belated review of stuff I bought during lockdown
A couple weeks ago, I had to test a printer, and the first text file I found to
test-print was this, quazza-purchases.txt:
blathering blatherskite
A couple weeks ago, I had to test a printer, and the first text file I found to
test-print was this, quazza-purchases.txt:
Quite a while ago, I wrote some Spotify code that would find places when my Discover Weekly playlist would intersect with those of my friends and coworkers. This was fun. Every once in a while, I talked about other things that might be fun, along those lines. I tend not to do too much with those ideas, because the Spotify API is often missing exactly the method I want, and I can work around it, but it becomes too much of a pain. Also, Iโm a little lazy when the project will need other people to be interested, unless Iโm sure they will be. Who wants to launch a flop to their friends?
In my last post, I wrote about how I made dzil workflower to install GitHub Actions into my Dist::Zilla-based distsโ repositories for automated testing. I also said Iโd been reading OโReillyโs Learning GitHub Actions. This week, I applied some more of what I learned from the book, and it was good.
Starting ages ago, once in a while somebody would show up and offer me a commit that would add some automated testing system to my open source repositories. I liked the idea, but it always felt like a free puppy. I didnโt know how it worked, I didnโt know how the YAML file (always YAML!) was put together, and I didnโt know what I was supposed to do when something went wrong.
Every time I store an API token in a plaintext file or an environment variable, it creates a lingering annoyance that follows me around whenever I go. Every year or two, another one of these lands on the pile. I am finally working on purging them all. Iโm doing it with the 1Password CLI, and so far so good.
Years ago, I found an iOS app called World Uncovered. I used it for a while, then forgot about it, then started using it again. Itโs pretty cool, and I keep telling people about it, so I thought Iโd write a post about it.
One of the things I wrote at the first PTS (back when it was called the Perl QA Hackathon) was Module::Faker. I wrote about it back then (way back in 2008), and again eleven years later. Itโs a library that, given a description of a (pretend) CPAN distribution, produces that distribution as an actual file on disk with all the files the dist should have.
Almost exactly a year since the last Perl Toolchain Summit, it was time for the next one, this time in Lisbon. Last year, I wrote:
A couple years ago, I posted about making a Prometheus exporter for my Chrome tab count. I had fun doing it, but unfortunately it made it onto Hacker News, which as always got a fair bit of missing-the-point. So it goes.