Think of how much they saved by sending me this nonsensical content marketing collateral instead of a coupon.

Just me, or has Apple Music started giving top billing to some really weird recommendations? Every day I log in, the top recommendation is an artist I’ve never heard of, with a track or album that sounds like AI generated lofi or stock music. I admit I listen to a fair number of instrumental “Focus” playlists and channels, but I think they’re trying to do something clever with the backend algorithm and they’re failing to grasp that people use “lofi music” and “music music” completely differently.

Update: and 20 minutes after posting this, it stopped working. HomeKit giveth and HomeKit taketh away.

Out of the box, Apple’s Home app will turn on any lights you add to a scene, even if it’s only to decrease their brightness level. As a result, if your goal is to simply dim the house’s lighting at nighttime, then your scene may have the unintended effect of actually turning on a bunch of lights.

While not the best-looking app in the world, third party apps can separate a light's power state from its brightness level in a HomeKit scene, and Eve is a free one that lets you configure this.

1. First, make your HomeKit scene how you want it in the Home app, because that UI is nicer
2. In Eve, open the "Automation" view from the sidebar
3. Find the scene in the "Scenes" tab
4. For each room with a light you want to dim without turning on, tap the > chevron to the right of the room name and then uncheck each light's "Power" setting while leaving the "Brightness" setting as-is

And there you go. Dimmer lights without inadvertently turning on all your lights. 🎉

Can you catch COVID from 2020 wine?

Becky and I circled the Costco three fucking times looking for eggs before independently realizing that OF COURSE they're in the room labeled "Dairy".

Why, American people?

Having recently begun the long, arduous journey off 1Password and onto Apple Passwords, one of the biggest annoyances is how much friction it adds to the drudgery of signing into a service to have to reach behind my monitor to scan the Touch ID sensor or to ensure I’m sufficiently camera-ready for a Face ID check to pass.

Turns out, you can just turn this off altogether! I would have preferred a reasonable time-based settings like 30 minutes or an hour, but I expected the answer to be, "go pound sand," and this is indeed better than that.

Record scratch you're probably wondering how I got here.

I added string cheese to my cart, and this popped up.

Really feels like these ¥100 silicone mug toppers are trying to have it both ways.

It has been very fun and very weird to be traveling across Japan using an app that I built doing workouts designed by my spouse, but it's worked a lot better for me than fucking around with Fitbod and other apps ever did.

I can't remember getting spam issues and comments so frequently at any point in GitHub's run, so I'm not sure what's driving it now.

This morning I woke up to 40+ emails generated by a dozen or so issues splayed across a bunch of Standard Ruby's repos and initiated by five or six accounts. Unfortunately, the GitHub web UI doesn't make it easy to quickly report spam, delete issues, and block users in one fell swoop. Separately, I encountered a number of race condition bugs in their React interface that resulted in validation failures, so I wasn't able to block them all from the org. Alas.

Great way to start the day.

I have always been willing to suffer Apple Maps in exchange for its tighter platform integration than its competitors, but at least in America and Japan specifically, it has really leapfrogged Google Maps in recent years. Not only in map accuracy, but also general usability. I only today realized I could plan out multi-stop journeys. This allowed me to plan a drive from rural Kanazawa to my adopted hometown of Hikone, an Anytime Fitness in a suburb of Nagoya, a nearby Babyface Planets for dinner (fantastic Omurice btw), before eventually landing at our hotel in Shinshiro.

I'm not super comfortable driving out here, so being able to plan this out in advance to break up the trip was a huge relief and helped me stay off my phone while driving. That's a pretty big UX win.

(The fact that you can't get navigation directions in Japanese without changing your primary system language makes it less than a clean victory, however.)

Noticed an issue with Beckygram yesterday where single-video posts weren't successfully syndicating to Instagram as reels if she didn't also upload a custom thumbnail ("cover") image—which Instagram's API doesn't require.

Even though I'm in Japan with nothing but a phone, a crappy LTE signal from Google Fi (that I can't believe they charge money for), and spotty hotel Wi-Fi, I was glad to find I had the tools to fix it:

1. Log into my Mac Studio over SSH using Terminus
2. Run heroku run rails c to get into the production Rails console to reproduce the error
3. Clone the repository with Working Copy
4. Fix the bug
5. Commit & push
6. Wait for it to deploy

It was a relief this whole ordeal didn't take more than 15 minutes or so to fix and it's encouraging to know that little one-line bugs won't require me to travel with an iPad or a Mac for supporting her app in production. Nice.

(Oh, and check out her little video of Akita being cute while you're here!)

Tonkatsu-fried layered omelette sandwich.

Greatest country on earth. 🇯🇵

Seeing Book of Mormon in Orlando was as fun as I hoped. Cast hammed up the half dozen Orlando references from the show and crowd went nuts.

