Pragmatism in the real world
With the recent release of the new OpenAI ChatGPT that can do image generation, I thought that I might add a feature image to my last blog post. I've had mixed experiences of AI generation of images, probably because I'm not good at prompting them. I started with this: We now have an image, but it doesn't have a credit. Now, I could go back to the LLM and ask it again, but these things… continue reading.
I'm using Signal more now and as it's fully end-to-end encrypted, if something goes wrong with your phone or you lose it, you will lose your entire message history. Signal on Android has an official backup method, but there isn't one for iPhone or desktop. As a result, a number of backup tools have been written by various people. The one I've had most luck with on my Mac desktop is signalbackup-tools. Note that the… continue reading.
As a hobby project, I've been writing a screensaver for my Mac that displays my photos with a caption and date taken. To get the width and height of the screen so that I could size the image correctly, I used this code in my ScreenSaverView: self.screenWidth = frame.size.width self.screenHeight = frame.size.height However, I discovered that with two or more screens, sometimes the frame size returned was wrong and so the photo was either too… continue reading.
By default, the first user that you create on macOS is an administrator and has more power over the system than a normal user account. The reason it does this is obvious as you need this power to create other users, to install software and so on. However it also means that the computer is slightly more vulnerable to attack via a vulnerability in the software I use day to day. To combat this, I… continue reading.
I was helping a friend set up a new website and hit a problem where the website was in an infinite redirect loop: I could see this in curl quite easily: $ curl -I https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ To debug, we turned off Cloudflare by setting the Proxy status on the DNS record in Cloudflare's admin to "DNS only" and the problem went away. Further investigation led to the SSL/TLS setting in… continue reading.
One of the bigger changes in PHPUnit 10 was the introduction of the new extension system which replaced listeners and hooks. The old way On one of my projects we have a TestListener that sets up the database before we run some functional tests against it. It looks like this: <?php declare(strict_types=1); namespace App\Test\Listeners; use App\Test\Functional\Helpers\DbHelper; use PHPUnit\Framework\TestListenerDefaultImplementation; use PHPUnit\Framework\TestSuite; class TestListener implements \PHPUnit\Framework\TestListener { use TestListenerDefaultImplementation; public function startTestSuite(TestSuite $suite): void { if (str_contains($suite->getName(),… continue reading.
There is a different between OAuth scopes and roles. A scope is the abilities that the client requests that the user can then decide if they are going to authorise that client to do those things. A role is the rights that a given user has within the application. Scope examples are "read-name", "read-address", "read-email", 'write-all", etc. Example roles might be "moderator", "user", "administrator", etc. and is used by the app to determine what the… continue reading.
I recently had a problem with a failing Playwright test that only happened when running in Docker. The test that was failing was: let locator = page.locator('a[href="/login"].nav-link'); await locator.click(); await expect(page).toHaveTitle(/Log in/); The test clicks the link to go to /login and then checks that the next page's title contains the text "Log in". Not an especially complicated test, so I was quite surprised when it failed claiming that the title was blank. To work… continue reading.
One very minor thing that's been bugging me since macOS Sequoia came out is that if you launch an app that lives in your menu bar, but also has a hidden Dock icon a second time, then the Dock icon will re-appear. This happens to me a lot because I use Alfred to launch apps and also to bring an app to the front. This works because opening a running app will bring it to… continue reading.
I create a fair few scripts in my ~/bin/ directory to automate tasks. Since discovering uv and inline script metadata, I've started using Python far more for these. As ~/bin is on my path, I want to run the script by calling it directly on the command line. To do this, I use this shebang: #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run –script The command line will now run uv run –script and pass the file as the… continue reading.
