Before and after: In AR mode, the centre of the galaxy is on the other side of a heat register in the floor.
Galactic Compass is an iPhone app that does one thing and one thing only — shows a big green 3-D arrow pointing to the centre of the galaxy 26,000 light years away.
The direction changes with where Earth is in its orbit, along with where you are and what time it is.
The app has somehow survived periodic purges over the years of apps I no longer use. Probably because it’s nice to get yourself oriented on a galactic scale now and then.
I was a bit surprised yesterday when I learned that the app had been updated with a new augmented reality mode. You now have the option of looking at the big-ass arrow floating wherever you happen to be.
Two other new features include an Apple Watch app and liquid glass appearance.
I checked the settings to see if there was anything else of interest, and saw that the app is made by Matt Webb, a noted developer in London.
I know of him because I recently placed a link on Newsonaut to a website he created for people who aren’t familiar with RSS feeds. About Feeds is his way of promoting RSS and the link is my way of supporting this effort.
So at least one small part of the galaxy is unfolding as it should.
I really wanted to stick with Sublime Text, and I gave it my best shot ever. But VS Code has pulled me back in again.
This time is was format on save. It’s a must-have I forgot to mention — the code you mess up becomes tidy again when you hit save.
Three packages and a few hacks later, I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted. Meanwhile, with VS Code, it takes zero effort.
But what about those slow cold starts. They’re still there — 23 bounces in the dock plus eight seconds of non-bounce waiting. So a total of about half a minute compared with near instant for Sublime Text. And this is after another round of Claude helping me optimize.
My solution is the same one I have for Bitwarden, another slow poke. Just leave it running.
It’s popular for certain news organizations to have their reporters ask politicians how many genders there are.
The “right” answer, apparently, is two.
But a question like this is not fair to the politician or to voters.
A politician’s opinion about the number of genders is irrelevant. The number is what it is, and their opinion changes nothing.
It also puts them on the spot. They know if they want votes from a particular segment of the population, they will have to resort to pandering. That is, they say what they think those voters want them to say, regardless of what they really think.
It’s unfair to voters because all they’ve really learned from the answer is whether that politician is willing to indulge them. It could be a different story once they’re elected.
A better question would be one about their stand on policy regarding gender in health care, education, and other areas. There is plenty that could be asked about that.
The answers would require more thought and nuance — certainly something more than a number. Still, it’s the kind of answer voters deserve and the kind of answer politicians should be encouraged to give.
Sometimes, in conversation, someone will say a word or phrase and immediately follow it up with “Oh, I guess we’re not allowed to say that.”
Usually it’s something racial, but it might also refer to sex or gender.
I’m never sure how to respond. I mean, why would you want to, even if you were “allowed”?
If you know that a group of people prefers to be called a certain thing, why wouldn’t you do them courtesy of using that word?
If you know that some people find a word offensive, why wouldn’t you have the decency not to use it?
They aren’t necessarily being malicious — they may be genuinely confused by a seemingly endless parade of words going in and out of fashion. Life would be easier if they could blurt out whatever comes to mind.
I can still remember the first time I saw pronouns in an email signature. It was baffling. Even after it was explained to me, I had a feeling of the world changing too fast for my comfort.
Still, it provides insight into the dilemma many people feel, and how I could answer the question of what they’re allowed to say.
“It can be hard to keep up. But it’s worth the effort.”
In the Newsonaut colophon, I list VS Code with the caveat: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
This is a line from The Godfather Part III where Michael Corleone expresses his frustrations over being unable to get out of the mafia. It was also parodied in The Sopranos. It’s sort of the way I feel about VS Code. I would like to switch, but there is always something pulling me back.
The reason I want out is because even with all the AI bloat turned off, it is still slow to load. I have no problem with using AI as a coding helper (never for writing!), but I want it kept separate.
My bar for a code editor is actually quite low, but still hard to meet.
Insisting on a particular theme might seem a bit shallow, but I can’t help it. I like what I like. City Lights was released by Yummygum nine years ago for VS Code, Sublime Text and the now-defunct Atom. It shows up as an option in Zed, but doesn’t look anything like the original. It’s also an option in Pulsar, a fork of Atom, but throws errors when you try to use it.
