Daily Jots for 14 Sep 2022 2022-09-14

09:17: So far the beginning of my day of ‘intensive and consistent concentration on work’ has started with two hours of procastination and internet surfing…let’s try to turn that around. There is stuff to get done! :)

10:56: Up until I started doing mobile development I found the CPU’s on even my older desktop more than sufficient, much less my M1 MBP. Now even the M1 is being taxed heavily. Amazing how much of a heavy lift writing code for these smalls devices require.

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Daily Jots for 12 Sep 2022 2022-09-12

10:23: Working on my first large scale Flutter project for real. I’m finding some of the default IntelliSense choices by IntelliJ/Android Studio annoying and I can’t figure out a way to override. I have turned on the ‘reformat code on save’ feature which I got to really like when I dabbled with Flutter under VSCode.

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Daily Jots for 31 Jul 2022 2022-07-31

10:43: Thought I was walking one way instead of another on the trails around where I’m staying right now and ended up accidentally walking nearly six miles. My body is not used to that distance in one go right now so will pay a little for that but wasn’t hard necessarily.

11:23: …although I will say that when I do my miles in a neighborhood I find listening to music and podcasts on my headphones indispensible. Doing the same walk on nature(ish) trails I find the headphones to be an unwanted distraction.

12:42: I had intended to have a day full of development/development documentation by writing some posts but instead it has manifested as helping some people with some coding and Friendica questions. In many ways that is even more enjoyable, especially since there was a high probability I was going to procrastinate away the hours not doing any of that development/development documentation at all :)

13:58: A sign that Matrix is on the cusp of hitting mainstream: the number of spam bots/accounts seems to be increasing geometrically.

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Daily Jots for 22 Jul 2022 2022-07-22

14:57: OK second attemp at updating my #friendica node, sixth try today. This time I’m bumping up CPUs to 8 from 2 and RAM to 16GB from 2GB. It now has more than enough disk space too. If this doesn’t work I’m not sure what my forward path will be. MySQL is really thrashing though.

18:14: Well after an afternoon wasted trying to get my #friendica updated with MySQL as its backing DB I finally ripped it out and replaced it with MariaDB. Everything ‘just worked’ after that. I highly recommend not using MySQL for #friendica if you have a choice. If you have a choice for other projects actually I highly recommend PostgreSQL. #mysql #postgresql

18:43: In case there was any remorse about leaving the Amazon/Alexa #SurveillanceCapitalism hellscape (there wasn’t) this news eliminates it. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/get-ready-for-alexa-skills-pop-up-ads-on-your-amazon-echo-show/

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Daily Jots for 21 Jul 2022 2022-07-21

10:26: I’m starting to experiment with Codium (the de-Microsofted VSCode) and finding it works very well. I was just pleased the snap install instructions worked just as well on ARM64 as on Intel

11:24: I have to remember to check my calendar on those ‘in the zone’ coding days. Almost missed a bunch of scheduled meetings.

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Daily Jots for 15 Jul 2022 2022-07-15

13:45: PHP is definitely back to feeling Rube-Goldberg like. Trying to XDebug installed with a modern version on Ubuntu 20 has been Kafkaesque. Standard package too old (2.9) pecl path looks installed but never shows up in the runtime (sometimes in the CLI). Punting to building an Ubuntu 22 VM to hope the standard packages ‘just work’…sigh… #development #php #programming

15:23: After spending the first half the day unsuccessfully wrestling xdebug under Ubuntu 20 to try to debug this Friendica thing and another couple hours trying to get Ubuntu 22 installed with a UI for ARM64 (only server installs exist right now) and slightly quirky differences on PHP 8 vs 7 I’m not ready to start the whole Friendica installation process for the third time this week. At least the latest release supports PHP 8 now :). #friendica #friendicadev #programming #php #ubuntu

19:02: I’ve allowed my doom scrolling/perpetual news dopamine hit habit to come back too much. Yeah I just go to individual Twitter accounts now but that isn’t that much better since it is the same 6-12 people I reflexively checked in my most frequented Twitter List. Gota double down against this now. I can already feel it dragging me into a despondent place.

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Daily Jots for 14 Jul 2022 2022-07-14

08:11: While I’ve been pleased at how not claustrophobic developing with just one 14 inch laptop screen has gotten this past month, I’m still annoyed by the frequency of Parallels Desktop crashing the entire OS (once every day or two). I thought they’d have fixed that by now.

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Daily Jots for 12 Jul 2022 2022-07-12

10:14: TIL a trick for doing a quick dried bean soak. Instead of leaving in cold water over night you boil a kettle of water and pour it over. It cuts the rehydration time from overnight to about an hour. #cooking

10:32: Of course one could just cook the beans an extra 30-45 minutes but I buy into the old wives’ tale that pre-soaking ‘de-gasses’ (for lack of a better expression) the cooked beans.

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Daily Jots for 05 Jul 2022 2022-07-05

08:39: A great review of 1982-era CGI for the making of Tron, including John Lasseter describing his first viewing it as a Disney animator and becoming inspired. #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory https://youtu.be/Tm4i6D3XXBQ

08:41: …and a doe with her fawns (the size of medium dogs at this point) just started playing in the back yard. Magical morning :)

10:32: In today’s mental ruminations (aka procrastination technique) I’m thinking about how I could use a Friendica instance with a customer feeder to make a ’news’ node on the Fediverse. Yes its been done but I want to do it again but one that crosses protocols (because Friendica) and is consistent with its publishing. #fediverse #friendica #ActivityPub #news

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Daily Jots for 02 Jul 2022 2022-07-02

09:58: Me: I wonder if I can do a full day of a monkish focus on work. Me 5 minutes later: I wonder if anyones posted anything interesting on The Fediverse…