I understand all the complaints. I wonder if it will ever be good again? Basic stuff doesn’t work. For example, you need to hard refresh for various counters to update.

I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID.

Access denied. Go away. Nothing to see here. Except this was all client-side. The Angular app checked the JWT for a NO_ROLES marker and rendered the access-denied page. The backend APIs? They didn’t check anything. They just served whatever you asked for.

More people who don’t know what the web is.

If an attacker pushed video to one of those RTMP endpoints with the stream key (which is RIGHT THERE in the URL), they would replace the camera feed. The PGM (Program) feed is the main broadcast output. Replace that, and every TV network receiving the FIFA feed shows whatever you pushed. The stream key is shared across all five camera angles per match. A single attacker could hijack every camera simultaneously.

This is wild!

I went to see Masters of the Universe on Thursday. Why did I do that? I believe I am the target demographic for this film. It’s a lot better than you might think, and passed some time. Jared Leto is even good in it, although I didn’t realise he was until afterwards. Maybe that’s why.

My week will be dominated by Brighton Ruby this week coming. I’m a bit annoyed at the weather for scheduling 30c heat on the day of the actual conference. Thank goodness it’s taking place in the Dome, whose giant theatre usually handles the heat very well, at least in previous years.