Hiya đź‘‹
I'm Adam Simpson and I work on the interwebs at Sparkbox and live life with my wonderful wife Christi and our daughters Ellie and Ainsley.
This is a great explanation of Rust's module system. I wish I had this clear of a picture when I was using modules for the first time in creating oscar.
The big takeaway and deviation from npm is this:
🔗 PermalinkWe need to explicitly build the module tree in Rust, there’s no implicit mapping to file system.
Great post from my friend and co-worker Bryan Braun on the value of demoing.
It didn’t matter that his demos weren’t fully built, or available for anyone to use. We simply needed to see it, in order to understand.
I find this is true for any kind of project: hobby or professional. Feedback — that elusive crucial ingredient to a good product — tends to arrive when someone else can see/hear/touch/examine what you're working on.
đź”— PermalinkAccording to my
Cargo.lockfile, my website currently depends on 364 crates. So it's really about standing on the shoulder of a carefully-curated set of giants.364 may seem like a lot (and in a way, it is), but please reserve your judgement until after you've heard about everything it does.
I /love/ posts like this. Amos goes in deep on the decisions he made while re-writing his website from scratch. It's a truly awesome post.
I'm seriously tempted to copy his SQLite full-text search implementation for this blog, but that's a decision for another time.
I’d like to see all the vim, vigor, and vigilance Apple applies to making sure no app on the App Store is making a dime without Apple getting three cents applied instead to making sure there aren’t any scams or ripoffs, and that popular apps support good-citizen-of-the-platform features within a reasonable amount of time after those features are introduced in the OS. I don’t know exactly how long “reasonable” is, but five fucking years for split-screen support ain’t it.
I've been thinking the same thing ever since the Hey app rejection right before WWDC. The App Store is supposed to be a place to get software that has been vetted by Apple but there seems to be a growing disconnect between what users imagine that vetting is and what Apple is doing.
I want to believe this tweet by Ben Evans is the goal of the App Store:
For the first time you could press one button and get an app, ready to run, and *trust* the app, and trust the payment. An app couldn't break your computer. It couldn't steal your data or break other apps or slow everything down and kill your battery. This is freedom.
— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) June 21, 2020
If we can trust the apps that come out of the App Store:
Maybe I was naive and alone in my assumption that Apple would root this stuff out during the review process. If they're not rooting this out then what is the point of the review process at all?
🔗 PermalinkWhat seems to be lacking is a “middle ground” that offers useful statistics to answer business questions, without becoming a specialized marketing tool requiring in-depth training to use effectively. Furthermore, some tools have privacy issues (especially Google Analytics). I saw there was space for a new service and ended up putting my original idea in the freezer and writing GoatCounter.
I agree 100% with this assessment and I'm excited about Goatcounter. I setup a free instance of Goatcounter for this site as a way to kick the tires on it. So far, I'm enjoying that it's privacy respecting and doesn't drag down page performance.
🔗 PermalinkIf you have used tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you probably have run into a suggestion to use “next-gen image formats”, namely Google’s WebP image format. Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality.
In any case, when converting images to WebP, check that they are actually smaller than the JPEG equivalent. There’s no need to serve larger images to your users than needed.
Great analysis of the WebP image format and a good reminder to not blindly follow what various auditing tools are reporting. Test and verify in addition to implementing the various suggested improvements.
đź”— PermalinkBritain is about to pass a significant landmark - at midnight on Wednesday it will have gone two full months without burning coal to generate power.
A decade ago about 40% of the country's electricity came from coal; coronavirus is part of the story, but far from all.
This is fascinating. The UK has been aggressively investing in renewable energy sources for years and it appears all that investment is starting to catch up with demand.
đź”— PermalinkAnd it's not only about these security problems. Running KDE apps in fakepak? Forget about desktop integration (not even font size). Need to input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters? Forget about that too - fcitx has been broken since flatpak 1.0, never fixed since.
The way we package and distribute desktop applications on Linux surely needs to be rethinked, sadly flatpak is introducing more problems than it is solving.
Flatpak is an emerging alternative way to install applications on Linux that is apparently rife with security and usability issues. This is a bummer because there's lots of room in this space for improvement. The lack of multi-lingual input is especially egregious.
đź”— PermalinkI stumbled upon this post (Google cache link) when I was trying to process multiple files via xargs.
đź”— Permalink
ls *.webm | xargs -I % ffmpeg -i % %.m4aThe key part of this one-liner is xargs
-i %. This means that each line of STDIN passed to xargs is put into a variable and can be referenced as%. Hence, the following text which specifiesffmpeg -i x.webm x.m4ato make it convert.