Weeknotes 183

July has so far been way less hot than June. I’ve been drenched by rain on my bike twice. I hope it stays like this.

I met Tekin for beers on Monday and had to wear a light jacket on the way to the pub. Imagine!

Tekin mentioned there’s a second season of The Bear so I started watching the second season of The Bear and it’s great so far. It’s not yet clear whether it’ll be possible for it to get as good as the first one although I’m keeping an open mind.

I also, like a blimmin wally, watched Avatar: The Way of Water because it was just sitting there on Disney+. It’s beautiful and incredibly technically impressive, but in every other respect it’s a naff film that goes on for much longer than it should. It’s ultimately just one situation after another, and not in a good way — the story beats are predictable and James Cameron undermines his boringly obvious “nature good, war bad” shtick by revelling so much in the war hardware, the ruddy plonker.

It’s so strange that the Avatar mega-franchise appears to have already abandoned its foundational and mildly interesting concept of avatars in favour of telling generic Pandora Stories. We’re only two films in!

Not recommended unless you’re a flippin wazzock.

A two-gang power socket in my hallway died and I replaced it with a more futuristic model which adds two USB ports. This turned out to be a good life hack because many of the things I plug into the wall are USB power adapters anyway and so I’ve been able to move a couple of those to the special drawer forever.

It’s a bit frightening doing what I’ll self-aggrandisingly refer to as “electrical work” because I don’t completely understand what electricity is and which way it goes down a wire under what circumstances. It’s also galling to install anachronistic USB-A ports when I’m trying my hardest to move everything in my life to USB-C, but the reality is that many of my cheap USB-powered thingies still have a USB-A cable so I’ve accepted I’m not going to be able to banish its horrible design from my home just yet.

LONDON REVIEW OF USER INTERFACES: the Disney+ video player on tvOS is really good. When you pause, the playback UI fades away after a couple of seconds; when you press play again, no UI appears except for a brief ⏵ symbol to indicate it’s worked. Perfect.

I saw a preview performance of a play and it does need work but that’s what previews are for.

The fix for my YJIT problem got merged, so now I’m just waiting for a new release of Ruby.

This week’s belated Git discovery was the break command for interactive rebase todo lists. When I want to modify a past commit I habitually use git rebase -⁠-⁠interactive <rev>^ to choose its parent as the upstream for the rebase so that the commit itself appears at the top of the todo list and I can change its pick command to edit. But break does the same thing as edit (i.e. interrupt the rebase) without cherry-picking anything, so I can instead use the more natural git rebase -⁠-⁠interactive <rev> and insert a break above the first command to stop at the same place. It’s not interesting but it is both true and mildly convenient.

This change is from 2018 so it only took me nearly five years to notice it.

(Update: correction.)

The above reminds me that Ufuk suggested I try git revise but I haven’t got around to it yet. I do use git absorb occasionally and it works more often than not.

I didn’t get any of my WebAssembly interpreter branches finished because I spent too much time faffing about with rebasing them.

Slow week.