Bill @bill@mastodon.technology

A recent conversation about how we learn has had me thinking about the decision I made to focus on listening rather than reading or writing Chinese. I recorded my thoughts in a short podcast episode.

https://anchor.fm/bill-glover/episodes/On-how-we-learn-e16lm0e

Nature: 1, iOS and 5000 adjustments per second: 0

When trying to take this photo, colours were all over the place. Not just gradual adjustments but as if certain colours were being switched in an out trying to find an image it was happy with. Really wish I’d shot this in RAW so that I could investigate further.

Now that we live under the flight path, I’ve started storing ADSB flight data. I’ve got a few ideas for how to turn this into a picture or display of some sort. Was expecting more of a pattern to emerge in this first attempt though. It’s chaotic up there.

Monday morning is a spreadsheet kind of morning. ☕️📈

Couldn’t work out why the macOS Dock kept moving between displays. Turns out you can move the dock to the current display by moving your cursor through the bottom edge of the display. #TIL

As we slowly start venturing beyond our self imposed Covid bubble, I’m constantly being reminded that the people I find most inspirational are those who are different to me.

Bubbles may feel safe but they don’t make it easy to see things differently.

Two hours in to debugging and I realise that yes, the table really didn't exist. 'vocab' is not 'voacb'.

Things I looked at:
* database connectivity
* file permissions
* concurrent access
* sql syntax issues
* different drivers

It was right there in the error message: "no such table: vocab"

Love this talk by @chiuki - take an engineering approach to drawing. Along the way debunking many of the ways we ridicule those who are learning to code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuyW4-RPE-M

Love this little trick from @victoria to get self documenting makefiles.

https://victoria.dev/blog/how-to-create-a-self-documenting-makefile/

As a bonus I took a look at why we use .PHONY in makefiles: to ensure commands run even in the presence of a file of the same name as the command.

It has been a while, but I've started to write code again. Thinking of streaming and forcing myself to explain what I'm doing.

Convince me this is a bad idea.

Wrote some code this evening and I now have a list of my most challenging Chinese characters.

及 <— this is the character that causes me the most grief.

Whilst my choice of reading material may be questionable, I’m loving the fact that I’m now incentivised to try and read more.

So far from “done” but the app is already proving useful.

Going to try and get a “readability” score published soon.

I need a new note taking system for when I’m out running. Siri just doesn’t cut it.

If you needed to represent language as a code (in the context of spoken language) what would you use?

* ISO 639-1 e.g. zh
* ISO 639-2 e.g. zho
* ISO 639-5 e.g. (unsure)
* IETF e.g. zh or cmn
* Other e.g. zh-CN

A create write-up. I hadn’t appreciated the progress attackers have made towards the clean, undetectable, hack.

The Great iPwn: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit (Dec 2020, CitizenLab)

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-great-ipwn-journalists-hacked-with-suspected-nso-group-imessage-zero-click-exploit/

Today I learned that you can use the string literal "allballs" to refer to midnight UTC (00:00:00.00 UTC) in PostgreSQL.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-datetime.html#DATATYPE-DATETIME-SPECIAL-TABLE

Is `192.11046143` a valid IPv4 address?

Every now and then something you thought was simple turns out to be anything but. Today, it's IP addresses: https://blog.dave.tf/post/ip-addr-parsing/

抚开研弄异…

I’m still struggling to go from character to tone reliably. I can have a good guess at the pinyin, but I don’t yet have a system for tones. I suspect this is where I need to bring the spoken and the written languages together. #Chinese