zacwest

The Roku channel might be the most inconvenient “channel” to ever host baseball games. No tvOS app, no webOS app. And when you finally get playback working the audio is out of sync and the advertisements are terrible.

I think my servers have appreciated the move out of the poorly ventilated cabinet they were hanging out in.

Absolutely the right reaction to court-ordered censorship. OpenDNS Suspends Service in France Due to Canal+ Piracy Blocking Order

knock is the most convenient way I have ever dealt with DRM removal from legal puchases (Kobo.com in this case). What a gift, but since killed by the powers that be.

14 years between videos on their channel, gotta love it. I miss ska.

Hard-hitting journalism from the San Francisco Standard:

People who work at restaurants near the building said OpenAI employees dine at their businesses but don’t speak openly about their jobs. They do, however, often take their coffee cold and with milk, according to one barista at Dandelion Chocolate.

Not sure what we would do if we couldn’t confirm that people like iced lattes.

Swift’s string manipulation is one of its biggest misses. It focuses on Unicode clarity at a cost of what programmers actually need it to do. Converted this random Swift script to Python and its readability spiked.

Before:

let bold = "\u{001B}[1m"
let reset = "\u{001B}[0m"

for character in CommandLine.arguments[1...].map({ $0.uppercased() }).joined(separator: " ") {
    if let transform = map[character] {
        let firstCharacter = String(transform.first!)
        let remaining = transform[transform.index(after: transform.startIndex)...]
        print(bold + firstCharacter + reset + remaining)
    } else {
        print(character)
    }
}

After:

bold = "\033[1m"
reset = "\033[0m"

for character in " ".join(sys.argv[1:]).upper():
    if transform := map.get(character):
        print(bold + transform[0] + reset + transform[1:])
    else:
        print(character)

Part of the @system76 terms for purchasing hardware includes this weird provision:

You will not register or use any Internet domain name that contains an System 76 trademark or trade name (i.e., System 76) in whole or in part or any other name that is confusingly similar thereto.

The best part of macOS 14 is turning off iCloud Drive and still having CloudKit function.

Surprisingly easy to send myself pgp-encrypted email from a server without thinking about it:

… | { printf "Subject: subject\n\n”; gpg --armor --encrypt --always-trust --recipient zac@zac.us; } | sendmail -- zac@zac.us

Grabs my key via WKD (or keys.openpgp.org), encrypts it, then emails it. In reality I’ll hard-code my key in scripts; this was just testing, but how easy!

Moving from Fastmail to Proton Mail, it compressing mail contents reduces my email storage size from 5.7 GB to 1.7 GB.

This episode of Sesame Street (5304) features a segment of a discussion between Sarafina and Meadowlark. Absolutely baller names. Like S-tier.

Well, at least I didn’t accidentally shoot myself in the foot:

$ ansible -a “xz –version” all

xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.4.1

Assuming these aren’t backdoored, too.

There’s something really fun about poking at a project monorepo: apps, browser extension, docs, and web all in one tidy place. I have no experience with React Native, but it was fun browsing.