📨 My Doctor prescribed a book

📨 My Doctor prescribed a book

June 28, 2024

Hello!

Welcome to the first actual popey newsletter. Thank you for subscribing (or reading online later, if you prefer).

There's a few snippets of what's going on here, things I've enjoyed, and a couple of questions for you. My contact details are in the footer.

Let's start gently with this little experiment, and see where it takes us.

[Create]
Quick, Quicker, Quickest

We published episode 32 of Linux Matters, a show I present with Mark and Martin and is lovingly produced/managed by Joe. We did a bumper Quickemu round-up.

Nerding around while recording this show is one of the highlights of my week.

Using a MacBook Air running Ubuntu Asahi atop a pile of books including the classic by Rodnay Zaks reminds me each time that I have never read it. That's okay, it's furniture now.

RISCy business

I did a silly thing. I was tagged in a Mastodon post about published snaps. My brain went sideways and pondered "How many snaps are published for each cpu architecture?".

I couldn't find an official API in ten seconds, so I wrote a snapcraft yaml, and sent it into the launchpad build farm to find the answer. It ran on the amd64, arm64, armhf, riscv64, s390x and ppcel64 builders.

During the build, it ran whatever shell commands I wanted, on each CPU. So I just set the snap version to the number of snaps, then listed them all in the build log. It doesn't actually build a usable snap. I'm just (ab)using the launchpad builders to run shell commands on different processors.

The snapcraft config and results are in a gist, if you'd like to enjoy the nonsense. Is this a bit of a waste of the build resources? Possibly. At least it's not AI or crypto though?

CTRL+C, CTRL+V of the week

I 'needed' an animated progress spinner in a bash shell script. This worked: Display Spinner while waiting for some process to finish.

Thanks to Jonas Eberle.

[Consume]
Computers I've never heard of

I binge-watched five videos in a series by Adrian Black, on Adrian's Digital Basement, about the 'Plexus P/20' - a rare and little-known Unix workstation. Adrian tore it down, attempted some repairs, and tried to get it running. I was hooked, it's a rollercoaster ride, worth a watch if you like obscure computers and have ~5 hours to kill!

Relentless positivity

The Rest Is Entertainment has become my insta-listen non-tech podcast when new episodes are out. I'll stop listening to any other show immediately and switch to TRIE instead. Richard Osman and Marina Hyde are compelling listening for me.

Richard is infectiously & relentless positive, while Marina has a breadth of knowledge and connections in the industry to pull from. Their timely 'news & opinion' episodes and the Q&A ones are fun and engaging. I quite enjoy the secret 'behind the scenes' magic of TV being shattered. Can you recommend similar podcasts I can listen to, especially if they have 'behind the scenes' elements!

[Comment]
Go home and read this

My Doctor 'prescribed' Delivered from Distraction (affiliate link) by Edward M. Hallowell, MD, and John J. Ratey, MD. I prefer consuming audiobooks to the printed page.

Unfortunately for me, that's not available in my region on Audible, Google Play Books, Apple Books, or my local library via Libby. I stumbled on an advert on DailyMotion for a dodgy copy, which has long been removed. The incongruous metal music on that DM link amused me greatly for an ADHD book.

While searching, I found Dr Hallowell's website, LinkTree, and his active presence on TikTok! For now, I'll settle for their podcast (which isn't technically a podcast), while I hunt down the audio book. Do you have ideas on where I can get this audiobook in the UK?

A possible Mini (mis)-adventure

I've had a Mini EV for nearly three years. I blogged about the EV experience a while back. The car dealership got in touch to ask if I wanted to test-drive the new model. The new one is manufactured in China, has a different external shape, bigger battery, and refreshed interior. I popped in to take one for a spin and consider my options.

I expected to hate the new animated screen-centric interior, lack of physical buttons, and other design changes. I didn't hate it. I'm a little annoyed that I really enjoyed the experience, because I was expecting to walk out and be confident that my car is better. It's not. Now my car feels outdated. Good job car salesman! Good job!

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

-- popey

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