Whenever I see some sort of “how to be well” article that includes the line “Avoid going to bed stressed, angry, upset, or...

Whenever I see some sort of “how to be well” article that includes the line “Avoid going to bed stressed, angry, upset, or nervous” my reaction is always something like…

Ha. Ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! wheeze.

I do love YOW. But it could also have the monicker “The Annual Scourging of the Javascript Devs”.

I do love YOW. But it could also have the monicker “The Annual Scourging of the Javascript Devs”.

Black Swans swim on the ocean! I had no idea. This feisty bastard chased away the fishing pelican we were watching while having our morning...

Black Swans swim on the ocean! I had no idea. This feisty bastard chased away the fishing pelican we were watching while having our morning coffee.

I just want to wear a nice coat damn it. Everyone else gets to!

I just want to wear a nice coat damn it. Everyone else gets to!

I can tell I’m going to be one of those insufferable old gits who calls a highland storm a “brisk morning” and goes for a determined...

I can tell I’m going to be one of those insufferable old gits who calls a highland storm a “brisk morning” and goes for a determined constitutional.

Proof I’m not designed for this climate: the temperature just dipped below 20 and everyone on the bus has leather jackets and heavy coats...

Proof I’m not designed for this climate: the temperature just dipped below 20 and everyone on the bus has leather jackets and heavy coats on. The bus driver has turned on the heating!

Meanwhile I’m just bordering between comfortable and slightly sweaty.

Building up my personal “Last Chance to See” list for Australia before I go (and chances are they’ll be gone before I...

Building up my personal “Last Chance to See” list for Australia before I go (and chances are they’ll be gone before I return):

1. Koalas (without intervention, extinct outside of zoos within the decade)
2. The Great Barrier Reef (just gotta mine that coal)

I think headphones that sound good and also don’t hurt my head might be my white whale. Bower & Wilkins PX: perfect sound, hurt...

I think headphones that sound good and also don’t hurt my head might be my white whale.

Bower & Wilkins PX: perfect sound, hurt with my glasses AirPods: fall out of my tiny ear canals QC35s: sound like bum Beyerdynamic DT770s: not portable

I resolved my terrible query drama by disabling the health check that runs the query. We have redundant health checks on that data anyway....

I resolved my terrible query drama by disabling the health check that runs the query. We have redundant health checks on that data anyway. Now everything is happy again. But I still don’t know why that particular query is forever doomed now.

Whither RSS?

The saddest thing is finding a new cool place with articles you’d like to read, and then to discover they don’t publish an RSS feed.

I’m a nerd, so I realised that ridiculouslyinteresting.com actually has an RSS feed at the standard /feed URL published by Wordpress. But they don’t publish that anywhere, and push you to their Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest feed instead.

Guys. You publish to your own website. You’re already doing it right. Why pay penance back into the walled gardens and not even syndicate yourselves?

A migration from Postgres on RDS to Aurora Postgres on RDS has left us with several critical queries that won’t use their indexes and no...

A migration from Postgres on RDS to Aurora Postgres on RDS has left us with several critical queries that won’t use their indexes and no amount of VACUUM ANALYZE on the affected tables seems to have any effect. Not particularly happy.

“Miscommunication” is a euphemism for “bald-faced lie”, correct?

“Miscommunication” is a euphemism for “bald-faced lie”, correct?

New glasses day!

New glasses day!

Bowl of red lentil Dahl and a mug of English Breakfast with milk. Most colonial British lunch ever?

Bowl of red lentil Dahl and a mug of English Breakfast with milk. Most colonial British lunch ever?

These wind-harried Lorikeet bros joined us on the roof for drinks.

These wind-harried Lorikeet bros joined us on the roof for drinks.

Automatic Night-Mode for Bear

I do love my aesthetically-pleasing productivity apps. There’s a reason I fled from the bells & whistles of OmniFocus back to Things 3, and ditched Evernote for Bear at the earliest opportunity. They do less, but what they do do is far better.

There’s one thing that Things has over Bear right now, though, and that’s an auto-switching dark mode! I do a lot of my scheming and planning after dark, with my long-suffering Tam trying to sleep beside me. Since she’s already got the patience of several saints, it’s especially important that my pixels are pushing as few lumens as possible.

Fortunately, Bear has plenty of dark theme options, particularly if you pay for it. But who wants to be navigating settings menus to toggle a theme every time the sun goes down? (And yes, before you ask, I use light themes during the day. I’m a programmer by trade but not an animal.)

