Michael Maclean
mgdm.net
Michael Maclean
@mgdm.net
Developer, software architect, former sailor, occasional photographer, sometime cyclist, full-time geek. He/him.
The fun part of having a rotating set of interests is that one week I can have zero motivation in working on, reading about or even thinking of a particular topic, but next week I'm knee deep in minutiae of something which will last two weeks before moving on to whatever disinterests me at the time
September 29, 2025 at 7:30 PM
I can really see why you'd be deathly scared of this thing if you were a character in a novel
A cast iron michelin tires advertising figure
early 20th century
September 23, 2025 at 3:07 PM
It might be completely legitimate, but any time I get an email from a service saying "we've updated our login system, you'll need to reset your password", I get suspicious.

Maybe they have moved and couldn't migrate the password hashes for some reason? They are hashes, right...? Alternatively...
September 17, 2025 at 1:34 PM
The first rule of PKI club is: you do not make another PKI

The second rule of PKI club is: *you do not make another PKI*
August 20, 2025 at 4:16 PM
HTTP 555 None Of This Is My Fault
July 30, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Can we please quit with the onboarding popups
July 1, 2025 at 8:59 PM
iOS seems to have developed support for RCS messaging, which I have only learned due to a huge uptick in the amount of scam messages I've been receiving
June 24, 2025 at 10:30 AM
@tailscale.com Your most recent blog post about Proxmox seems to 404, though it's linked from tailscale.com/blog
Blog | Tailscale
Updates on innovations and the state of virtual private networks - globally, as well as Tailscale product and company news.
tailscale.com
May 22, 2025 at 12:38 PM
I set my Slack username to this for a bit. It was great
A day and a half of debugging later, you figure out that "[object Object]" is the actual, original, correct text which someone entered
May 19, 2025 at 11:13 AM
The keywords “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “RECOMMENDED”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and also read like a Beastie Boys song
April 21, 2025 at 4:01 PM
A colleague got me earlier by mentioning two topics that merged into one laser-guided precision nerd snipe which I'm not sure I'm able to pull off but it is occupying most of my brain right now
April 9, 2025 at 9:56 PM
A cross functional team is one that writes Haskell angrily
February 11, 2025 at 12:16 PM
A couple of @akrabat.com's posts on uv have been useful to me today. Being able to define the dependencies inside the Python script is nice:

akrabat.com/defining-pyt...

And then it's made even nicer by being able to hide the uv interaction in the shebang:

akrabat.com/using-uv-as-...

Thanks Rob!
Defining Python dependencies at the top of the file
An article by Rob Allen
akrabat.com
January 29, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Back to work tomorrow, where I can place bets on how many Slack bots are going to be built in the next three months called Norbot
January 5, 2025 at 7:52 PM
December 30, 2024 at 5:02 PM
I have watched an awful lot of Star Trek over the years, and one of the things I observed is that a lot of the courses they set end in 215. I’m sure that everyone else was as curious as me to find out how often this happened, so I have set out to investigate this important issue.
December 13, 2024 at 10:08 PM
I haven't bothered looking at Spotify Wrapped because I know what it will tell me (and my listening is split across two platforms anyway), but I would appreciate a feature where I can ban all of the stuff that I normally get fed by Daily Mix etc and only hear new-to-me stuff
December 4, 2024 at 7:27 PM
Today is #NixOS release day. I've got an OVH box with it, on encrypted ZFS, with the full "erase your darlings" thing going on, and just switched it to flakes and upgraded to 24.11 without a hitch. I don't have a serial console on this one, so upgrades make me a bit nervous but they're usually fine
November 30, 2024 at 7:29 PM
Typo of the day: HTTPSPS, which is how you call a cat securely over the web
November 12, 2024 at 4:10 PM
Recent macOS and choices made by app developers seem to make it very hard to work out which window actually has focus right now
August 2, 2023 at 3:20 PM