Notices by Alex Hall (alexhall@mastodon.social), page 2

I just realized that Christmas in 2024 will fall on a Wednesday. I don't think I get Christmas Eve off, so 2024 will be the worst time for a holiday: smack dab in the middle of the week. Normal weekend, work two days, have a random day off, work two days, normal weekend, repeat for New Year's Day.

One advantage of braille is being able to quickly count how many digits are in huge numbers. I know my display has 32 cells. Examining this number, I have one empty cell on the right, and the number sign. I instantly know there are 30 digits. Try that on a monitor! Yes, this rarely comes up, and yes, I'd still rather be able to see a real monitor. But it's one tiny thing I'm faster at than sighted people. Let me have it.

From what I was told, you start the app, then hold your phone to your chest with the camera facing out and slowly pivot. Once the camera sees the traffic signal, it'll tell you if you can cross or not. Hold still, and wait for the app to indicate it's safe to cross. Very cool stuff, but will I do this while I'm listening to traffic and have a dog or cane in one hand?

Someone told me about the OKO app today. It uses a phone's camera and AI to recognize when a traffic signal indicates it's safe to cross a street. I remember it coming out, but I figured it wasn't going to work well so I never tried it. I'm told it's actually quite something. Has anyone used this? It sounds like yet another great app I'll only truly use when I can have it running on AR glasses.

I found a thread on r/blind the other day. Someone asked a very valid question: how should they, being blind, deal with dangerous critters like venomous spiders or scorpions? Every answer was either get traps/cats and hope for the best, or move somewhere else. With all our technology, you'd think this would be a solvable problem, but it's not. I have no idea how one would even begin to address it.

Is there an accessible JSON viewer for Windows? I give it a file or paste the code in, and it gives me some kind of tree I can navigate? Maybe a text field I can tab to that shows the description of the focused object, if set, for use with things like OpenAPI schemas?

Twice today, linuxize.com has popped up a thing telling me to verify I'm human. This wasn't While I was paying for something, or logging in, or anything like that. I was just trying to read an article. That's all. I searched, found the site, wanted to read the content, and was told to prove I'm a human. No, linuxize.com. You pull this, and I'm leaving your site to find my answers elsewhere. I'll also actively avoid you in the future. Nice job.

@Marco Thank you, that makes perfect sense. We don't use pull requests at work yet, and work is where I interact with Git most of the time. I didn't consider pull requests at all.

Why does Git differentiate between the author of a commit and the committer? Don't they have to be the same?

There's always confusion about writing dates, especially between Britain and the United States. Month day year, or day month year? Slash, period, or hyphen as the separator? I wish all countries would adopt the obviously superior year-month-day format. It's unambiguous, save to use in file names (slashes aren't), and, if leading zeros are included, sorts by date even if sorted as string values. Happy 2023-11-06, everyone.

Did NOT sleep well or long. Chair is comfortable. Room is perfect temperature. House is quiet. Working from home. Keep almost drifting off to sleep. Long day ahead. Body has always been unaffected by caffein. Is today over?

I was just reading a query. I half drifted into a daydream, imagining the text of the query grabbing the data out of the tables and tossing it off to its left, where the data bounced on the ground. You guys, I don't know if I'm gonna make it through today.

I want to have VSCode use PHP in a Docker container as its executable. I'm also using Debian 10 in WSL. My setup:

* In VSCode, php.executablePath is set to "\\\\wsl.localhost\\debian\\usr\\local\\bin\\php".
* That file is a simple bash script:

```
#!/bin/bash
docker exec -t php-dev php $@
```

* If I run `php --version` in WSL, I get a valid response. My script and container seem to work.
* VSCode says the path isn't a valid PHP executable.
* My script has 777 permissions.

Any ideas?

I just realized something. I'm so used to working in Debian that I forgot VSCode is running from Windows, so of course it doesn't know how to work with my bash script. I'll try turning this into a bat file instead.