Have to imagine it plays a little differently in SLC.

TFW you notice the only written review for your podcast is from your wife.

Something has been stuck in my craw for several years/decades and I'm finally ready to do something about it.

Most software companies start from a place of, "let's make a simple useful thing and charge a fair price for it." And everything goes great for about fifteen minutes before they eventually concede all that simplicity and utility in order to establish additional revenue streams, or achieve planet-wide scale, or return an obscene multiple to their investors.

And who suffers when that happens? We do.

My favorite example is expense-tracking software. The Earth used to be populated with a diverse array of straightforward, easy-to-use apps that could ingest receipts, pretend a bunch of south Asians painstakingly categorizing those receipts were actually artificial intelligence, and export reports for your bookkeeper or accountant.

So far so good.

But at some point, some angel investor somewhere said, "what if we issued our own credit cards and then kept all the swipe fees for ourselves? And sold analytics based on what products and services companies were buying? Wouldn't that make us way more money than charging $5/month?" His name was Chad.

Corporate buyers embraced this model, because it meant no longer paying a subscription for expense-tracking software. But what was the experience like for users? Tough shit, nobody asked. They just work here. Instead, employees were strong-armed into activating those corporate cards and using them for all their reimbursable expenses—even if it meant losing out on literal thousands of dollars in cash back and rewards from their personal cards. Meanwhile, the apps themselves went to shit, because engineering teams that had previously only demonstrated competency in successfully putting a spreadsheet on the Internet were now also forced to provide the myriad card management services one would expect from Chase (~15,000 people in engineering), Capital One (~10,000), and American Express (~7000).

Fraudulent transaction on your corporate card? Good luck. Need to issue a chargeback against a vendor? Have fun. Oh, and everybody's so busy fighting fires and applying for better jobs elsewhere that nobody has time to actually work on the expense-tracking part of the expense-tracking software anymore, so don't expect any of the bugs preventing you from getting reimbursed to be fixed from now on. In fact, you know what, just for asking, here: have some extra bugs. And that was the state of the market before 2022! Things are even worse now that the free-money well has runneth dry. Now, none of those companies have a prayer of keeping all 14 plates spinning as the lifeless husk of what had been a growing engineering team has been remanded to work in an otherwise empty office building as executives watch their runway evaporate and investors start turning up the heat.

All for something that literally could have been a spreadsheet.

So anyway, yeah, fuck those apps.

So, starting in 2025, whenever I come across a problem that is poorly served by the current crop of SaaS products, I'm going to build my own little tool that does the job. And, if you're lucky, I'll release it as part of an eventual fuckthis.app suite of apps. And whatever I build, it's going to be opinionated, because it'll have been built with only my needs in mind. (Or maybe sometimes, like, a specific sibling or spouse of mine or something.) If whatever I make happens to be exactly what you need, trust me: that will be due to sheer and unintentional coincidence. But honestly, if your options are limited to, "try out whatever shit Justin uses," and picking over the scraps of the VC-funded graveyard that is the current SaaS industry, I might take those odds.

Also, I'm pre-announcing this today because it's entirely possible I'll never release anything at all. Software is a pain in the ass and the only valid reason for creating it is because every other approach has failed.

One of the most bizarre and frustrating things about life in Florida is that the state government has decided to eschew official .gov domains in favor of a random smattering of .com domains, for seemingly no other reason than appearing pro-business. Or maybe anti-government? Regardless, it definitely doesn't make it easier to help constituents avoid scams.

Here's what I had to do to figure out whether this text was legitimate::

1. Go to fl.gov which redirects to www.myflorida.com
2. Click to see the list of state agencies, which takes you back to dos.fl.gov and lists the Department of Financial Services' homepage as www.myfloridacfo.com
3. That homepage indicates Florida really has a "Chief Financial Officer" role (are Florida politicians just LARPing at this point?) and that it matches this guy's name and lists a phone number matching the one in the text message
4. Browse around for storm-related pages and find this page which references (but does not hyperlink to) PrepareFL.com
5. Visit PrepareFL.com only to realize it redirects back to the previous page

I really wish this was an isolated incident but there are so many public-private partnerships and privatized services in the state, that it's really hard to tell when you're dealing with local and state government and when you're being scammed or phished.

Want to file a new LLC? You'll want to do that at efile.sunbiz.org. Receive a tollbooth fine from the Department of Transportation? Just punch in your credit card over at www.sunpass.com. Need to amend your Beneficial Ownership Information to comply with FinCEN? Just respond to an e-mail from MyFloridaCorporateFilings.com and oh wait nevermind that one's a scam.

For fuck's sake. Why can't y'all be normal?

Aaron's reaction to my reading and ranking of his pun submission for the latest version of the Breaking Change podcast

New brand of T-shirt (Bella Canvas) for the uniform. Fresh colors to mark the start of what's next.