Matt Owens @brokenintuition@mastodon.technology

In case there are any other ecology-interested but uninformed folks in tech fedi:

Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy

There are very few books I've ever read that I've gotten anywhere near as much out of.

It's really interesting how quickly I went from being the guy who wanted the perfect grass lawn to the guy who's extremely disturbed by the ecological impact of grass lawns and very interested in native plants and local wildlife. Exposing yourself to (and learning from) new information is important folks

Today's lesson at work: if you're working on something that processes files of a specific format, double check which version of that file format your files are actually using

I'm trying to do this because my old linux laptop is physically falling apart, and I had the great idea to try this before spending money on another laptop. Before I started there was something in the back of my mind that said "hey matt, trying to dual boot on surface hardware is a terrible idea" but I ignored that voice and here I am, attempting to create windows 10 recovery media so I can actually use this machine. All to try to save a few hundred bucks on a used thinkpad

Tried to install Manjaro on my surface book alongside windows, and I had to disable secure boot. Wireless drivers didn't work so I decided to move on for the night. Enter bitlocker, which I never enabled, telling me to enter a recovery key because someone was messing with my security settings. There's no such recovery key in my Microsoft account, so no decrypting my drive for me. Luckily I had enough sense to back everything up before I started this mess

Since Twitter has positioned itself as the place for real time news, while major world events are unfolding they really need to knock it off with the "you've scrolled far enough, you have to log in now" thing

It's very telling that Dr. Oz doesn't use his full name in his senate campaign ads. At least his campaign has forced his show to end for now

It's a good night for a glass of wine and an episode of the open source security podcast #privacy

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2022/02/13/episode-310-hayley-tsukayama-from-the-eff-talks-about-privacy/

One of the most fun things about zwift is watching my little avatar cyclist fly down switchbacks at 35mph without any regard for personal safety or the laws of physics #cycling

Happy new year! I decided to write a year in review to document some thoughts about my year.

https://brokenintuition.com/posts/2021-year-in-review/

I'm somewhat new to automated testing being part of my workflow and I'm not generally interested in seeing my tests fail before writing any code, but today I've gotten a lot out of my tests accidentally failing and seeing my error messages weren't as useful as I thought #tdd

I just discovered you can buy *disposable* fill your own k cups. So, you remove basically all of the convenience without doing anything to reduce the egregious waste?

Trying out @moaparty seems pretty cool

Spending a few hours getting a new monitor set up and actually doing sane cable routing for once...priceless

Starting a new job in a few weeks in an entirely different domain and using a very different tech stack. Time to start reading

One of these days I will remember the correct syntax to initialize a dictionary in c#... today is not that day

I accidentally ended up with two etsy accounts, so I went to close one and was happy to see they have a "no seriously, delete everything" option to delete your account. Cool! They send an email with a link to confirm - that returns 404. So close...

Local gov't is funny sometimes. We needed our front steps replaced and the company doing it started on saturday but couldn't finish because some of the material they had weren't the right size. They came back today and right after they showed up the town inspector came and made them leave because they didn't have a permit for the work they were doing. Now I'm stuck with partially finished steps until the town approves the permit, which are definitely less safe than the broken steps that were there before.