Shortcuts.app to the rescue! This extremely simple shortcut simply reads the current auto-brightness setting and toggles Bear between the light and dark variants of the default Charcoal theme based on a threshold.

Auto-night Bear Theme

Now I can launch Bear with the right theme for the light I’m in with Siri 🤩.

How it works is pretty basic, and easy to customise. The brightness setting is a fractional number between 0 and 1, with 1 being full brightness. I consider an auto-brightness setting of about 0.2 to be ‘dark enough’ for a dark theme. Your mileage might vary, so adjust the threshold as you prefer. And naturally, you might prefer any of the other great themes Bear Pro bundles in.

Shortcuts has some good stuff built in. For example, if you don’t trust your auto-brightness setting, you could simply use the Get Date shortcut and toggle the theme if it’s after 6pm. Or get fancy and hit a weather API for local sunset times.

I’m really quite enjoying this iOS automation hobby. Even though Shortcuts.app is a pretty terrible scripting environment once you get past trivial tasks. But that’s a post for another day.

“Hey Siri, play some music” “Okay. I think you would like to hear some Tropical Fuck Storm” Well shit, she’s got my number.

“Hey Siri, play some music”

“Okay. I think you would like to hear some Tropical Fuck Storm”

Well shit, she’s got my number.

Credit to iFixit. The Genius Bar quoted me $1400 AUD to replace the dead SSD in my 2014 MacBook Air. For $450 AUD including shipping, and...

Credit to iFixit. The Genius Bar quoted me $1400 AUD to replace the dead SSD in my 2014 MacBook Air. For $450 AUD including shipping, and literally 8 minutes of labour, I was able to replace it myself.

Right to repair is a real thing, peeps.

TMITuesday: I have two enormous pimples deep inside my nostrils. They’re excruciating and I can’t. Do. Anything. About them.

TMITuesday: I have two enormous pimples deep inside my nostrils. They’re excruciating and I can’t. Do. Anything. About them.

Fibrous Rant

You know the worst thing about “make sure you eat 30g of fibre a day”? You think that means “eat lots of healthy produce”, right?

Fruit and veg have fuck all fibre in them. Healthy apple? 4g. Delicious garden salad? About 5g unless you’re adding beans. Eat 10 bananas a day and you’ll hit your fibre goal. And probably trigger a diabetic coma.

Basically, if you want to hit 30g, boy, you gotta eat legumes at least twice a day.

I had beans for breakfast. Added to wholemeal bread, that got me a whopping 17g of fibre. Ok, I think, that’s a pretty good foundation: over half way! So I eat a veggie stir fry for lunch. Four separate vegetables (including broccoli, superfood de-jour). 2.5 grams of fibre in the serve. What.

Ok, I’ll eat a banana and a kiwi fruit. Whoops, too bad, I hate kiwi skin, that fruit now has only 1.5g of fibre in it. Still more than 10g off my target.

Dinner is what I thought would be a solid capstone for the day, teriyaki chicken breast and steamed vegetables. But it’s not going to get me 10g of fibre today.

So “eat less, mostly plants” is probably good advice. But “eat less, mostly plants, and mostly lentils” is probably more accurate. Sigh. I hate lentils.

4 months: a new low for “amount of time I’m willing to put up with a phone condom for”. Apple cases are so much better than any of the...

4 months: a new low for “amount of time I’m willing to put up with a phone condom for”.

Apple cases are so much better than any of the third parties I’ve tried in terms of protection and size, but the pocket bulk remains untenable.

“But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred.”...

“But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred.”

Snippet from Ballard’s intro to his first large omnibus of collected SF short stories. No better sentence to describe why I admire him.

It’s closing on a decade since I was last at university. Can anyone tell me when I’ll stop having that nightmare that a...

It’s closing on a decade since I was last at university. Can anyone tell me when I’ll stop having that nightmare that a mid-semester exam is imminent and I haven’t made it to classes yet?

Is anyone else worried that the new head of Nintendo America literally has the main Mario villain as his surname? To be succeeded as head of...

Is anyone else worried that the new head of Nintendo America literally has the main Mario villain as his surname?

To be succeeded as head of marketing by Tony King R. Kool.

Two in one week. Let’s hope I can. All the third. It’s Couch 2 5K I intervals, so it’s not like the first week is particularly...

Two in one week. Let’s hope I can. All the third.

It’s Couch 2 5K I intervals, so it’s not like the first week is particularly strenuous: 3km in total, 1/1.5min run/walk intervals.