There’s a lot of positive and negative discussion happening about AIs at the moment. I have thoughts - lots of them - and I want to blog more, mostly about coding tools. But I don’t have the time! But some small experiments still blow me away - and are worthy of a quick post. So, I finished reading the Iain M Banks book Stonemouth last night - it’s a complex story with a lot of characters, and I mostly kept track, but to be honest I got lost in a few minor characters - it doesn’t help...| Korny's Blog
Why Mermaid? I’ve always loved diagrams as code - you can easily express graphical information in a text file, with easy searching, renaming, git tooling, and it encourages you to keep things simple rather than getting caught up in presentation. I was a long-time user of PlantUML - it has a lot of diagram types and options, a lot of tweakability, and is open and can run anywhere. But - anywhere means “anywhere with a Java VM”, and about ten years ago, Mermaid.js came along as a javascri...| Korny's Blog
(aside - I have some much bigger blog ideas but haven’t had the time to write them properly - so here’s just a small thing I find handy) Lately I wanted some toolbar widgets - mostly for looking at CI/CD build statuses - and I stumbled across XBar. What is XBar? XBar is a nifty tool for Mac OSX machines which puts little UI widgets on your toolbar. (It started as an older project called Bitbar, which was abandoned for a while - there is a similar alternative called SwiftBar for those who ...| Korny's Blog
My youngest child started school this week, so I have a bit of time for blogging! This is another “a neat hack that I’m sharing partly so I remember how I did it in the future”… The problem Basically, I have a big ripped mp3 music collection I play using the venerable MPD Music Player Daemon system. I can play tracks and playlists fine with MPD-compatible applications, but I quite often want to listen to and browse music based on albums not tracks. I want “these are my favourite alb...| Korny’s Blog
My grandfather, Dr Kornelis Sietsma was a Dutch Reformed Church minister in wartime Amsterdam. He preached in ways that offended the Nazi occupiers, and they deported him to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died. This was a fascinating family history to me growing up - I was named after my grandfather, and his heroic attitude and tragic death informed my view of the world. Now I have kids of my own, and I started thinking about how I could explain their great-grandfather to them. I kne...| Korny's Blog