I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. They're also cross-posted to my Mastodon account. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.
By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.
It's now been 20 years of fighting with it sporadically and I still can't figure out how to use launchctl to successfully automate tasks reliably on macOS. Such a frustrating piece of software.
If someone opens a half-baked pull request on your project and you really don't feel like doing the work to get it across the finish line, no reply will shut it down faster than telling them you'll merge it once they add tests.
Who the hell decided to name it @Dependabot and not @JohnnyDep?
January's Searls of Wisdom contained some big news about my new line of software products, including the launch of my first NEVER app, Beckygram. Subscribe to learn more justin.searls.co/newsletter/
Just survived my first flight with Apple Vision Pro. Watched 2 hours and 35 minutes of downloaded video and had 8% battery remaining.
If you've ever paid a significant amount of money for a seat upgrade, consider buying a Vision Pro instead. I literally forgot I was sitting in economy.
One of the strangest things about United Airlines is that booking a premium economy seat (of which there are only a dozen or so on this plane) has zero bearing on your boarding zone unless you buy an extra add-on. It's so bizarre because it results in United being wholly excluded from Premium Economy searches on sites like Google Flights. Feels strange paying twice as much to hang out in Group 5.
If you're curious at all about this Vision Pro thing and you've read the reviews and you want to go DEEPER, then I invite you to listen to me drill into all kinds of details for two hours. My takes are, if nothing else, incisive (if not outright biting) justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v4-facial-computing/
I'm going to be cutting an episode of my Breaking Change podcast about what it's like to use Vision Pro. If you have any questions you want me to answer? E-mail me podcast@searls.co 💚
I wonder if anyone has attempted to fork VS Code to run under WebKit instead of Chromium. My M2 MacBook Air should get "all-day battery life" but has never cracked 3 hours and the only running app other than Safari is usually VS Code.
Birthday present surprises ruined by iCloud Shared Photo Library: 1
TIL there's an aspect-ratio property in CSS now. That's pretty damn rad! developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/aspect-ratio
Computer science is about everything except I/O and application development is about nothing but I/O.
Was having an awesome week and then I realized half the assets I created for my new app in AWS are on us-east-1 and the other half are on us-east-2 and now I'm having a terrible week.
One bummer about Apple Vision Pro is that it appears Apple has no plans to sell a USB-C adapter for plugging the device directly into a computer as opposed to the battery pack (despite a couple photos of such a dongle floating around the WWDC reveal) apple.com/shop/accessories/all/apple-vision-pro
Update: nevermind we fixed it. This was a really, really frustrating and demoralizing pairing session. What a mess. github.com/rails/rails/pull/50758
Boy it'd be super cool if someone read this GitHub comment on this issue I found in Rails' ActiveStorage and helped figure out how to fix it. I'm just gonna leave this here: github.com/rails/rails/issues/50560#issuecomment-1892134270
Whether or not you listened to the first episode of Breaking Change, if you DIDN'T e-mail podcast@searls.co with a question/comment/take, do it! Don't think, "that's something other people will do"—they won't! It's really on you this time!
Wow, Iconduck seems like a rad place to find open source SVG icons. Been looking for a good directory of them for a while iconduck.com/
Big day, everyone: I've expanded the justin.searls.co family of brands by launching a solo podcast that's slow-paced, long-form, and world-weary. It's called Breaking Change: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-change/id1725165751
Shout out to Dave from Ypsilanti who requested bids from contractors for a bathroom remodel on Angie's List and entered my cell phone number. 30 calls and 20 texts in the last 24 hours. Cool.