atribecalledqst

> Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I'm one of about 2 people at my company who goes on archaeological expeditions to understand when and why a bug was introduced. A nonzero number of times, I have found that the behavior was introduced on purpose over a decade ago, and sometimes it's addressing an edge case I didn't think about. History is valuable!

(unfortunately the most common usage for me though is as a 'smell test' where I learn who wrote the code from the history and then decide based on my existing assessment of their skills, how suspicious I should be of that code)

e; oh yeah one more story that's kinda funny. Just this week I saw some behavior that I didn't like and went to look at the code's history. I was the one who wrote the code I didn't like. But I had left a good enough comment on it that I realized there actually was no issue at all and my expectations were incorrect.

Yeah, I could never do serious front-end work, I just can't do (and also don't enjoy) making anything graphical.

That said I have made a couple web apps for personal & work use (and I have a Neocities) and it is certainly a freeing experience to write them without giving a crap about aesthetics or design. I get the job done, it's not pretty, but once the functionality's there I'm happy.

Fighting with CSS to make things align properly is the least fun aspect of this, but it is pretty fun to figure out the logic to generate the HTML, interact with the backend, have some JavaScript for basic interactivity, etc.

I was a kid in the 90s and I have vague memories of various little games and programs on the family Mac (the first one we had was a Mac SE IIRC). When I think about them today, I realize... they were probably HyperCard programs.

There was one that was basically an interactive storybook about a black cat, that I forget the name of now but I know is on Macintosh Garden. 99% sure that one is HyperCard.

My dad gave me a program called Soroban that was basically just an abacus, I think it gave you simple arithmetic problems and you'd do the calculations on the abacus to figure out the answer. He actually may have written that one himself, I'm not sure. (unfortunately I don't remember how to use an abacus today)

Interested to hear about what kinds of obscure HyperCard programs you all encountered back then...

The thing I hate most about the new version of Teams is that it flashes the taskbar when a new message is received. You can disable the pop-up notifications, but that doesn't affect the flashing taskbar for some (??) reason. The old version of Teams didn't work like this, it was possible to turn off all notifications & alerts so that you only got notified when a meeting started or somebody @'d you.

You can go into do-not-disturb mode to stop the flashing, but then pings aren't delivered and you can't do 1-on-1 calls. So there's a pretty significant tradeoff. I wasn't able to find a way to disable them any other way (registry hacks I saw recommended online didn't work).

This sucks because if I see the taskbar flashing, I MUST go and check out Teams. It's too distracting to leave on. So there can't be a background group chat where I'm not taking part and doing other things -- I get dragged into checking every message which is extremely annoying. I suspect that 'immediately check out the app causing the taskbar to flash' is basically a conditioned response for most computer users so I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

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I also strongly dislike the vibe of the Teams emoji set. The :) looks like it's playing dumb, and it adds that connotation to messages I see from people using it. (admittedly I've only seen it be used by my dumb coworkers)

I realized too late that apparently the only way to get rid of the OneDrive directory structure is to manage the settings from within OneDrive itself! I'd already uninstalled it and removed, by hand, most of its folders.

Now if I try to reinstall OneDrive, it doesn't open when I try to launch it! I think it just gets trashed by all the changes I've made.

I guess I have to live with the OneDrive\Pictures and OneDrive\Documents folder forever, because they keep coming back when I delete them.

(I am somewhat loathe to reinstall Windows because just getting it installed on this laptop was a huge PITA in the first place, and it was extremely annoying getting all the ads & crap uninstalled)

e; actually wait, I may have been able to finish the job with the registry hack given here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...

Bless you Rodrigo. Bless you

ee; this is another example of a phenomenon I see a LOT, which is that just complaining about something into the void is often a critical step to solving a problem.

Yes! I was a backer for this while it was still running. Really cool series, don't have a physical copy of the book but do intend to get at least a digital copy at some point. Man that hard copy would make a GREAT coffee table book though...

The lab course is getting harder to run since the parts in the BOM on the author website are being end-of-life'd. I ran into this when I started trying to run it as a self-study project a while ago. It wasn't always clear what parts you could use to replace them either...

Also, the BOM itself doesn't have everything used in the course, so I sometimes found I needed to order something I hadn't anticipated needing. (the frustration with this ultimately caused me to drop it, maybe half-ish of the way through)

This doesn't really negate your point, the lab course certainly still exists, I'm just not sure how amenable it is to run through as a self-study hobbyist.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but I sure wish they'd do this for OneDrive! I installed Windows for personal use for the first time recently (although I use it exclusively at work) and it drove me ABSOLUTELY BONKERS that my home drive was mapping to C:\Users\atribecalledqst\OneDrive.

