We’re dog sitting a chihuahua. I just had this conversation with their owners’ kitchen spybot:
Me: Dingus, Monday morning at 8AM, play “I Want a Dog” by Pet Shop Boys.
Spy: OK. Would you like me to make that your default alarm tone?
Me: …yes!
My wife: LOL
Don’t leave me alone with your electronics.
We’re dogsitting Holly. She thinks my jokes are hilarious.
The new cajun place next door finally has muffuletta sandwiches in stock. First, they’re every bit as delicious as I remembered from first trying them many years ago. Second, I now know how I’ll die, and that I’ll die smiling contentedly.
I’ve been up on the roof installing the mount for a new Meshtastic antenna.
I don’t actually need an encrypted mesh messaging system that doesn’t require Internet access, but it’s reassuring to have one available anyway.
I bought a Meshtastic radio and I could see getting addicted to experimenting with it. The little stubby antenna in the kit is enough to hear from nodes across the bay and let me talk to nearby nodes. I’ve already ordered an outdoor roof antenna to push that farther.
This is fun.
Currently reading: The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran 📚
Next up.
Finished reading: My Struggle: Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard 📚
I would read a thousand pages of him describing his living room. Actually, I think I have.
Absolutely luxurious.
Apple Card's stil broken after Apple broke it
After Apple broke my Apple Card yesterday, I thought I’d found the correct, undocumented, undiscoverable way to update the App Store to use my new card information. Nope. Apple is still declining transactions from their own card after they unilaterally decided to change it.
I’m anticipating the moment they tell me they’ve canceled my account for nonpayment. What an unnecessary mess.
Apple updated my Apple Pay so that I couldn't pay Apple
I got an email this weekend that Apple was updating my Apple Card’s expiration date. The old date would work for purchases through the end of the year.
Today Apple Music said I can’t play songs until I update my payment info. I clicked the offered button and got an unworking form with unlabeled, required fields.
When I guessed the right value for the unlabeled field (which wasn’t asking for my name; it didn’t allow me to type a space character), it told me it already had that card information on file. I closed that and went into System Settings > me > Payment & Shipping. There was no way to update the payment information there. A quick trip to Kagi said I have to update that through the App Store app instead.
So I went into that app and clicked Manage Payments. It prompted me to enter my credit card info there. That didn’t work, once again because that card was already on file. I clicked the Back button on that form and it took me to a different screen I hadn’t seen before that listed my payment methods. The form on the new screen wouldn’t let me edit my Apple Card, but it did allow me to delete that card altogether and add it right back. That seems to have been the right combination of incantations. I can listen to music again.
To recap:
- Apple made changes to my Apple Card.
- They didn’t apply those changes to their own internal system.
- The prompt for me to do it myself didn’t work.
- Neither did the second place I tried.
- Neither did the third.
- …until a random button click took me to the hidden screen I needed in the first place.
Does anyone at Apple use this themselves? I’m doubtful.
Last night we said goodbye to Gigi after a sudden medical event. She went to sleep surrounded by a heartbroken family who loved her very much.
Goodnight, sweet pup.
If you want to really understand how Internet protocols work, I heartily recommend writing your own on top of UDP. You don’t have to work in the kernel. You can use just about any language you want. You can make it as simple or complex as you desire. Try it sometime! It’s instructive.
I was making the bed while the cat laid on it, surfing the waves of bedding as I shifted things around carefully to avoid chasing her off. Then it struck me that I’ll never be able to make the dog into the bed again, which was one of her favorite things. That hit unexpectedly hard.
Miss you, girl.
The comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as taken from our suburban back porch right in the middle of the Bay Area. It was easily visible to the naked eye. If you haven’t gone outside to look at it yet, do it!
Silent Hill 2 is not fun. It’s beautiful. It’s immersive. It’s engaging. But it’s not fun. Everything that happens comes back to your decision to do this to yourself. No one forced you to go there. To ignore the warnings. To follow a fog-enshrouded vaguely human but not quite shape through a gore-smeared hole in the base of a wall. You chose to. And now there are consequences.
It’s excellent and you should totally play it. I can’t say you’ll exactly enjoy it, though.
Python 3.13 launched today. I’ve done it. I’ve lived long enough to see a less-GIL’ed Python released to the public. Until now there’s been an unvirtuous cycle:
Python isn’t good at running CPU-intensive threaded code. → No one writes code like that. → There was no pressure to remove the GIL because no one writes code that would benefit from it. → Repeat.
I hope this is the first giant step toward good Python multithreading.
Ugh, “walkable” cities. 🙄
To get dinner, we had to:
- Walk a couple of blocks
- Pause for my wife to pet a dog
- Watch sunset at a table behind a taqueria
- …where my wife had to pet another dog
- Stroll past the monthly outdoor fest with live bands and a bunch of vendor booths
- Wait for my wife to pet a dog again
- Walk back past the European market, where we walked in to get dessert snacks
- …and for my wife to pet the owner’s dogs
Simply intolerable.
Google writes safer code with Rust
From “Google hails move to Rust for huge drop in memory vulnerabilities”:
In Google’s own shift towards using memory safe programming languages there has been a significant drop in the number of memory-related vulnerabilities, with memory safe vulnerabilities down to 24% in 2024 - a stark contrast from 2019 [76%] and well below the industry norm of 70%.
Memory safety is not the same as safety. You can still write bad logic in any language. It “just” gets rid of the majority of bugs so that programmers can concentrate on the more interesting parts.
Also, yes, of course you can write safe C code. No one with a large codebase ever has in practice, but it’s at least hypothetically possible. Wouldn’t rather not have to, though?
It astounds me that in 2024 there’s no canonical way to select which CSS to use for a web browser on a phone screen. You have to guess at how many CSS pixels wide your target device is. If next year’s device is any larger than a hardcoded threshold, they may get your desktop layout instead.
I know there are people who’ve made their careers out of memorizing all the edge cases of this monstrosity. Those are lifetimes lost to toil because no one can agree on an official way to look nice on a cell phone, or the one true way to center an image. It’s madness.
The fine folks who make iA Writer wrote about their challenges supporting Android.
My first impressions:
- I’m glad Google is taking user privacy so seriously.
- …but I didn’t know it was so Kafka-esque for developers to comply with their requirements.
I hear “why would devs ever tolerate Apple’s App Store shenanigans when Android is right there?” Well, because the grass isn’t always greener.
Ideally, both Apple and Google would make it easier for devs. Nothing about this requires either’s processes to be more complicated than they inherently are. As it stands today, both shift a lot of extra effort and compliance guesswork onto developers.
My Raspberry Pi 4 started running hot when I moved it from a freestanding case to a fanless server rack. I’d often SSH in and see idling it at 65C or warmer, with log messages showing it had been thermally throttled. That’s not great.
I just bought a Argon Fan HAT. I installed it and fired up a large Rust compile with 4 concurrent jobs. 20 minutes later and the RPi averaged about 54C with no throttling.
Get your Pi a fan. It wants one very much.