A lot has happened since I last updated this blog. In January 2020, Helen and I decided to move back to Sydney. Over a year later, we finally managed to fly back to Australia.
Vaccine - first dose received!
This morning I received the first dose of the Astra Zenica Covid vaccine. The process was super efficient. It was at the Business Design Centre in Angel, which is a lovely building.
When Assistant doesn't work in Xcode
I often have a problem in Xcode when I am working in the Storyboard, when I click on “Assistant” to open the related ViewController to add an Outlet or Action, and Assistant can’t find the related file.
Installing certbot on Amazon Linux 2 AMI
The steps to install certbot on an Amazon Linux 2 EC2 instance are:
Using SQLite from Swift
It’s been a while since I experimented with using SQLite from Swift (like a few years). I found it painful the last time I tried, but thought I’d revisit it again. To my delight, it turns out to be straightforward.
Happy New Year 2021
It’s another year! What a weird year 2020 was. Helen and I started the year in Australia. We travelled back to the UK at the end of February thinking that we would move back to Sydney in July/August. Instead we got stuck in the UK because of the pandemic.
Limbo and Inside
This past week Helen and I have been playing “Limbo” and “Inside” by Playdead on the XBox. These are such good games! Both Limbo and Inside have tons of atmosphere. They are a moody, luscious side-scroller games. The puzzles are engaging, and you never feel like you are completely stuck. Ironically, we both thought that the hardest puzzle in “Inside” was the very first one in the farm, which you get to quite early on.
Branding the Go Build
I want to make sure that I can print out the version information from my Go builds. To do this I need to embed the current version information automatically into the application when I build it. Following the information at https://blog.alexellis.io/inject-build-time-vars-golang/ and this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11354518/application-auto-build-versioning, I have the following boilerplate:
Replacing Evernote
I have been working on replacing Evernote. The software has just got so slow and buggy, and I dislike having my important information in third-party software. The main things that I use it for are for capturing articles that interest me online, for writing my diary, and capturing photos of receipts and letters.
I now email the URL of any interesting articles or blog posts to a custom email address. I have set up a rule to map any emails going to that email address to a special folder on my IMAP server. I have a Python script that I wrote that will process emails from that folder and extract the URL, then download the HTML at the URL and convert it to a Markdown file. This has been working pretty well. I am planning to index all these files, and I need to set up a process to regularly review the downloaded articles.
Post US Election
The U.S. election was a wild ride! It wasn’t the Democratic landslide that I was hoping. As predicted, however, the initial vote was skewed to the Republicans, and Trump tried to portray that as a Republican win. Over the course of days, the mail-in ballots were counted, and it became clear that Biden won.