So when Alexa sends skill requests it has a userId (obviously) but also optionally it can have a personId if you have voice id enabled. Which means requests can be individually tailored. Why exactly do neither Spotify or Apple allow you to associate a person id with a family plan member?

I get it - you built something in a week using AI. But do you really have a good product or SaaS startup now? What's to stop anyone else doing what you just did? Somebody less knowledgeable might be able to do it even better in 4 days with next months tools...

"Your email address was found in a data breach." At this point without more information these notifications and services are worse than useless.

Ferris hacks his grades in the opening scenes of Ferris Bueller's Day Of... 1986. Sooo... almost 40 years ago. Everything old is new.

I get why people want phones with better cameras. Better battery life, definitely. Lighter? Sure. But this Apple obsession with making it everything thin.. I don't need to save 3mm in my pocket, if I did I wouldn't buy a big-screen phone. Give me a bigger battery any day.

I don't necessarily believe I'm looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. I just think it had better colour grading.

"Large diffs are not rendered by default." Those 7 little words that make you take a deep breath before clicking.

Do not ever ever mandate a user be signed in to be able to send you any kind of support/contact request. Unless of course you don't want to know your new user sign up flow is broken for some new users. I'm looking at you Docusign.

At some point I'll stop being hypnotised by the Apple vintage screen saver. That time is not today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oezf... We need somebody to do something similar that just works with screenshots of other old operating systems. OS/2, Windows 386, Solaris, QNX, BeOS... please!

They say to try and find the good in any situation. So here I am with quite the cold and sore throat... narrating my life to the voice of Optimus Prime.

So the TypeScript team rewrote the TypeScript compiler in Go. Sure, that's their choice but let's be honest here. Anyone wanting to write cross-platform command-line tools in C# is now going to face an uphill battle with "even Microsoft didn't use C# for theirs" used as a smack down.

Been playing around a bit with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and it's been great for doing Tailwind and web page starters. Gave it a chance at some personal C# stuff and it created a fair PoC with some prompting and existing know-how.

It was the 30th birthday of Delphi yesterday & I would write about how it changed my idea of software development but... I already did that for the 25th. So here it is again! damieng.com/blog/2020/02... My Disk Image Manager for ZX/Spectrum/Memotech/CPC disk images was originally written in it!

If you are going to get a top-end graphics card do yourself a favor and get a 16-pin 12VHPWR that is: a. From the manufacturer of your PC b. Ideally in white It's not worth risking $2000 on saving $15 on a cable. Yeah yeah mine is a 4090 and needs dusting.

‪ keep seeing screenshots of modern retro-style games with gorgeous art paired with fonts that aren't up to the same standard. Often they need just a few small tweaks. Remember, I have hundreds of free 8x8 fonts available and if you need help fine-tuning any pixel font I'm here for you.

Honestly between my favourite shows jumping between services or disappearing, rising costs, more services and now the forced ads I'm glad I still have DVD & BluRay discs around. Tempted to get myself a nice 4K BluRay player. Picture and sound quality also superior to steaming compression.

How is it legal that Disney+ can introduce ads on ad-free plans to people who already paid for a specific plan up-front for a year? I get month-to-month they can change it for the following month but this seems a complete bait-and-switch. #enshittification ensues. Now how do I get a refund?

£18/month Netflix supplies many expensive, high-bandwidth content with new movies & show every month. Creatives clamour to get on board. £20/month Spotify supplies cheaper-to-make, low-bandwidth content and I rarely find new stuff I like. Musicians hate it. Is compensation radically different?

OpenAI was trained without permission on countless copyrighted texts. Karma has entered the building. www.techradar.com/computing/ar...

Maybe Microsoft should slow down the development of C# and Razor etc. for a minute to work on the awful state of syntax highlighting for these languages. Exhibit A from Microsoft's own docs - Yikes!

Ooh, do corporations next! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Thought I'd be immune from the TikTok ban since I left the USA in 2020. Alas they're using an "account country" setting rather than geo location. Sigh. I guess mine was originally setup in the USA so despite 4 years of exclusive Guernsey access I'm also out. Land of the free indeed.

Well, I've been very happy with JetBrains Rider for the last 2 years but now I've had to reinstall Visual Studio Community because the debugger is failing to attach to unit tests reliably in my project. Of course it works fine on a minimal project so putting together a repro is... difficult.

I love Star Trek and its endless optimism... but they really need to do a better job on their threat modelling.

Surprise!!

Holy shit this filing update is wild! It states that: 1. Zuckerberg gave the ok to train off copyrighted works 2. Engineers wrote scripts to remove copyright info 3. Meta downloaded illegal torrents to train models of GenAi is a house of cards, I swear. techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/m...

Donations to Biden's inaugural fund in 2021: Meta = $0 Tim Cook = $0 Sam Altman = $0 Google = $200,000 Amazon = $200,000 Donations to Trump's inaugural fund in 2025: Meta = $1,000,000 Tim Cook = $1,000,000 Sam Altman = $1,000,000 Google = $1,000,000 Amazon = $1,000,000 The oligarchy is here.

Finally had time over the holidays to realize a long-standing dream of mine: a hex editor that knows about the PE file and .NET metadata format. You can click any byte and it will show you which data structure it is in the tree. Every byte is covered. The parser is at github.com/KirillOsenko...

If you think H1B's are about paying less for foreign workers instead of hiring American then either you haven't been a H1B or worked in tech in the USA. H1B's have to be paid the same as a US worker - and it's simple to check with your tax return.

It's v3 1.0.0 release day! We are excited for you to try out our newly redesigned testing framework. Release notes: xunit.net/releases/v3/... xunit.net/releases/ana... xunit.net/releases/vis... #DotNet #CSharp #FSharp #UnitTest #TDD

MongoDB.EntityFrameworkCore 8.2.1 is now out! Included in this release is support for EF shadow properties, indexes declared by CreateIndex created during CreateDatabase, MQL.Exists/NotExists/ExistsOrNull support as well as a fix for OfType queries. github.com/mongodb/mong...

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 1 ZX Amelia Stan Davis' 1964 typeface takes inspiration from the magnetic OCR of its time but in a friendly, rounded & bold style. This 8x8 tiny pixel font reproduction attempts to do it justice! download.damieng.com/fonts/zx-ori... #adventoffonts #pixelfonts

As Shopify gets more and more popular the number of online retailers that will ship to Guernsey (or Jersey and Isle of Man) shrinks and shrinks. I get it, we're not a big market, but please include our country in the basic set-up configuration that most stores use.

Coming soon to the MongoDB EF Core Provider... - Shadow Properties - Default Values (for schema evolution) - HasIndex support

Anyway, in another thread I mentioned the Sony BBS, used by developers to chat about Sony Playstation development. This is the original machine, any many of the developers, like myself, would be new to it. Turns out there was a UK BBS, and there is also what appears to be a dump of it here... 1/

Long overdue... I've rebuilt my personal web site! Now featuring fast SPA navigating, OgImage generation, a an obligatory dark theme, improved mobile experience, and full-up tile home page all built upon Nuxt3. Most important though is the Miami Vice inspired 80s colour palette. damieng.com

Okay, for the last 3 years I've run an advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts - a mix of 50% ports from old games and systems and 50% brand-new-creations. Any interest this year my pixel-loving friends? You can check out last years here damieng.com/typography/a...

Blogged about Nuxt3 and how to send server side email protected by recaptcha on Cloudflare and Brevo. https://damieng.com/blog/2023/06/04/send-email-with-nuxt3-cloudflare-and-brevo/