Back in the day, I was a big fan of BBEdit, but once I discovered multi-cursors, there was no turning back. BBEdit has added lots of major features over the years, but not the one I want.
That leaves Sublime Text, which checks all three boxes. So what held me back? I couldn’t make package control work.
In order to have Emmet and City Lights, you need to add packages. And the best way to add packages is with package control. I could not make it work, and concluded that it wasn’t worth the frustration of trying to make it work.
So yesterday, inspired by David Bushell’s post, and with the power of Claude, I finally found the answer. And it all starts with what I thought was the website for package control. Turns out it has been abandoned by the guy who created it, and no one seems to know how to get rid of it. To make matters worse, it links to an outdated version of package control that doesn’t work on some computers, including mine.
Sublime HQ has come to the rescue with a new site. This is fine, but there is no download for package control at this site. For that you need to go to Github.
Someone going by the handle deathaxe has updated package control so that it now works on my iMac. Thank you, deathaxe!
I guess that’s also fine, but the Github page still points people to the old package control site with the out-of-date version of package control.
It’s enough to make your head spin, but I’m glad to say that I am now able to make Sublime Text work the way I like. If all goes well over the next few weeks, I’ll finally be able to update that colophon.
This is my entry for AuguStory, a blogging challenge from Robert Birming to tell the story of your blog.
Once upon a time, Newsonaut was called Newsloops. The name was a mashup of news and Kamloops, reflecting my frequent commentary on local news for the newspaper where I worked.
The internet was still new-ish back in 2010, but we could see it was coming for our lunch. One of our strategies was to embrace it, doing anything we could think of that would bring us into the digital age. And for me, that included a blog.
About a year later, I changed the name to Newsonaut. I’m a long-time fan of science fiction and I wanted to take my writing beyond the local news.
Despite our best efforts, Google and Facebook starved the paper of ad revenue and it shut down in January 2014. I carried on writing for a couple of years — determined that journalism would in some way continue to be my occupation.
That fell by the wayside, though, as I accepted my new role as web developer for the local university. My focus shifted and I wrote far less often.
My blog never went away, though, and now, in retirement, it has found a new life as I rediscover writing for pleasure.
I’m back to writing for myself. It no longer matters if someone is paying me to do it or giving me some kind of recognition.
I’m not really sure that I care whether bots scrape Newsonaut and dump its contents into training grounds for large language models.
In fact, I kind of hope they do. There is nothing sacred on this site. If it gets chewed up and spat out into the primordial soup of the Internet, then so much the better.
Maybe my permuted content will slightly improve the response that someone, somewhere gets from an AI chat. I’m pretty sure any scrapings from Newsonaut would be accurate and possibly, at times, entertaining.
So welcome, bots. I embrace the slopiverse.
Addendum: OK, so they took it all long ago without my consent. A man can dream of freedom, can’t he?
This marks my 43rd post of the year, which is one more than the 42 I had in 2020. My next goal is to surpass the 64 posts I had in 2014. My best ever was 169 in 2011. In those days, though, it was more like a job. Now, writing has become one of the great pleasures of my life. You can see a graph of my progress on the Explore page.
On the one hand, there are plenty of HTML entities that can be used as icons on your blog. On the other hand, just try finding them!
I wrote about this recently when I pointed out that there is indeed unicode for the magnifying glass commonly used for search. It’s just not called that.
There are others like that. For example, a bulleted list icon that could be used to represent categories does exist, but it’s the mathematical symbol for colon equals. Another example would the hamburger menu. It’s there, too, but you need to know it’s the I Ching trigram for heaven.
So anyway, I rounded up a bunch of them and made a mini site called Font Lonesome. So called because you can use them all by their lonesome without a third-party service.
I use HTML entities exclusively for icons on Newsonaut, and so far it has worked well for me. It’s also kind of a fun challenge.
Over at thriftmac, though, I need a variety of icons to represent the app categories. For that, I turn to Font Awesome, which has a good selection of free icons.
Edit: I had to make a few changes after discovering some of them render as emojis in Safari. D'oh!
