Random Notes

Earlier this week I took my parents to the airport and had the opportunity to work on my side project on the train on my way back home. For some reason I enjoy coding on trains, buses, and airplanes. Especially when it’s raining outside. A wonderful combination of white noise sounds, I suppose.

tinyScientist went to the doctor for his U-Untersuchungen and took some other vaccines. My wife has a Phd in vaccine development working with viruses, so of course tinyScientist won’t miss a single shot.

On Tuesday I returned to work after two weeks off and had my contract updated to match my new title: Engineering Team Lead. Never have I imagined I would take such kind of role, but the setup we have in the company works so well that I decided to accept the challenge. I’m glad I have the time to write code and lead a team.

Internet in Germany has its ups and downs; probably more downs than ups. This week my Internet Provider gave me money back because the service is too unstable in my area, I had to use my phone as personal hotspot in 30% of the meetings I attended.

Earlier this year LEGO released the Series 24 of its minifigures. We went to a store to feel the packages, as we always do, and found 10 minifigures. Still missing 2.

And finally, I canceled Audible. The local public library is great and offers thousands of audiobooks via Libby for 10 EUR/year.

Made good progress in my side-project today, but now it’s bed time 👨‍💻 🛌

🎮 🤣 I see a lot of people talking about shooting down the Chinese balloon, but no one says a word when I shoot down balloons on Animal Crossing every 10 minutes…

GitHub added to people’s profiles open fields for social accounts. I linked my Mastodon account there and now it shows my GitHub profile as a verified URL on Mastodon 👨‍💻

I’m impressed by Matter’s support. I sent a feedback/suggestion earlier today and they implemented and deployed it within a couple of hours 👨‍💻

📷 Boris, tinyScientist’s new friend.

I’ve made some changes to my blog yesterday, putting some Nord colors here and there. For the codeblocks, the following lines were added to Micro.blog’s config.json:

{
    "pygmentsCodefences": true,
    "pygmentsCodefencesGuessSyntax": true,
    "pygmentsStyle": "nord"
}

There’s no HBO Max in Germany 📺 🤦‍♂️

👨‍💻 I wish I had more time to work on my native omg.lol client for macOS and iOS. I still have some vacation days I have to take before the end of March and might use them for that.

• Had my parents visiting us during the week and visited several museums with them
• Finished removing all my followers on Twitter
  • It took a while since I had thousands of followers (from a remote time when I had a popular podcast back in Brazil)
• Deleted more accounts:
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Stack Overflow
  • Git Tower
  • mastodon.social
• Added support to a new statuslog.lol feature to my native macOS and iOS client, which allows users to reply to statuses via Mastodon
• Used my page and /now pages as base to create the theme for my weblog.lol

Following the example of some digital friends, I’ll start posting some short weekly notes about what I’m up to, things I’ve learned, and things I found online I think are worth sharing. Think of it as some sort of newsletter.

Deleted my Tumblr and Pinterest accounts.

A few months ago I stopped following everyone on Twitter. This week I removed all my followers and locked my account. I don’t want to delete the account, since Twitter recycle the usernames, so this should be enough for now.

My parents are visiting us, which means touristing in our own city. Went to a museum today.

📷 ✈️ Cockpit of an old Lufthansa airplane in the Deutsches Technikmuseum. Taken with an iPhone using Obscura 3.

It’s official now, third-party clients are banned on Twitter. Elon Musk just killed the only thing that made Twitter interesting.

Twitterrific: End of an Era:

Twitterrific has been discontinued. (…) Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store (…)

Congratulations, Elon Musk… 😤

One of the reasons Twitter is what it is today is thanks to the dozens of mobile apps that appeared back in 2007-2010.

Twitter’s first mobile client only existed thanks to a third-party application they bought (Tweetie), hiring the mind behind it (Loren Brichter).

I had to use Twitter the other day to contact Vodafone’s technical support and, since I was there, decided to check on Musk. People on the platform were celebrating the fact Twitter native app was the number 1 in the AppStore. Easy when you get rid of the competitor.

I’m happy with the two blogs I have, otavio.cc and photos.otavio.cc, but I might merge them into one and have an RSS feed for all the content and one just for the photos. WIM 👨‍💻

Update: I’ve killed the latter on 2023-01-30.

I’m a big Obsidian fan - even created Micro.publish to send posts from Obsidian directly to Micro.blog - but Obsidian Publish is a little bit pricey. I’m thinking if it makes sense to use Micro.blog Pages to build a Digital Garden… 🤷‍♂️

👨‍💻 Starting on Monday I’m no longer a Senior macOS Engineer at NordVPN, but a macOS Engineering Team Lead. I still code, but have a team to manage.

📷 After lunch coffee. Taken with an iPhone.

Tony Stubblebine in Medium embraces Mastodon:

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse.

Evan Williams' Medium is embracing Mastodon. Kinda funny.

With a couple of lines of code I migrated my app from NavigationView to NavigationSplitView, which offers much better navigation in SwiftUI.

And I got for free the ability to show/hide the sidebar.

Apple has a pretty good session about NavigationSplitView and NavigationStack on their developer portal. The jokes and puns are awful, but the content is really good.