Archives: Notes

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On a train, in a branch, adding tests to legacy code and refactoring. Aw yeah. Love it when a test goes green.

Forget this debate about whether it is overall more productive or not – for me personally, I just don’t enjoy coding if I’m not driving it with tests.

I’m going through the ‘Build A Laravel App With TDD’ series on Laracasts. I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s fun to code along in little step-by-step videos like this. It’s somewhere between reading a tutorial, doing a kata, and pair programming. Picking up lots of little tips about the framework, and tweaking my tools setup to keep up with the video with as little pausing as possible.

I just remembered that at the recent platform coops talk, Terry Tyldesley mentioned that Resonate is investigating decentralisation. There wasn’t time for much more info than that.. but the basic gist was that they don’t want to be a centralised platform. That’s very cool to hear.

Popped along to a talk yesterday on platform coops organised by Nesta and Cooperatives UK. Specifically discussing the capital conundrum as they call it. They’ve just put a report on it. Totally honestly, I still don’t understand like 90% of how coops work. I haven’t invested the time. But felt big love towards everyone who cares and is trying hard to make them happen.

I’ve had a bit of a social media hiatus. Not planned – it just kind of happens now and again. I feel out of the loop with what’s happening at the world’s bleeding edge. And, that’s totally fine. But I do miss my interesting indieweb and fediverse peeps!

Did a djembe drumming class yesterday – holy moly it was fun.  We did five songs.  Such rhythm.  So drum.  I used to play a kit and this is a lot simpler, but it’s way more fun when there’s twenty of you doing it together.

Also with Brutaldon I like the fact you can’t see how many favourites or boosts a toot has gotten.

I feel like, I don’t really want to know how popular something is, I just want to read it.

#brutaldon

I’ve been using it a couple of weeks and I’m liking the Brutaldon interface for Mastodon a lot.

The slower pace works much better for me.  I recommend trying it if you’re like me and your attention and time is easily stolen by automatic updates and infinite scrolls.  I feel like my toot perusing is a lot more chilled out and intentional now.

https://brutaldon.online/about

#brutaldon

I’m very happy to have discovered org-super-agenda, lets you group things in logical ways in your agenda.

Definitely recommend checking it out if you use org-mode.

https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

#orgMode #emacs

Wow, rough day for St. George.

– St George is put in Prison
– St George is Tortured on a Table
– St George is Tortured in a Cauldron
– St George is Tortured Tied to a Cross
– St George Survives Poison
– St George is Tortured Between Two Wheels
– St George is Tied between Two Posts and Sawn in Half
– St George is Dragged by Horses
– St George is Beheaded

Damn. Gotta work hard to be a megalo-martyr.

(I think the beheading is kind of redundant after the sawing in half thing, but hats off to the Romans for thoroughness.)

 

(This is from the altarpiece of St George at the V&A Museum in London.)

There’s a nice mini-exhibition on some social housing projects in the UK at the V&A Museum at the moment.

This fact is pretty amazing: “In the mid-1970s nearly half the population of England and Wales lived in council houses”

But as we know… “with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 the housing sector underwent rapid privitisation. Local authority architects’ departments were disbanded, public land was sold off, and millions of council homes were bought[…]”.

This also looks nice.

“Walden, a game is an exploratory narrative and open world simulation of the life of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during his experiment in self-reliant living at Walden Pond. […] players are surrounded by the beauty of the woods and the Pond, which hold a promise of a sublime life beyond these basic needs.”

https://www.waldengame.com/

When I was a kid my Mum got me and my brother a game for the Amstrad called “Osprey!”

“The object of the game is to allocate wardens to help the ospreys successfully nest, rear young and survive the hazards that threaten them.”

Very sad to say that to my like 5 year old self it just wasn’t as fun as Harrier Attack, based on the Falklands War, but I love her for trying.

mobygames.com/game/osprey

 

“On this evening in the City of Light, a hundred million connected devices sing through the wires and the aether. Of the waves that ripple through the urban fabric, at whatever scale, very few escape being captured by them, and represented in bursts of binary data. Enciphered within are billions of discrete choices, millions of lives in motion, the cycling of the entire economy, and, at the very edge of perception, the signs and traces of empire’s slow unwinding.”

Radical Technologies has a cracking first chapter.