Mastodawn

It's been a day of solving weird tech problems at home.

1. Partners laptop always disconnecting from home wifi network. Started randomly last week. Doesn't happen on any other WiFi network, and it doesn't happen to any other device on the home network. Just her device on this network...

Solution? Idk but I put the device on its own vlan with 2.4ghz bandwidth only and it's stable now? Maybe weird channel issues or how the mesh wifi tries to intelligently switch devices between 2.4ghz and 5ghz for the same SSID.

2. Form 54 (Family Composition) from Australian Immigration website. She filled it in, signed it, saved it, closed it and it automatically encrypted itself with a password unknown to us. Redownloaded the form, repeated and got the same result. 2017 MacBook pro on an older version of macos.

Doesn't happen on my personal or work laptops both MacBooks of sorts running latest everything.

Solution: Weird permissions on PDF provided by Australian Immigration dept + Bug in older version of Preview. Filled it in on my laptop but couldn't upload because Immigration website detects the PDF is encrypted 🤦. Open in Firefox, print to PDF and upload that instead. Success 🥳

Technology is hard 😩. And actually I can't imagine trying to struggle through some of the requirements of modern life without the tech background I have. The fact that I work in this area full time and have access to like 4 different computers to cross check issues is just not a reasonable expectation for a lot of people.

Maybe, as a bank, you should not be using a random library taken from the internet, with a single maintainer and some 100 stars, and make it a critical dependency of your banking operations.

Maybe, as a bank, your IT should write and maintain such a library and open source it.

Maybe, as a bank, you should not continue to use the first library, and do the second thing after the first library was able to take down critical parts of your infra the first time.

Because we live in a society, and as a bank, you should be contributing to it, too.

But then, what do I know.

@julijane

Simon Jun 24

I just got super nostalgic for my old 3rd Gen iPod Nano. No touch screen, data, ads just super crisp, satisfying haptics on that scroll wheel 🤤 and the music of my early teens

Simon Jun 17

Neoliberal capitalist brainrot.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/564434/should-kiwis-pay-the-high-price-for-nz-dairy-that-overseas-buyers-will

Simon Jun 12

At what point in the afternoon does a late lunch just become dinner?

Before or after 4:55pm?

Simon Jun 5

lol, just wanted to get in, make a quick content edit and get out. wp-login.php dead. 90 minutes later and I've figured out that the MFA plugin shit the bed, recovered access and setup new MFA plugin and auth.

I'm reminded why I don't do more self hosting. I wish I had more time and energy for it but some times its just admin on top of life admin.

Simon Jun 3

Kiwi PyCon May 27

Kiwi PyCon 2025 Call for Proposals now open!
https://python.nz/2025/05/27/kiwi-pycon-2025-cfp/

Kiwi PyCon 2025 Call for Proposals now open!

Kiwi PyCon 2025 is the fourteenth New Zealand Python programming language and community conference. It will be held in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, from the 21st to the 23rd of November. Today we are opening the call for proposals for presentations and for the "poster session". This year, for the first time, we're also offering an…

Simon May 29

My politics are whatever landlords are against.

Simon May 26

lmao, at the bottom of Google's AI search slop is a foot note that anything above could be total bullshit.

Nice. Feels like that should be in 30pt bold underline at the top.

Simon May 26

Lucomo May 23

AI is a horrible tool in software development.

A team leader explains the problems in this post on Reddit:

"AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard"

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/s/MeNimUXpsy

🌐	https://simonmerrick.com
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Kiwi PyCon 2025	https://kiwipycon.nz