What I hated the most was that the File Explorer just calls the folders in there e.g. "Documents" and "Pictures" without showing the full path. So it was hard to figure out just where in the file system you were looking -- a major annoyance if you do any work in the command-line!

Even after switching OneDrive off and doing as much as I can to try and get rid of the OneDrive folder structure, I haven't been completely successful. You can make some -- but not all -- home folders (like Downloads, Documents, etc.) point directly to their place in the local user folder, but others, particularly Pictures, don't seem to be movable. Additionally, some programs still seem to want to use the OneDrive folder by default, like I think Office programs still do their best to use them.

In the grand scheme of things it's a small annoyance but god it annoys the shit out of me! I didn't ask for cloud backup and it drives me nuts they tried to force it on me!

Whoa! Thanks for the recommendation! This looks like it'll be right up my alley.

I've started to suspect recently that an important secret of being able to sound natural in conversational Japanese is using a LOT of onomatopoeia words. I've considered mining all of them from jmdict and studying them specifically.

Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved.

Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game.

Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway.

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Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.

It was such a shame we didn't get the other 2 Loom games that were planned. (and iirc there's an easter egg that you can find, that directly hints at the content for the next game)

I have a Framework 16 pre-ordered and I've been waffling on whether to keep the preorder.

My daily driver is a MacBook and honestly... I'm not expecting that to change. So I guess I don't mind if the Framework is a worse experience than the MacBook. It just needs to do the few things that I need a Windows laptop for. (and maybe support some experiments using desktop Linux...)

My company did a hilariously stupid thing where, towards the beginning of the pandemic, corporate decided that hybrid work was the future and ordered everybody to change to open offices. We are a small company and have few enough people that there is room for everybody to have a cubicle. Our management sometimes fights stupid pointless orders but not this one -- so they began a lengthy process of tearing out all the cubes and replacing with a bunch of open spaces, including more conference rooms and labs for some reason (that I guarantee will never be used because again -- very small company). They went so far as to change where walls were -- when I visited recently and took a tour back there, it felt super claustrophobic.

When corporate changed their minds and said everybody needs to start coming into work again, our management realized that, because of the way they did the conversion to open offices, they no longer have enough room for everybody in the company to be there physically!

I still can't decide whether I'm bitter about the pointless change to open office, or if I'm thankful they did because otherwise they would have pressured us harder to start coming in again.

I thought Mode C was just barometric pressure data measured by the aircraft. It's related to altitude, not position, so there's no such thing as Mode C "coverage".

e; oh wait you said passive MLAT off Mode C, that makes more sense then

The fun surprise for me after upgrading to Monterey (which I will never stop bringing up in "Mac OS X bug" threads here in case an Apple employee is lurking) is that in new versions of Mac OS X you can't use both Home Sharing in Apple Music and bluetooth headphones at the same time. You can Home Share from Apple Music with wired headphones, and you can use bluetooth headphones with other functionality in the OS. But Apple Music specifically is broken. Possible that this is related to the home sharing being hosted on a really old Mac, but it worked fine on High Sierra!

Apple Music is in general much buggier than iTunes but that's the real dealbreaker for me.

I mostly just use MPD instead, but even that program occasionally has issues, there are a handful of music files that basically cause a fault in the headphones and they dont work right unless I switch to a different song. Still no idea whose fault that is though (OS X? the headphones? MPD?)

At first I was thinking "huh, I don't think I've ever seen this before..." but come to think of it, there have definitely been a few freak occurrences of the balance suddenly getting out of whack. It throws me for a loop at first because usually the balance suddenly going out in headphones is an indicator that one or the other side is starting to die.

It's pretty rare, I've only seen it a few times, but yeah. Pretty obnoxious

This tripped me up hardcore at work recently, because I was trying to SSH into a VM using a non-standard port, but the port-forwarding went from the non-standard port into the usual 22 on the VM. So when I got "Connection Refused" on port 22, I thought that meant the connection was getting through the NAT layer but then failing at the VM for some reason.

NOPE I'd just specified the option wrong!

There's a Japanese ATC sim series called "I Am an Air Traffic Controller" that I like. It's got a couple installments on the Switch and 3DS which is where I played them, but they go back as far as the PS1. Some but not all of them were localized (there is an English one on Switch)

I think originally it was a PC game series, I've watched some videos of the recent PC installments and they look TOUGH. Much tougher than the console ones

WOW finally I encounter somebody with the same use case as me in the wild. I thought that would never happen. Except I stream off my 2007 Macbook instead, which is basically just a NAS to me at this point. (I actually do own a Synology NAS but have not integrated it with this existing system)

I hate the UI on Apple Music enough that I don't use iTunes Home Share anymore, but instead run an instance of MPD and then just control playback through ncmpcpp. But to modify tags, add ratings, etc. I have a Screen Sharing session open to the 2007 machine to use iTunes. I have an ongoing project to write a web app that would free me from iTunes altogether, but it will be a while before that's usable.

