Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote Dear Netflix: Have some respect for your content and your viewers, begging for Netflix to add a setting for adults, one that doesn’t auto-play trailers and content all the time.

Nothing has changed. The UI is still intensely eager to auto-play videos and trailers. It’s an incredibly hyperactive UI, almost afraid that if it stops making noise, it will die.

If you’re using the Samsung TV app, there is almost no way to have Netflix stay silent. The only way is... [More]

1. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) — 4/10
2. D.L. Hughley: Contrarian (2018) — 8/10
3. Aquaman (2018) — 5/10
4. Crazy Rich Asians (2018) — 8/10
5. Dead to Me (2019) — 6/10
6. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) — 10/10
7. Game of Thrones S08 (2019) — 8/10
8. Fleabag (2016) — 8/10
9. Jean Claude Van Johnson (2016) — 9/10
10. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) — 9/10
11. The Man in the High Castle S01 (2015) — 8/10
12. Veep S07 (2019) — 10/10
13. John Wick: Chapter 3 − Parabellum (2019) — 8/10

These... [More]

After having listened to an excellent interview with the author on What we don’t talk about when we talk about rape, I’d recently added the book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal to my Amazon Wishlist.

Soon after, I received an e-mail from Amazon that they were giving me a one-week, five-dollar coupon toward the purchase of the book. That sounded good to me. I clicked through to the book’s page, where I saw that, indeed, a five-dollar credit would be applied were I to purchase the... [More]

From the article The Defense Crack by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“We defend anyone accused of a crime. We do not refuse representation because the defendant is too wealthy, his crime too awful, his skin color too pale or his genitals too stiff. We couldn’t care less that the woke have deemed him too guilty to be worthy. We do not judge. That’s for the jury to do. We defend.

“The notion that criminal defense lawyers should become the advanced guard of morality and justice is one that appeals to those for whom such... [More]”

I’ve just read about a web framework called Svelte in the post Virtual DOM is pure overhead. I think the product itself sounds interesting, but that the author uses unnecessarily misleading arguments.

From what I gather, Svelte is a compile-time reconciliation generator for JSX/TSX components. This pre-calculated generator applies changes to the DOM without needing a virtual DOM and without real-time diffing or reconciliation. That is, instead of having real-time calculation, with possible... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Moritz Neumeier: Hurra... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

This information is available in many videos and forums, but I’ve collected it here so that I don’t have to look it up next time.

Chain is rubbing on other gears

The DI2 does not adjust itself. It does, however, know how far apart your gears are. Once you’ve got one gear—a central one—adjusted, the others are automatically correct, as well.

The DI2 also almost never needs adjustment (at least in my experience).[1]

If you hear the chain rubbing on any of the gears, then you can use the... [More]

I spotted the following citation in Notre Dame Cathedral will never be the same, but it can be rebuilt by Kiona N. Smith (Ars Technica):

“In a statement, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron vowed to the rebuild the cathedral, beginning with a national donation program to raise funds for the effort.”

Did Macron just suggest using GoFundMe to fund the rebuilding of Notre Dame? Is France not collecting taxes anymore?

Julian Assange has had his Ecuadoran citizenship revoked and has been forcibly removed from the Ecuadoran embassy where he’d been imprisoned for the last seven years. Had he set foot outside, the British authorities would have swept him up and packed him off to America. It took years of pressure and a regime change in Ecuador, but they finally got permission to go in and get him.

Making You Complicit

Why did they bother to get permission? Why didn’t they just go in and get him whenever they... [More]

Introduction

Testing is any form of validation that verifies code. That includes not only structured validation using checklists, test plans, etc. but also informal testing, as when developers click their way through a UI or emit values in debugging output to a console.

Automated testing covers the topic of all regression-style tests that execute both locally and in CI. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

Testing is primarily a mindset.

You should think of writing tests... [More]

The article Saving Willie McCoy by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) includes a link to a body-cam video of the shooting of Willie McCoy. McCoy was found asleep in the driver’s seat of his car in the drive-thru lane of a Taco Bell. The police could clearly see a gun in his lap.

Willie McCoy OIS 020919 body camera video 2 by Mercury News (YouTube)

The first three minutes are largely uneventful. The officer notes that the magazine is not in the pistol, so the driver has at most one shot.

When he moves, McCoy’s first scratches his left arm with his right hand, as he seems to be waking up. The... [More]

1. Robot Jox (1989) — 4/10
2. A Simple Plan (1998) — 8/10
3. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) — 8/10
4. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) — 7/10
5. Queer Eye S03 (2019) — 7/10
6. Love, Death and Robots (2019) — 9/10
7. The Dirt (2019) — 6/10
8. Isn’t It Romantic (2019) — 7/10
9. Nate Bargatze: Tennessee Kid (2019) — 9/10
10. Kevin Hart: Irresponsible (2019) — 6/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and... [More]

1. Nikita (1990) — 7/10
2. Comedians in Cars getting Coffee S10 (2018) — 6/10
3. Kaya Yanar: Made in Germany (2008) — 8/10
4. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) — 9/10
5. Brooklyn Nine-Nine S06 (2018–2019) — 9/10
6. The Kominsky Method (2018) — 10/10
7. Sex Education (2019) — 10/10
8. Heavy Metal (1981) — 4/10
9. Eighth Grade (2018) — 4/10
10. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — 8/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

The Putin Interviews... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve in reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve in reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve in reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger... [More]

Each new indignity reported from the States leads to this question. When are U.S. Americans going to shake off their parasitic elite? When will they wake up from their Soma coma?

The article On Our Knees by Missy Comley Beattie (CounterPunch) poses the same question as she considers the 2020 candidates.

“Dear God, I shake my head with no, no, no, no, and at the risk of being accused of ageism, I say, “Biden is too old.” So is Sanders, so is Trump, and so is Hillary Clinton—and yes, she has threatened to enter the field if the... [More]”

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

A lifetime ago, I knew a guy named Chris Jannuzzi. I worked with him at Logicat. I wrote software; he wrote content; we worked together. He was in a band. He was a musician. He might still be.[1] I learned a lot about music from him, his deep love for James Brown and his band, for example. I first heard of Vince Guaraldi from him. Gained an appreciation for vodka gimlets, on the other.

He gave me a song, once, that he and his band had written and recorded in the pretty amazing studio that he had... [More]

1. The Orville S01 (2017) — 8/10
2. The Incredibles 2 (2018) — 6/10
3. Sebastian Maniscalco: Stay Hungry (2019) — 6/10
4. Kaya Yanar: Reiz der Schweiz (2017) — 8/10
5. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) — 9/10
6. Mad Men (S05-S07) — 9/10
7. The Putin Interviews E02 (2017) — 8/10
8. Conan the Barbarian (2011) — 6/10
9. Johnny Handsome (1989) — 7/10
10. Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972) — 8/10
11. Don’t Breathe (2016) — 7/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought... [More]