TIL
TIL about the complex and wonderful world of Audio Description from this episode of Hyperfixed
It’s classic Goldman to be curious about a new thing, and mainline Hyperfixed to get overzealous about solving a Too Big Problem, but this episode goes above and beyond. It’s about copyright, artistic intent, accessibility, and ultimately the joy of movies. Classic stuff from the relatively new show
Watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind tonight. Wonderful movie.
TIL that Miyazaki wrote it as a Manga series and then adapted it to film afterwards, and that it’s technically not a Studio Ghibli movie, as its success led to the founding of the studio
TIL that the Artemis II crew had unprecedented visibility on the far side of the moon during their mission.
I understood that it was the first trip to the moon in 50 years, but didn’t quite understand the significance of their specific route, and the photographs we would see.
TIL about Wendy Carlos, a pioneer in synthesizer music, who helped Bob Moog develop the world famous Moog Synthesizer
This from a cool episode of Version History all about the vocoder
TIL about Expo Custom Builds, which are triggered by, but meaningfully different from, EAS workflows.
Today I just needed them for a repack workflow, but I’m wondering if there’s more we could potentially do with it.
I wish I could ask and understand what happened with using ${} vs ${{}} in each environment
TIL that you can “move” Expo router stacks up into the root easily by re-arranging the file structure.
In some ways this is obvious, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to us as we worked on the problem. We started by manually hiding our tab bar on some screens, but today realized we could take that entire <Stack> and put it at app/(section)/_layout.tsx and it would render entirely over the tabs, which was exactly the behavior we wanted!
TIL how to gather crash reports from another iOS device and resymbolicate them.
I also re-learned that running the Console app and streaming messages with a live device is your friend in a pinch.
Fun launch day 😅
TIL that cats have 18 claws, because they have 5 on each front paw + 4 on the back 2
If I had known that, maybe I could have won our Easter round of I Should Have Known That
TIL that the MLB home plate used to be made of cast iron, and they amended the rules to make it foul territory because one particular guy made a habit of hitting the ball straight down for base hits
TIL about ceremonial drinking cacao when I stepped into Maya Moon in SD because I thought it was a coffee shop 😅
I don’t know that I can say that I enjoyed it, but I did get the distinct feeling that this is someone’s favorite drink in the world. I think that counts for something
TIL that Rosalina was originally designed to be canonically related to Peach, but that story element was removed before the release of Super Mario Galaxy
When it came up in the movie, it seemed a little too convenient, and I wondered why this had never been mentioned. That factoid rounds it all out
TIL more than I wanted to know about inconsistencies between react-native-webview’s Android and iOS implementations. In particular, the one that bit us today was certain navigation state changes being called or not called on different platforms when using history.pushState
TIL - I got to use React Native’s BackHandler API
I’m not in the market for a switch to Android, but I enjoy how RN has pushed me to understand the different design decisions between that and iOS
TIL that there are woodpeckers in my neighborhood. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one in the wild. I was absolutely enchanted by this little guy today
TIL that a softball curveball is equivalent to a baseball sweeper based on their movement
TIL that the Savannah Bananas stream some of their games live on Youtube. The kids are getting in to them, so it was fun to watch part of a game tonight
TIL that Tanstack Query allows you to hold on to existing data (even across query key changes!) via placeholderData.
This helped make a loading state much better. We want to let users change filters (which results in a new query key) but it was a poor experience when the data disappeared from the screen on filter changes
TIL - saw a first of a kind bug today: an Expo module where the calling a function according to the docs and Typescript typings caused a “wrong number of arguments” bug
The notable thing was that we couldn’t have caught this in jest tests, since those never touch native modules.
One more reminder to double check work on devices, and to consider end to end native testing
TIL that Flea (the RCHP bassist) spent 2 years learning to play trumpet and has a Jazz instrumental album coming out later this week. This video of his Jimmy Fallon appearance is an absolute delight