I don't remember if I ever encountered the disconnection issues you did with a modern machine + home sharing with an older one. The thing that drove me the most nuts was that I could not use home sharing if I was using my headphones over bluetooth. They had to be plugged in for home sharing to work.

My favorite trick was when I figured out how to get the advertisements from home sharing forwarded over VPN, so I could use it when I was on work travel. Unfortunately that broke when I upgraded from Mavericks to High Sierra and I never figured out how to fix it.

FYI -- on my MBP I use a program called Spectacle to snap windows around, and I now have no complaints relative to what you can do on Windows.

Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/kazpcn/spectacle_alter...

[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

I read the Cuckoo's Egg when I was in like 6th grade, and even though I didn't REALLY understand what was going on at the time, I've always wondered if it subconsciously influenced me towards becoming more computer-savvy, to my present day form as a command line junkie ;)

IIRC I randomly picked it out from the local Borders too (realize I'm dating myself with that one) so that's some real "Dalai Lama reincarnation" stuff going on there. Like it was fated...

I have a Framework 16 pre-ordered for batch 11 -- is there a rough estimate of when it might ship? Promising I won't send you a nastygram either if that estimate doesn't hold :)

I didn't keep track of Framework 13s at all so I'm not sure what their shipping cadence was for pre-orders (just for comparison's sake)

I was thinking about how the future software engineer to move into the house is probably more likely to curse him rather than thank him for making the server MORE vulnerable than it was before, by removing the SSH password.

There's also a big difference between being able to just speak English, and being employable in a job that focuses on use of English as a skill... like writing a TV show or a book

Uber is an interesting example to me because where I live, it really did revolutionize taxi service. They used to not take credit cards and you used to have to fight for them at the end of the night when bars closed. Plus taxis were usually much less clean than an Uber car. That industry badly needed to be disrupted to make it less of a shitty experience.

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to people losing their livelihoods because of Uber and am generally opposed to the 'giggification' of everything that Uber seems to have ushered in. It feels like there was a better way to handle the innovation.

Non-EE here, but I went through a bit of the lab course as a hobbyist.

Unfortunately a lot of the parts on the lab course's list are end of life now, and it's not always clear what you can substitute them with. There aren't always replacement parts with the exact same specs on digikey. I did source a couple parts through eBay.

Additionally, there are parts that aren't in the BOM that are used in the lab course. An early one has you doing a test against a black box with something inside it, and the book only tells you later what was supposed to be inside it. I think there's a basic control theory chapter at some point, and there are parts in that chapter that weren't in the BOM.

Ultimately, I got frustrated with the book continuing to ask me to use stuff I didn't know I was supposed to have, and gave up. It got annoying having to get partially through a chapter, order something, wait for it to arrive, then continue. Maybe I would have stuck with it if I'd checked up-front what I was expected to have for all the chapters, and got EVERYTHING in advance. (but again I think it's going to get harder and harder to actually buy what's in the BOM as time goes on)

I rebelled. On the console I set the display property of the #glass-container element to "none", hiding the popover window:

document.querySelector("#glass-container").style.display = "none";

Then since scrolling was disabled, I just used the window.scroll() function to scroll down and see the small parts of the article that I wasn't able to read before the popup appeared.

This works because Tumblr doesn't actually remove the parts of the article it doesn't want you to see from the HTML output, so it's still perfectly viewable if you can get past the popup. This is not generally the case though, for example most news sites actually remove the text you're not supposed to see if you don't log in.

If I could figure out how to re-enable scrolling, I'd have a recipe for a pretty delicious Greasemonkey script.

Dear tumblr -- Sincerely fuck off with this bullshit, thanks.

JIRA has been annoying the shit out of me with their recent UI updates --

1. Changing default sorting order to 'most recent first'; I thought I was going insane at first when it happened

2. Making the comment box a floating page element so it always takes up about 25% screen real estate

I've been able to script these back to their old behavior but wouldn't it be nice if they added settings to toggle the behavior...

My company has been on Atlassian products for the past like 20 years so it'll be interesting to see whether we migrate to their cloud garbage or migrate off them altogether.

There are so many highly-publicized failures in military programs (LCS, F-35, Zumwalt, Gerald Ford, JLENS) that I'm legitimately worried if America's military strength is basically just a paper tiger at this point.