Weeknotes 27

E and I started watching series 3 of “The Great Pottery Throw Down”. I was drawn in by the sight of expert judge Keith Brymer Jones in dungarees throwing an amphora before asking contestants to do the same. We were hooked when we saw him moved to tears while judging a breakfast set:

That’s fantastic, mate. Fantastic!

After writing about my disappointment with the Great British Bake Off in my early weeknotes, this is the feel-good show I’ve been looking for.

In Coronavirus lockdown news: E cut my hair with a beard trimmer. After watching a few YouTube videos and trying to convert UK haircut “grades” into millimetres, we went for 6 mm on the side, 12 mm on top and 9 mm in between.

After my adoption of Shortcuts a few weeks ago, Tom asked why I didn’t use “Hey Siri” to activate my shortcuts instead of fumbling with my phone’s screen in the dark. I had tried but was frustrated pausing between saying “Hey Siri” and waiting for the telltale “hmm?”.

Tom told me you don’t need to pause at all: Siri will buffer everything you say after being activated. You will now find me occasionally saying “Hey Siri Bounce”, “Hey Siri Fold” and “Hey Siri Autolyse”.

I haven’t been enjoying the increased number of emotionally manipulative Coronavirus-related advertisements from commercial companies and seeing Uber’s “Thank You For Not Riding” made me particularly cynical. As Sean Haney demonstrated, “Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same”.

There should only be two types of advert: the straightforward Cillit Bang approach or the utterly sublime Halo Top.

Someone in this household accidentally cooked our kitchen scales, reducing them to molten plastic so we had to invest in a replacement. As Neven Mrgan mentions in his pizza dough recipe, having gram-precision scales that have an extra long timeout is ideal for baking:

My favorite feature: extra long timeout (before it turns off) so I can forget to get the flour and run downstairs and hunt for it and when I come back, my measurement is still up on the screen.

We got ourselves some Salter Pro Stainless Steel Digital Kitchen Scales as a replacement and, while it isn’t listed anywhere, they have a very generous timeout.

Siguza’s write-up of their “Psychic Paper” security exploit for iOS is a great and extremely accessible read on how the incidental complexity of XML parsing resulted in a very serious bug.

We finished DEVS and, like Tom, I think it is well worth watching even if it wasn’t perfect.

It made me want to re-read Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”, “Arrival” (formerly published as “Stories of Your Life and Others”) and Greg Egan’s “Permutation City”.

I investigated and fixed an issue related to re2, my most popular open source project, which led me on a journey to better understand shared library names and how they communicate ABI compatibility. This then led me to discover and fix a bug in a Homebrew formula to resolve the original issue.

I do love the twists and turns of debugging.

The jury is in: Doom Eternal is far too stressful.