Ruben Schade has an interesting idea, that's started flipping a lot of switches in my head, using an old computer as a dedicated device for writing.

I’ve seen more people on Mastodon take up old computers for this purpose, which as a self-respecting retrocomputing nerd has inspired me tremendously. These are some of the reasons I’ve seen:

• Single-tasking operating systems force the text editor to be front and centre, and nullify any temptation to ALT+TAB to a browser, or chat window, or a quick game of Chips Challenge running in Wine.

• Spartan GUIs or text interfaces have fewer distracting Das Blinkin Lights, relatively speaking.

• Old machines and word processors have their charms. Why wouldn’t you want to write on something old and cool, instead of something new and meh?

• Some old keyboards were garbage. Some were wonderful. The latter, turns out, are still great to type on.

• Writers have muscle memory going back to the days of WordPerfect or Paperback Writer. I think The Beatles sang a song about that.

• Fast character recognition. Modern computers have higher latency between key presses and typing, which I absolutely notice now.

Just reading this post makes me want to get out my X1 Carbon ThinkPad, play around with Arch, and configure myself a device dedicated to writing. It wouldn't even be that complicated for me, since my blog is really just a bunch of markdown files that are put together on my server using Hugo.

The idea makes my mind go back to a video by Joshua Blais where he talked about using a 10 year old ThinkPad, and also how he uses various devices to keep contexts defined and separate.

I think it's time to download a fresh Arch ISO, make myself a coffee, watch some of Joshua Blais' videos, and play around with a ThinkPad.

PlayStation:

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

I'm so glad this didn't affect me. Because something like this would annoy me so much I'd stop buying things digitally. And I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Manuel Moreale writing about supporting people online:

But I recently realized that tiers are the wrong approach. At least for me. I believe in kindness. I believe that if you decide to support something I do, you should get all the benefits, no matter how much you pay.

I also realized that 1$+/month is the best price possible when it comes to supporting online creators. The 1$ part means you can set it up and forget about it because it’s a low enough amount that won’t make too much of a difference for the majority of people who are considering supporting online creators. The + part allows you to contribute more if you want to do so. And that’s just perfect.

As a result of this idea, I've also gone ahead and updated my Ko-fi page to be up to date, and to also have an option for a £1 a month membership.

Previously I've had links to BuyMeACoffee on my sites, but I think the idea of a £1 (or higher) subscription is a better model for supporting people like me online.

At the moment, this subscription is more of a tip to support the work I do here on my blog, and also the software I write. However, this may expand in the future.

For example, I've always liked the idea of a newsletter, and I've tried it a few times in the past, so I think I may bring that back at some point. And I also want to write more open-source software in the future. Right now the only open-source project I'm really working on is Text Case CLI, and I think I want to do more of this in the future. Along with maybe even working on some free apps.

With all that being said, you can find (and support) me on Ko-fi.

It's only the 4th of December, so there hasn't been much of Advent of Code so far. Just 8 puzzles, out of the 50 total that we will get to solve.

This is the first time that I'm attempting all of the puzzles, and my aim is do them roughly within the same day. Although I'm not sure I'll get much code written on Christmas Day.

That being said, while some days have been tougher than others, I've had a lot of fun so far.

I've seen a lot of people talk about Advent of Code being the perfect tool to help you learn a new programming language. I'm not doing that myself, but I am writing it in Java 21, so I'm both refining my Java skills, and also seeing what is new with the language at the same time.

So far it's been mainly string manipulation, iterating through arrays, and some fiddly counting logic. It can be a bit tedious at times, but maybe after 25 days it will come a lot more naturally.

If you want to have a look at my solutions so far, I have a public repo on GitHub with the logic for each puzzle.

I've written a few times about my progressional career as a software engineer, and how I've had troubles working out what my programer identity was.

Needless to say, right now, professionally, I'm 90% a Java developer [^1].

With that in mind, I updated my LinkedIn and my online CV to reflect my latest situation (and skills, experiences, etc.), and I'm now "officially" casually open for a new role. I say it like that, because I'm in no rush to leave my current role, but I've decided that I'm going to start keeping my ears peeled for any interesting opportunities.

