Philipp @pb@chaos.social

Yeah yeah, Norway’s fjords are majestic and the thousands of tiny islands are pretty and all that, but have you ever had to draw a map of the bloody place? I’m three map projects away from packing up and moving to Wyoming.

(Disclosure: You’d probably get a similar result with the front page of the paper I work for. I picked Aftenposten because it’s one of the largest news sites in Norway. Both are owned by the same parent company.)

In case you think I’m joking: I’m not. To be fair, a bit more than half of that was autoplaying video, but that still leaves nearly 50 MB that wasn’t, including 30 MB of JavaScript. This is obscene.

Here’s a fun multiplayer game:

– Each player opens the front page of a news site of their choice, with content blockers turned off and the Dev Tools open on the Network tab
– Players may only interact with the page by scrolling
– First to reach 100 MB transferred wins

My favourite part is how impossibly steep those fjords are – especially underwater.

It’s been a while, but I’ve plotted a thing! This time it really is a map of Bergen and surrounding areas. Height contours in black, sea depth contours in blue, both in 50m intervals, all based on open data from http://geonorge.no. #plottertwitter

I’m trying to learn Blender because it seems there’s a lot of fun to be had by combining 3D rendering and a pen plotter. So far, I’ve followed a donut tutorial and drawn a handy map of Bergen and its surrounding areas. It’s really… uh… yeah… #plottertwitter

I’m at the German embassy in Oslo. There’s a Tux in the waiting room and I thought you might like to know.

It is, by the way, a calendar of daylight/twilight/night hours in Bergen for 2020. The problem is that I can’t look at it from up close because my left and right eyes can’t agree on what to focus on. It feels a bit trippy.

Another thing that I didn’t really expect to work as well as it did: plotting with pencil. Probably helps that those lines are doubled up. #plottertwitter

I just created an account for a service whose password requirements were “a min. password length of 8 characters, with letters and numbers”. Fair enough, I thought, so I tried about a billion different ones, none of which worked.

Turns out “min.” is short for “maximum”.

killall Dock fixed it, but I’m a bit sad to see it go.

I have no idea how this is even possible, but somehow a tiny VS Code icon has squeezed itself into my Dock. It’s too small to click and at first I thought it was a just blue dot (maybe some kind of activity indicator for iTerm?).

Sorry, of course I meant “challenge”, not “problem”.

Problem: Some people really struggle to get any work done in an open-plan office.

Solution: A glorified phone box.

How to find out what Python version you’re running, in three easy steps:

1. Run python -v
2. Press ^D
3. Run python --version

Update: I can write things to disk again, so that’s a good sign!

That feeling when it’s Election Day in Norway and you’re not sure if your computer has decided to install the world’s longest update or if the SSD is toast.

I’ve lived in Bergen for almost two years and I’ve still not satisfactorily established whether or not this statue of Henrik Ibsen can shoot lasers from its eyes. Best to err on the side of caution until I do.

I‘ve got a new keyboard because Apple‘s was killing my hands and apparently ergonomics are a thing and it‘s … different. I like it, but it‘s been about twenty years since I last typed this slowly.