Of course everybody knows the best Death Cab album is Give Up by The Postal Service. š
Microblog
I was trying to get to get some work done when suddenly my brain decided that it needed to see a list of all Death Cab for Cutie albums ranked RIGHT NOW.
My wheelchair's joystick stopped working when I got back home from a doc appointment. So I swapped out the joystick for the one on my previous chair. It worked, but turns out the orientation of that one is off by like 45 degrees. So I had to rewire my brain on the fly in the heat just to get out of the van and into the house. Took about 30 minutes.
Related: this is the best Coke Zero Iāve ever had.
I was looking at Firefoxās comparison page and noticed that even though they conclude that Firefox is the winner (obviously), Microsoft Edge actually ticks every checkbox they present.
I wasā¦ surprised, to say the least.
(Edit: I shared the wrong URL)
āYou donāt hear about TextMate because TextMate is old. What would I tweet? Still using TextMate. Still good.ā
Re-reading a post I wrote about going back to WordPress. Iām proud of this excerpt:
āWith 30% of the web, we might as well say that it is ubiquitous. And itās good. Much like Helvetica, WordPress is very seldom the worst choice that you could have made (even if it isnāt always the best).ā
That number is in the 40s now.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/switching-to-wordpress-in-2019
I bet if you went back 100 years and described Spotify/Apple Music/Bandcamp to them, they would assume that in the future no one is working and everyone is listening to music all day every day in some kind of utopian paradise.
Prettier just formatted its own configuration file when I hit save. Is this the singularity?
To be clear, though, as much as I can understand the frustrations, my Mastodon experience has been the opposite. I donāt know if itās because Iām in tech (sup NERDS) or I just lucked out with my instance (https://social.lol).
Everyone is nice. There are lots of creative, interesting people posting art, code, statuses, silly things, serious thingsājust a good variety of stuff.
When I log into Bluesky, I donāt know who to follow and it looks like mostly just screaming.
This article by @kissane was great but I kept being distracted by the beautiful typography and design (because Iām a nerd, not because itās distracting).
I also correctly identified the fonts as Matthew Butterickās Valkyrie and Heliotrope. *chefās kiss*
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
Who remembers Firebug? ā¤ļø
PHP 8 cost me a new customer. I can see in the logs where they tried to subscribe. But they hit PHP 8ās insidious error, `Warning: Undefined array keyā¦`.
For better or worse, checking an array value using a possibly-non-existent key was a common pattern in PHP code. You could do it in an if statement and count on the result being truthy or falsey. Yeah I know, I know. But still.
This change makes ton of existing code problematic.
Hereās the best fix that I know of: https://www.mattwatson.org/blog/20230716-let-me-live-dangerously-php/
I wish there was a CSS media query for the userās scrollbar preference. macOS has three options for when to show scrollbars:
- Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
- When scrolling
- Always
I set mine to āAlwaysā (even though many native apps including Setapp and Apple Music ignore it and disappear them anyway).
But it would be nice for web apps to know the userās preference.

Me: Hey Matt, do you want a Bluesky invite?
Matt: idk maybe later ā¦ isnāt that the meth in Breaking Bad?
Me: umm, yes I believe it is
I have had Nothing Compares 2 U stuck in my head all afternoon.
I'm working on an update to my side project, A Fine Start. https://afinestart.me
Brain is fried from designing favicons. Theyāre hard and Iām out of design practice.
Working on favicons for some NASA apps. Nice little break from coding.
Aaaannnnddd I found a case where the maximum call stack is exceeded. Not a 10x dev after all.