I've also now decided to take a more formal approach to learning more about Java, and how I can become a better Java developer. Even though I used it for a few years at university, and also quite a number of years professionally, I think I'm going to try and focus more time on getting even better.

That has meant that I've been having some fun on LeetCode solving various problems. But I'm going to have an attempt at this years Advent of Code. I've done some individual puzzles in the past, but I've never tried to do them each day (or close to) as they are available. So that should be fun.

I don't know if I'll be posting my Java-related content here. But it wouldn't surprise me if I decided to have fun with a few more side-projects while I spent more time refining my Java skills.

Andrew Webster, writing at The Verge:

Analogue seems obsessed with recreating the Game Boy family as faithfully as possible. For its latest endeavor, it’s bringing the classic colorways of the Game Boy Advance and Pocket to the Analogue Pocket. These Classic Limited Edition Pockets have, according to the press release, been “carefully color-matched” to resemble the colors of the Game Boys of old, offering blue, green, indigo, spice orange, pink, red, silver, and yellow.

I've been interested in the Analogue Pocket for some time. Although I've always held back because I'm not sure if I'd actually use it.

However, I have to say, I love it in the true GameBoy colours.

Ben Lovejoy, reporting for 9To5Mac:

Apple and Google should be held legally responsible for gatekeeping app downloads by teenagers, suggests Facebook and Instagram developer Meta.

Yeah, sure.

“It’s not our fault we actively develop and promote software that negatively affects teenagers health, they downloaded it from your App Store”

I've been thinking about online vs real-life communities, and how in the real-world, there are many aspects that separate individuals, but also groups apart from each other. And yet, I'd estimate that most people feel more connection to people in the real world than on any online community.

For years I've had the same overarching thought in my head, that we humans simply cannot comprehend or deal with the scale that the internet has opened up to us. This both applies to things like the scope of news that is presented to us, and also when it comes to having human interactions with each other.

Traditional social networks are the worst offenders in my opinion. Especially ones who's foundations are built on everyone being connected, and having recommendation algorithms trying their hardest to force any form of interaction.

Whether it's a chef sharing their cultures cuisine via Instagram, a student sharing their learnings via X/Twitter, or a group of young people making fun videos and posting them to YouTube. There's always going to be one or many individuals/groups that won't be it's biggest fan. However, in the real world, you wouldn't expect someone to read a cook book, just to then tell the writer that they did it wrong, or go up to a group of young people and tell them that whatever they're doing, they could have done it better.

And yet online, it's quite typical to see negative replies to any form of human interaction. I don't to be hyperbolic and say that social networks encourage us to be negative to each other, but I do think that most social networks try to connect us together in ways that simply isn't natural.

We've gone from having small local communities, to what can feel like at times, having the entire world in your living room.

It's probably why some people just make their online presence completely private. Because then they can control the scope of their interaction, and avoid an abundance of negativity in the case where something was picked up by an algorithm and shown to a huge number of people.

In Ricky Gervais' show, Humanity, he had a funny segment on the typical replies you can find on Twitter. This is just a small snippet:

That’s like going into a town square, seeing a big notice board and there’s a notice with guitar lessons, and you go, "But I don’t fucking want guitar lessons!".

It's absurd behaviour, but it's pretty typical. It might to some extent be the reason why don't always feel comfortable being themselves online.

Scale changes how we interact massively. For example, the interaction that most people would have with another individual in a local pub is likely a lot different than it would be on a platform like Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube.

I don't think it's realistic, or even valuable enough for it to exist, but I have found myself sometimes wanting a more local social platform. Something like a UK-only Instagram for example, or a European-only Twitter. Because I'd assume most people in the UK are not interested in what Americans get up to on the 4th of July, and probably most Americans aren't interested in the Eurovision Song Content. These types of platforms would certainly have their own problems. But I think it just stems from me trying to invent a form of separation, where you're not by default connected to the entire world.

I guess the closest we got to small online communities were web forums. These were typically centred on a shared interest or activity, so it tended to bring somewhat likeminded people together.

