A garage sale for your mind

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tech

A collection of 180 posts

Reolink vs Dahua

A friend wanted 90 days of local camera footage and figured he needed a 4-disk NAS. The real culprit was his Reolink cameras using CBR encoding. Swapping in a single Dahua dropped him from 86GB a day to 15GB. Sometimes upgrading cameras beats buying storage.

Slapping my Past Self

Asked what I'd tell my younger self, my answer is embarrassingly practical: finish what you started. I have a graveyard of projects abandoned right at the boring polish phase, each a little regret. The joy isn't only in the breakthrough; it's in the boring victory of shipping.

More on AI Programming

If AI optimizes my work, do we need fewer programmers? I offer the alternative: the scope of software just keeps growing. Before compilers the largest programs were tiny; now AAA games take hundreds of engineers years. The bar keeps rising.

My Super Power

I once wrote an app that had to scan ITF barcodes, a format iOS didn't support. After learning that the white space encodes the data and the last digit is a checksum, I got my superpower: for a few months I could read and parse ITF barcodes in my head.

Kindle Kids Catch 22

My 9yo's Kindle book has printable supplementary material, but Amazon Kids won't print. Exit the app, check settings, search the web, try the iPad app, try the web. Nope, nope, nope. The only way forward was to buy the book all over again outside of Kids.

Technical Interviews

Interviewing for a Senior Staff role that requires cryptography and network programming, and the first technical interview focuses entirely on MVVM with SwiftUI. Why? I could learn that in a couple hours. Thankfully the last two rounds were more on point.

Xcode Blues

Does Xcode's AI integration actually do anything useful? I keep trying the feature and consistently fail to find any value in it. Is it just me?

The State of AI Programming

I've been programming since the early 1990s on a hand-me-down Mac Plus. The AI tooling improves at breakneck speed, but the actual programming ability has leveled off, and it will lead you down the wrong path with supreme confidence. A field report from building a streaming app.

Exciting, New Apple Gadget?

Purpose-built gadgets appeal to me on some primal level: the giant Garmin over my phone, a click-wheel iPod over my computer. The rumored Apple Home Hub, an iPad mounted to the wall with a robotic swiveling base, finally resonates. I'm optimistic until proven otherwise.

The Amazon Music App is Garbage

For a company renowned for grueling algorithmic interviews, you'd expect software that doesn't block the main thread, stutter playback, or somehow play two songs at once. The Amazon Music app is impressively awful. At some point it'll be an embarrassment to have on a resume.

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