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I like Movies

I like Movies

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“I can’t believe my job is to make you feel good about yourself”

-Lawrence’s boss Alana

I Like Movies is a film about an naive, overly optimistic kid named Lawrence who is absorbed in the world of movies and his own ‘creative’ viewpoints. Unfortunately, he’s socially abrasive, clueless as to how the world/life works, and goes on about creative visions when he hasn’t even held a simple job or seems to make anything anyone wants to see. He shares too much to the point of embarrassing himself and his friends.

I think the movie hits a couple of important themes that are relevant today. First, that when we’re young we often embarrassingly think our thoughts and ideas are unique and amazing – only later to realize how cringe we really were.

Secondly, I think the quote from the boss nails what being a manager is like today – especially for those that grew up in the isolation of covid. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re struggling at a much higher rate than other generations – even when rated by their own peers. So the question is, how does one help those that are struggling like Lawrence along?

Epic Photography often is boring looking

Epic Photography often is boring looking

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I used a lot of interesting tricks when I was taking landscape photography. You could use a dirty mud puddle to make amazing shots that looked like you were on the beach or overlooking a lake. It works for shooting people too. Epic shots are often all about lighting and focusing on split second shot. A good reminder in the Instagram era where everyone is posting ‘perfect’ pictures.

Doughnut shop in Indiana is still using Commodore 64’s as their cash register

Doughnut shop in Indiana is still using Commodore 64’s as their cash register

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The Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, IN is a respectable local donut shop. What sets it apart, however, is the fact they are still using Commodore 64’s for their cash registers.

A recent series of photos on X attracted a lot of attention this week, as it showed staff at the Hilligoss Bakery apparently processing orders on a Commodore 64-based register system. Commenters pointed out that the last publicly posted picture of the register was taken in 2021, so Tom’s Hardware decided to give them a call—and staff duly verified that the systems were still in use.

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Portland gets an F in city finances

Portland gets an F in city finances

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A 2024 report on city finances report gave Portland a full on ‘F’ for the state of it’s finances. Primarily due to the incredible debt burden of each resident. This isn’t a surprise considering Portland has the second highest tax rates in the country, and is currently facing a $27 million budget shortfall (especially as it’s tax base flees across the state line to Vancouver and businesses increasingly are leaving as well)

Read more about the state of the cities finances as well as thoughts of your favorite other major US cities.

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More developer attacks

More developer attacks

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A group of Israeli researchers managed to infect over 100 organizations by typosquatting an infected version of a popular theme on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code marketplace. They reported they were able to infect ‘numerous’ high-value targets (billion dollar publicly listed companies, security companies, court networks, etc) within 24 hours of publishing the extension. It was able to collect system information and send it to a remote server via an HTTPS POST request. It didn’t get flagged by endpoint detection.

By using what they learned, they examining other extensions on the VSCode Marketplace. Researchers found the following:

  • 1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
  • 8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
  • 1,452 running unknown executables.
  • 2,304 that are using another publisher’s Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.

They found blatantly obvious issues like this code that opens a reverse shell to the cybercriminal’s server

In summary, the lack of controls on the VSCode marketplace allows threat actors to perform rampant abuse. While the researchers reported the extensions they found to Microsoft, the vast majority remain available for download via VSCode Marketplace after they published their report.

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Adam Savage discusses work

Adam Savage discusses work

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What’s the best way to get paid as a freelancer? How do you assess the viability of a new member of your workshop team? Two topics covered by Jame’s video below.

I found the evaluation of a new team member as really interesting. I have found it’s not as simple as just hiring the smartest person. Special forces absolutely requires competency/physical ability – but will also drop candidates for reasons of integrity, perseverance, ability to take personal responsibility, professionalism, and especially ability to operate as a team player. Being a maverick or deceitful, no matter how talented you are, make you a bad team member.

“One of the less smart people – that wasn’t that great – had an attitude that was so good it made the workplace function better. I can’t quite explain it but it was really true.”

He nails it. It’s true on software teams. It’s not always true, but time and again I’ve seen personal dynamics and attitude are MORE important than ability. A rockstar that’s hard to work with or can’t get along with others might as well not be on the team. Either manage them on a project all by themselves or find another teammate that fits well.

Also, when it comes to the difficulty of being a freelance, Mike Monteiro’s “F*ck You, Pay Me” video is a must-watch.

Saving the largest commercial CRT ever made

Saving the largest commercial CRT ever made

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The Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1, aka the PVM-4300, is thought to be the largest CRT TV ever sold to consumers. It has a 43-inch visible diagonal on its 45-inch tube and weighs in at almost 440 lbs. The stand alone is over 170lbs. At the time, it cost $40,000 USD in 1989 (or about $100K today, adjusted for inflation)

Long since thought gone, Shank Mods managed to save an extremely rare 43-inch Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1 from an untimely ending. It was being kept on the second floor of an Osaka noodle shop called Chikuma Soba – a building due for demolition in just a few weeks.

It was moved from the soba shop, crated up, and shipped to the US. While it worked well – it did need servicing. The alignment was off, had some tube cataracts, and the dynamic convergence amplifier circuit had failed. They worked on them all and have a very nice display.

The video describes the incredible journey and is definitely worth a watch

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Demoscene is not dead

Demoscene is not dead

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Andreas from Insomniac Games made a Amiga 500 demo in 2019 as part of this work with The Black Lotus demo group. He presented not only the Eon Amiga 500 demo, but tons of great technical information about the 4 years it took to develop it.

Old demo scene programmers hold amazing amounts of wisdom. When solving the core pieces of logic, I found this is true (but when doing larger, complete system development, these don’t work)

Work backwards from desired outcome to discover your constraints. Don’t just brute force. Instead, ask, what must be in place for us to get the peak performance from the key component we’re dependent on (render, disk load, etc). Then work from that constraint.

Do everything you can at compile time, not run time. Pre-compute tons of things – even the build-up of the data structures in memory. Just run it and then save and reload that blob automatically.

Over-generalizing early is a trap many devs fall into. Solve the problem in front of you. Trust that you can delete the code and do something else if it sucks. It’s cheaper and faster than trying to anticipate things ahead of time. Do the simplest thing that will work and if it sucks come back and delete it.

If you end up with a small runtime table/code that doesn’t require runtime checks because you can prove it can’t go wrong, you’re doing something right.

When developing, the actual Amiga is super slow and limited. They took an Amiga emulator and hacked it up so they could debug on it instead. Using calltraps to trigger the emulator, they added memory protection, fast forward, trigger debug, loading symbols, cycle accurate profiling, single step, high-resolution timers, etc. Also allows perfect input playback.

Modern threading and consumer/producer components (disk loading, data transfer, decompressors, etc) often just throw things in buffers and YOLO. There’s no clear backpressure to show you where you’re wasting time/space. Running on this kind of hardware/simulator shows you how much time the design is wasting by poorly and inefficiently designed algorithms/constraints.

Presented at Handmade Cities event in Seattle at: https://handmadecities.com/