Ben Barnett

@__bb
147 Followers
115 Following
96 Posts
Ex-farmer, still a developer.
I like building things and learning. Preferably at the same time.
Webhttps://menial.co.uk
@oelna That’s not you, I’ll have a look into it 👍
@oelna Hi, I’m the author of Base. Thank you for supporting the app, and do get in touch if there’s anything I can help with. Glad you find it useful :)

Now this is a good bug write-up:
https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html#walresetbug

"the occurrence rate of this problem in the wild appears to be less than or equal to the expect occurrence rate of SSD malfunctions and/or cosmic-ray hits"

Write-Ahead Logging

I've posted an update to Base (v3.3) which adds Quick Look previews for SQLite databases. You can now see a summary of database contents from the Finder, without having to open the app!

https://menial.co.uk/blog/2026/03/08/base-3.3.0-released/

I thought I'd have an experiment with the codex app and asked it to do something with codegen. Things got a bit out of hand. This is the first time I've had macOS force me to terminate apps due to memory pressure!
I just said “you’re absolutely right” to someone at work and now I’m wondering if I’m an LLM in a skin-suit.
@louie There was a nice sit-down restaurant near me that suddenly started advertising takeaway pizza. I went in one evening to get one and the place was dark with chairs on top of the tables. They seemed amazed to see a customer and I waited while they made a (decent) pizza. Turns out they made all their money from being a wedding venue.
I am not good at the game Baba Is You, and it hurts my brain more than I’d like, but the *satisfaction* of solving a level is top-notch.
Something that has been making me very happy lately is BirdNET-Pi (https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi ). It’s delightful to see the different birds that pass by and to help me recognise the different calls. It’s up to 54 species in about two months, even pruning ones I know are false positives!
GitHub - Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi: A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B 3B+ 0W2 and more. Built on the TFLite version of BirdNET.

A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B 3B+ 0W2 and more. Built on the TFLite version of BirdNET. - Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi

GitHub

I’ve released v3.2 of Base this week. This update tidies the table editor UI, making it clearer and easier to understand. There’s a new context menu item for inserting special values (dates, UUIDs, NULL) into tables. It also has an experimental feature for showing/hiding columns in the data browser, which is handy for wide tables.

More details here: https://menial.co.uk/blog/2025/12/01/base-3.2.0-released/

Base 3.2.0 Released

Base 3.2 is now available for download. This update contains mostly quality-of-life improvements, with improvements to the table schema editor, data browsing table and SQL autocompletion.

Menial