Web forums still exist, but I for one don't use them anymore. However, I do think there is some good news. Because it seems like platforms like Mastodon encourages a better level of human interaction than we've seen on others.

You could argue that there's nothing stopping people behaving as they did on Twitter or Instagram, on Mastodon. But because Mastodon is not one big network, it's decentralised nature means that small (or sometimes large) communities can join together to form a federation allows both levels of interaction. It's by no means perfect, but I think it somewhat encourages people to both find a place where they feel comfortable, but also give them the choice to interact outside of their sphere.

I'm hoping that this means we're at least moving in the right direction.

I switched this blog from Ghost to Hugo a few months back, and I have to say, one my favourite parts about Hugo is that I can build my site literally anywhere. You just need three things, your blog files (config, posts, etc.), your blog theme, and also the Hugo command line tool.

Then all you need to do in the command line is run hugo server.

After that you haven't just built a bunch of static .html files. Instead, Hugo runs a local web server that live reloads on changes to your site config, blog posts, theme, etc. So it's not just a simple way of previewing your blog content, it's a literal copy of what your entire site is going to look like when it goes live.

I'm finding it to be super helpful in all sorts of situations. It's not only great to see how an individual post looks, but I can now see if it appears correctly in the archives, on the home page, how the RSS feed is generated, if the frontmatter is valid, and, of course, if the site compiles at all.

Since I write most of my blog posts on my Mac, I tend to run it at least once before I commit my changes (which, in turn deploys my blog). Just earlier today, I setup a separate CDN for all the images that are stored on this blog, and I used a local Hugo server to verify that everything had switched over correctly.

There's certainly a few downsides to using Hugo, which mostly come from it being a static site generator and not something with an API that a bunch of third-party apps can support. But things like this make me think that (at least for now) I've made the correct decision.

I wrote back in July about my programming career, how it had changed, and also both what programmer I see myself as now, and what I want to become in the future. It's a reasonably long post (~1000 words), but the tldr is essentially, I joined as an iOS developer, but after some internal changes, I'm now primarily writing server applications in Java, but at the same time, other projects that are quite random, e.g. JavaScript scripts for NetSuite, Python scripts for data operations, etc.

The conclusion of that post was:

I’m starting to think that I’m just a “programmer”. No fancy specifications (or limitations), just someone that writes code in order to get things done.

And I think that's still true. But it's been in the back of my head ever since, and I'm certainly a bit more sure about the type of programmer that I want to me.

Back last year, there were some redundancies at work, primarily because they wanted to shrink the local teams responsibilities into more local projects (our headquarters is now in China). I, obviously still work there, but I did think about leaving at that moment. The problem was, I wasn't sure that if I did take redundancy, what job I would look for next. I hadn't worked in iOS for a while, and I'd only just recently started writing Java full-time. I was in a weird situation.

But after just over a year in the new role (I now both work on Java applications, third-party integrations, and also as a software architect for our Enterprise APIs), I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. And I think it's primarily down to the range of work that I get to do.

Recently, we were having an issue with an integration that we have built for a third-party system, which would communicate with one of our own REST APIs. It was a pretty hard situation to debug, because the third-party is pretty closed, and only certain customers were having these issues. But thanks to this new flexibility in my role, and probably that I'm one of the most experienced in the team, I was allowed to try to investigate/fix the problem in my own way.

My solution was to create my own tool that could help us investigate the connection to our APIs. We couldn't just use something like Postman because this API has a few non-standard authentication measures that made that impossible. But because I have experience in web development, I put together a web page, with some client-side JavaScript that could mimic as close as possible the situation that was having issues.

I'm not going to say that this little tool suddenly fixed all of our problems and I'm such a great programmer. But it made me appreciate this new role more, and made me think "hang on, I'm now the type of programmer that makes tools for myself". That felt pretty good to be honest.

I still don't know what the official title is, but I'm now more sure than ever that I don't really want to go back to iOS/mobile development full-time. I'm finding it much more enjoyable writing both server-side code, and also the various scripts, tools, and new challenges that have seemed to come with the territory.