A handful of things that caught my attention this week.
1. Gail.com
So, this lovely person has owned gail.com for 30 (thirty!) years this year. I don’t know when the FAQ that lives there now was put up, but it uses <font size="+1" face="ARIAL,HELVETICA">. Gmail launched in April 2004, and I imagine it didn’t take long before Gail started getting an influx of typo hits.
2. _why and the Desktop Ruby app
In 2008, _why released Shoes! (http only). After he disappeared there were various efforts to keep it alive, and the JRuby-based Shoes 4 made it all the way to RC1 towards the end of 2017 before it too died. SchwadLabs is working on “Scarpe” which means shoes in Italian, using a webview. Turbo Desktop is doing something similar, using Tauri 2. And just last week I opened a PR to Warbler and updated my fork of Dan Lucraft’s SWT gem to version 4.39 to further my goals of building desktop apps in Ruby.
Anyway, here’s an absolutely terrible quality video of _why at RailsConf in 2006, talking about Ruby syntax and object structure.
3. Mastodon is 10
Last week Monday, Mastodon turned 10 if you’re scoring by the date of the first post. If you’re scoring from the first commit, that date would’ve been February 20th. A lot of the links I post in this series come from posts on Mastodon, and the comments on this blog are powered by Mastodon.
My favorite feature of Mastodon? I can reach the end.
4. Dark pattern: log in
Continuing my subseries on dark patterns … sheesh, logging in to just about anything has become a mess.
- Use our app to log in.
- Use your passkey.
- We’ll send you an SMS, or an email, or phone you from an automated system that doesn’t work.
Each of these is either trying to lock me in to an ecosystem or increasing the attack surface of my account login. And banks are the worst. Just stop it. My unique 24 character password and OTP are fine.
5. 10 Claude Code Tips You Didn’t Know
Usually this kind of blog post is, in fact, full of stuff I did know. But here were some things I didn’t know and I bet you didn’t either. [CTRL+G] to compose prompts in your editor? I did not know that. Double-tapping [ESC] opens the rewind menu? That neither. Worth a read.