Weeknotes for week 25, 2023

The week of June 19th.

It was a week of international food deliveries – Swedish Midsummer food from ScandiKitchen, Mexican soda from Mexgrocer, Japanese staples and Korean snacks from Tuk Tuk Mart.

A brand/design agency gave a presentation at work. It was fun to experience while on a Mad Men rewatch.

I pictured the guy dropping out of Zoom into his modern Donald Draper life.

After going to bed one night, we heard a faint beeping.

After a minute or so, we were notified on our phones – the kitchen HomePod wanted us to know it was detecting an alarm sound. It turned out to be nothing important (some incidental water after cleaning the dryer lint trap, setting off a leak detector) but it's a neat feature I had forgotten about.

I've had a growing urge to try modern SwiftUI development.

I had Friday off work for Midsummer Eve, so I wrote a Mac wrapper for our code review tool. It was a lot of fun!

ChatGPT sped me up quite a lot, though it giveth and taketh away – it kept suggesting complicated and ineffective ways of avoiding a crash when closing a window, until I googled it and immediately found a tiny incantation that meant I didn't have to handle that window at all.

In its defence, I love its can-do attitude. If you ask for something that's not built in, it will happily write any number of custom solutions for you, even if you keep discarding them.

I'm in that sponge mode where I want to devour all the docs. I spent a few hours on Saturday in our garden swing seat reading documentation on my MacBook, and then one of our cats climbed on my lap, making things a bit crowded.

This was the first situation since the Vision Pro announcement where I've felt that it would've clearly been the perfect device. Just floating in my cocoon with my full lap available to cats and a huge documentation window covering the hillside.

We watched more Buster Keaton: The Cameraman (1928) and The Navigator (1924). Both rather good.

Also rewatched Far and Away (1992), which was nothing much but never dull. Not having grown up in the British Isles, I have the luxury of a low sensitivity to bad Oirish accents. Also, Enya!

I enjoyed:

• The Coding Train: What was coding like 40 years ago?. Enthusiastic video of coding Snake in ancient BASIC. Bear with the intro skit (or skip past it).
• "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" by Aaron A. Reed. (Via Denis Defreyne.) The sample chapter was fascinating, though I'm sad the physical book is sold out.