A civilization exerts a certain gravity around which a generation of mankind flourishes. It binds people in a framework of civility, bringing them together, aspiring them to coexist and thrive. If a section of society doesn’t do well at the expense of other, or is suppressed or worse, oppressed, then there’s a rot in the civilization. It has been subverted and a cancer has set in. It spreads slowly at first, tiptoeing around people cocooned in their risk averse fabric of existence. There’s a growing discomfort, a nagging feeling of something not right. The rot becomes evident enough sooner or later, and it falls on the society to make the choice: fix the disease or let it fester. Skirting this choice just shreds the veneer of civility and unmasks the putrefaction.
While working with Testcontainers, I recently ran into an issue where it couldn’t detect Docker running on my machine when using Orbstack instead of Docker Desktop.
Turns out, you can force Docker host detection by setting these environment variables.
The Evil Scientist’s Notes for the Press Conference
Tom Gauld, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, Canongate, 2020
Today I learned that you can export VoiceOver speech to an audio file using the say command in macOS.
# export speech to an AIFF filesay "Hello, world!" -o hello_world.aiff# export speech by reading text file # using Karen voice to an m4a filesay -f input.txt -o output.m4a -v Karen
The say command supports exporting audio in various formats, including AIFF, WAVE, m4a, and others depending on the selected voice. You can also customize the voice, adjust audio quality, and more.
…I think pain and unhappiness are distinct and different things and it is possible to go on suffering pain without being really unhappy. Pain is something external, something that comes from without, an ephemeral accident like a physical ailment, like our present separation, like the death of a brother. Unhappiness on the other hand, although produced by pain is something within yourself which grows, develops and envelops you if you allow it to do so and do not watch out. Pain, no one can avoid but unhappiness you can overcome if you consider something worthwhile enough to live for.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz (in a letter to his wife Alys), September 17, 1952, Two Loves by Kyla Pasha and Salima Hashmi, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011
After years of working with Excel, I just learned why cells are bottom-aligned: to line up numbers for easier sums in ledgers.
Got back to tinker with a Python project after ages (since 2018!). Used uv to set things up. And I’m blown away by the experience. This is like a million miles ahead of pip, pyenv, and what not I was inflicted with years ago. Bonus points to uv for working with Nushell.
- uv venv- overlay use .venv/bin/activate.nuuv syncuv run run.py
Update [Oct 26, 2025]
You don’t even need to manually setup virtual environment now, uv sync does that automatically for you.
CodeBuild offers a range of Java versions on its standard Linux images. But what if your preferred version isn’t on the list? Unlike Node.js with n or Go with goenv, standard CodeBuild images don’t come with a handy tool to switch Java versions. The simplest way I’ve found is to install a custom version of Amazon’s Corretto Java distribution with java: corretto<major_version> property in buildspec.yml. Here is how you can do it on Amazon Linux 2023 x86_64 standard:5.0 runtime of CodeBuild.
buildspec.yml
version: 0.2phases:install:runtime-versions:java: corretto22# use Java 22 in the next phases
Update [Oct 07, 2024]
You’ll need to manually set JAVA_HOME, JRE_HOME, and JDK_HOME because these variables don’t get set properly — at least for now (there is an issue tracking it). AWS has patched the JAVA_HOME issue, so setting the runtime is now enough.
Fun fact: the code which took Apollo 11 to the moon is available on github
And if you look through it you’ll see that - joyfully - it also includes original comments.
My absolute favourite thing about the Moon Code is that it includes comments like this: “TEMPORARY - I HOPE HOPE HOPE”
I just think it’s fun to be reminded that not only are humans pretty cool and brave and badass, making it to the literal moon with technology that was less advanced than the phone you carry in your pocket, but that at least part of that was held together by work that was ‘TEMPORARY - I HOPE HOPE HOPE’.
