Weeknotes 266

Two news macOS dictation apps to consider this week: Handy and TongueType.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

There’s only so many times you can read ‘Then I severed a +3 damage with poison debuff while he raised a +1 shield and used his armour of holding to neutralise the attack’

This is exactly why I stopped reading! I think it would make an excellent TV series though, and that’s happening so let’s wait and see.

How is the Bun Rewrite in Rust Going?

As of today, the 27th of July 2026, a six week period after the rewrite was merged to main, there’s still no release tag.

Very interesting.

Why AI Tokens are so Expensive - Computerphile

Not news to me, but it is incredible just how wasteful LLMs are when you gets to grips with how they work.

Don’t Review AI Code. Verify It.

centered their identity around writing code

And it is difficult to process.

It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice” – the MINASWAN thing was, and has always been, bollocks.

I went to see Game of Thrones: The Mad King play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon on Friday. It was very very long (nearly 4 hours), but enjoyable, and the RSC is more comfortable than your average theatre. I paid £3.50 for a 330ml can of Fanta though!

Two database migrations and a divorce – a real insight into the amount of work involved in a massive database migration.

A win and a loss this week regarding my upgrade to the Public beta of iOS 27.

The loss: during my drive to Stratford-upon-Avon CarPlay crashed four times. Not ideal.

The win: the new Shortcuts app has a “describe” function where you can describe a shortcut you’d like and have to it create it for you. It worked extremely well for me and now I have a Shortcut I’m using daily.

Possible arbitrary file read and remote code execution in Active Storage variant processing – bad times.

I…finished two projects this week. Who am I? What am I?

Both command line apps written in Rust.

Firstly, a tool to download the data from my personal training app (which has no public data export or public API) and saves it to a SQLite database committed to a GitHub repo every night using a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow.

Secondly, a tool called posterity which will scan the movies in your Plex library and download the associated poster art and save it next to the movie file.

I wouldn’t have finished either of these tools without an LLM. Take from that what you will.

Whilst testing posterity I learnt that you can export all permission ACL state using getfacl before making changes, and if the changes break something, restore the state using setfacl.

PGSimCity – no idea what to say about this other than it’s cool. Very cool.