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Aside: Statuslog 08/02/2023

😩

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 I’ve ever had.

Aside: Mastodon post on 08/01/2023

Re-reading a post I wrote about going back to WordPress. I’m proud of this excerpt:

“With 30% of the web, we might as well say that it is ubiquitous. And it’s good. Much like Helvetica, WordPress is very seldom the worst choice that you could have made (even if it isn’t always the best).”

That number is in the 40s now.

blakewatson.com/journal/switch

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/31/2023

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.

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/31/2023

Prettier just formatted its own configuration file when I hit save. Is this the singularity?

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/30/2023

PHP 8 cost me a new customer. I can see in the logs where they tried to subscribe. But they hit PHP 8’s insidious error, Warning: Undefined array key….

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.

Here’s the best fix that I know of: mattwatson.org/blog/20230716-l

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/29/2023

I wish there was a CSS media query for the user’s scrollbar preference. macOS has three options:

  • Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
    – When scrolling
    – Always

I set mine to “Always” (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 user’s preference.

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/28/2023

Me: Hey Matt, do you want a Bluesky invite?

Matt: idk maybe later … isn’t that the meth in Breaking Bad?

Me: umm, yes I believe it is

Aside: Statuslog 07/20/2023

😣

Brain is fried from designing favicons. They’re hard and I’m out of design practice.

Aside: Statuslog 07/20/2023

😌

Working on favicons for some NASA apps. Nice little break from coding.

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/20/2023

I just wrote a recursive function that worked on the first try. I'm sitting here stunned. Is this what it feels like to be a 10x dev?

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/19/2023

My mom’s ancient miniature poodle is the only dog I’ve ever seen that, when given a treat, will just stare at it like “idk what you want me to do with that.”

But then bark if one of the other dogs get close to it.

Aside: Mastodon post on 07/19/2023

Just to recap, the three times I glanced at the clock this afternoon went like:

  • 12:34
  • 2:34:56
  • 4:20

If I don’t show up tomorrow, I’ve either won the lottery or the universe took me.