Stavros' Stuff

The other day I saw a video by someone who bought a $16 electronic clock, and it looked interesting, because that little clock had been taunting me for months by showing up constantly in my AliExpress recommendations. I held off on buying it because what am I going to do with yet another clock, but the video said that it has an ESP8266 inside, and that, with a little soldering and programming, you could run ESPhome on it!

Obviously, I didn’t need any more convincing, though I remembered this clock being listed for $6 for a while, and balked at the $16 the video mentioned. I ordered a different listing, which I found for $12, hoping it would be the same as the one from the video.

Fairly serendipitously for this purchase, the last bedside clock I made was showing its age a bit. Mainly, the dimmest setting on its screen was bright enough to be annoying when I’m in bed, and the screen has been burned-in quite a bit. A new monochrome OLED screen is an easy fix, but I’d prefer a color one (especially if it can be dimmed more), so hopefully I’d be able to replace the Do Not Be Alarmed clock with this new one.

The new clock arrived promptly, and I

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As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones. Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection.

The other thing I have a fascination with is meetings. Well, I say “fascination”, but it’s more of a burning hatred, really. One day, a few months ago, I was in one such meeting, as I have been every day since, and I jokingly pretended to get irate about something.

One of my coworkers laughed and said “I bet if this were a phone call, you’d slam the phone down right now”, and a dread spread over me. Why didn’t I have a phone handset I could slam down? Had I really become a corporate husk of my former, carefree self, puppeteered by

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As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve been using it for years knowing what a few commands do, and whenever it gets into a weird state because I fat-fingered something, I have my trusty alias, fuckgit, that deletes the .git directory, clones the repo again into a temp folder, and moves the .git directory from that into my directory, and I’ve managed to eke out a living for my family this way.

Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing people rave about Jujutsu, and I always wanted to try it, but it never seemed worth the trouble, even though I hate git. I idly read a few tutorials, trying to understand how it works, but in the end I decided it wasn’t for me.

One day I randomly decided to try again, but this time I asked Claude how to do with Jujutsu whatever operation I wanted to do with git. That’s when the mental model of jj clicked for me, and I finally understood everything, including how git works. I never thought a VCS would spark joy in me, but here we are, and I figured maybe I can write something that will make jj click for you as well.

It also doesn’t hurt that Jujutsu is completely interoperable with git (and thus with providers like GitHub), and I can have all the power of Jujutsu locally on my git repos, without anyone knowing I’m not actually using git.

The problem

The problem I had with the other tutorials, without realizing it, was that

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I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have gone without buying LED panels, and this is

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Some time ago, my friend George linked me to TRMNL, a new battery-powered e-ink display with an associated service that generates the images that the display will actually show. It looks really well-made, and I have an irrational attraction to e-ink displays, so naturally I had to pre-order one.

Thei

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I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve seen is invariably AWS/GCP with at least thirty microservices (how else will you keep the code tidy?), a distributed datastore

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This is going to be pretty specific to a Greek audience, as it’s all based on a Greek meme video, but I’ll try to explain. Watch the video first so you know what I’m talking about while I describe it:

Two guys are driving on a road near a remote village in Crete, and the guy on the passeng

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I now notice I haven’t written anything in almost a year, which nobody else seems to have noticed, so I guess it’s just as well. I have, though, broken my unintentional hiatus to post something that reminds me why I hate technology so much: All UX is bad.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade now, but the latest Ubuntu update decided to ran

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Today, at work, I was debating with other engineers on what the wording of the message should be, when a patient tries to register an already-registered blood test kit. The specifics (or the people) aren’t really important here, but what struck a chord was when someone said “this is up to the UX people”.

We don’t have “UX people”. “UX people” don’t exist.

The UX people

The unspoken assumption here is that

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I’m writing this post sleepless and with a headache, which I find is the best way to write posts, because it removes all the verbal guardrails, so, be forewarned.

Back in 2016, a year before recorded history, I stole a simple idea: What if I wrote a bot to reply to spammers, pretending to be interested in their wares, and wasting their time? After some creating this, it turned out that it was possible, and Spamnesty was born.

Spamnesty was cleverly disguised as a company, Mnesty, LLC, Asia’s premier maritime logistics company, strategically located in the land-locked Mongolia. Of course, this didn’t tip spammers off that the whole thing was fake, because why would they even care to look at the site? This resulted in untold amounts of entertainment, whiling the small hours of the morning away, reading about the likes of the hapless Abdullah Ishaq, whose attempt of selling LedTrading.com to my bot did not

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