In order to fulfill my part in documenting life and the seasons here’s the first chestnut 🌰 I saw this year. Autumn is coming.

A couple of chestnuts lie on a textured ground amidst scattered twigs and leaves.

It’s impressive how much greener the grass is on our side since we installed our automated irrigation system. 🥳

I canceled my SetApp subscription

Yesterday, I canceled my SetApp subscription. It’s around 110€ per year and I only use 3-4 apps from it. Did a quick i research and saw that I pay less for those apps if I buy them outright. And most of them will be supported for two years after purchase. Financially it’s a no-brainer and supports the developers even more. The apps I use?

  • Dash from Kapeli
  • BetterTouchTool
  • CodeRunner
  • Numi

I didn’t buy CodeRunner and Numi just now. The are both more expenssive (€20 and €35) and I don’t have a need for them currently.

Started reading: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson 📚 I am drawn into the story and am interested in the characters. Good start.

Discarded: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson 📚 I tried to read it for a few days but never got into the story. Somehow the phrasing and characters didn’t appeal to me at all. 🤷‍♂️ Already started the next book by Sanderson. It’s more my style.

Iced Americano ☕️

Good Morning ☕️

Started reading: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson 📚

Finished reading: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson 📚 My first Sanderson book. I didn’t know what to expect. It’s book two from the special projects series and unrelated to other books. Was a quick read and entertaining. 4/5 stars. Good main character. 😅😉

I recently found1 and older post by @manton about integrating footnotes2. This post is a only-slightly hidden exercise in using them.


  1. I use Omnivore as a read-it-later tool and did some clean-up there… ↩︎

  2. www.manton.org/2023/09/1… ↩︎

I used to be a big fan of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Now I read about For Advertising Firefox Now Collects User Data By Default. Learning about stuff like this makes it hard to continue to trust them. What are the alternatives? Going back to Safari? Not sure about what to do.

One more Ed Zitron quote

I hate to be that guy, but it’s all beginning to remind me of the nebulous roadmaps that cryptocurrency con artists used to offer. What’s the difference between OpenAI vaguely suggesting that “Strawberry” will “give LLMs reasoning” and NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club’s roadmap that promises a real-life clubhouse in Miami and a “top secret blockchain game”? I’d argue that the Bored Ape Yacht Club has a better chance of delivering, if only because “a blockchain game” would ostensibly use technology that exists.

It’s kind of like saying you’re on the first step to becoming Spider-Man because you’re a man.

Ed Zitron in his latest email newsletter on the ai nonsense-hype on the topic that LLM’s will start “reasoning” soon.

Read it. It’s really good and will make you think. www.wheresyoured.at/put-up-or…

Heute morgen auf dem Weg zum Jugendamt. Wir brauchten ein Dokument für die Schule neu ausgestellt. Das ursprüngliche hatten wir verlegt 🙈.

Das Ursprüngliche hatten wir verlegt.

Wenn man es so schreibt, bekommt es einen anderen Charakter. Und gilt vermutlich ganz allgemein für unsere heutige Gesellschaft.

Unterwegs habe ich eine Folge RadioWissen gehört, über Die frühe Bundesrepublik- Die 1950er Jahre. Für mich als 1982 Geborener sehr interessant. Vieles wusste ich nicht.

I just added stubs to pages I want to fill on this blog. You can find them in the navigation already even though they are quite empty still. Adam Keys brought my attention to those through his blog post “Slash pages & micro-features”

Something on my feature branch breaks a feature that used to work before. That feature is only losely related to the changes I made. The feature that is now broken is old and has no test coverage. It’s real work to figure out why it’s affected in this way.

A new Alfred workflow: Quickly open Merge Requests in GitLab

Synopsis

I created a workflow for Alfred so I can quickly open all the merge requests that are assigned to me. If the query “review” is added then all the merge requests where I am assigned as a reviewer are openend.

Background

I love to use Alfred to quickly to repetitive tasks on my computer. I use it to find the right emoji, modify text styles and text cases, convert images or units.

When at work, I also regularly have to open the overview pages on GitLab to see what status my merge requests have—or to quickly access them. I also want to navigate to the overview of the merge requests where I am assigned as a reviewer. Others might wait on my review or pushed updates.

All of that those lists exist as a bookmark in my browser. I can open them by clicking the bookmark. But then I have to decide whether I want to open a new tab or stay in the same tab I currently use. And I have to click with the mouse/touchpad.

This can be done quicker/easier: Open Alred (shortcut CMD-Space), type mrs and hit ENTER. This opens the page where I can see the assigned merge requests.

If I want to access the MRs for review, I do the same but type mrs review. This overview is filtered for MRs where I haven’t approved yet.

Works wonderfully.

You can download the workflow from my GitHub repo

The window of Alfred app is visible and the command ‘mrs review’ was entered. Below the command you can see a short description of what the command will do.

I am using Apple’s 100 best albums of all time page & right now am at number 95: Usher’s Confessions. Usually I listen to Rock and Metal, or Blues/Soul/Jazz. So it’s a mixed bag in every regard. I like being exposed to different music and it’s fine to keep it in the background while working.

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing @heibie@mastodon.social bielinski.de

Silhouettes of two people, one of them a child, standing on a beach at sunset, with the ocean and sun in the background. The sky is partly cloudy, and their shadows stretch across the sand. Silhouette of a person standing on a beach, facing the ocean during sunset or sunrise. The sky and water have a bright, reflective quality, and the overall appearance is in black and white. Beach scene at sunset with the sun low on the horizon, a person bending down near the water, and scattered clouds in the sky. Waves gently roll onto the shore, with golden light reflecting off the water and wet sand.