TIL
TIL about Expo’s repack feature. It uses a cached native build, attaches a new JS bundle, and lets you use that for internal testing. It’s buggy right now, and I couldn’t get it to work today, but I’m very excited about it as a future prospect for faster builds.
TIL that the state and local tax deduction limits (SALT) got raised for 2025. That’s a meaningful tax break for high-income earners in high-tax states. AKA people who really don’t need tax breaks. AKA me.
TIL about Refugee Net, an org working to help resettle refugees and support them as they come to the US. It’s a good time to support groups who are working to make the US a more compassionate and welcoming place
TIL that the selective attention test (where you’re challenged to count passes of a ball and a person in a gorilla suit walks through the background) has a corollary for audio.
It surprised me, because my experience of audio feels much less voluntary than my experience of video. I’m always aware that my eyes are focused on a point. Much less that my ears are also “choosing” what to hear
It came up in one of the essays in You Didn’t Hear This From Me
TIL - had my first introduction to opencode.ai today. I’d heard of it before, but tried it out with codex
Fascinating TUI. Definitely things to observe/learn from the different front end. I love how it does diffs
I’m excited to play with it and keep learning about how different tools compare
TIL that seaweed salad is made by rehydrating dried seaweed with water and vinegar. Up until I looked up a recipe, I had assumed that it was made with a “wet” form of seaweed that wasn’t normally available at the grocery store.
I’ve become a big fan of www.americastestkitchen.com this year. It’s nice to just open the app and see something that might look good and know I can trust the recipe. Every one I’ve made has been a banger
TIL that if you sent the CSS zoom property to a number with a sufficient number of digits, some of the automatic sizing logic on your page may become unable to calculate round numbers and result in and endless loop of elements re-rendering at different sizes
I also re-learned how to round a number to a specific number of digits 😅
TIL more about Claude skills. In fact, I wrote my first two, for helping me gather context about all the code getting pushed and merged on the teams I run.
I know skills can be used to pipe in specific context for tasks, but right now they’re most useful to me as a way to “script” the non-deterministic beings
TIL that the flag patch on the USA WBC team hat is “backwards” because the reverse presentation is used in battle situations where one could picture the flag waving behind the pole in motion
TIL about Sofi Tukker. I’ve been asking people what their baseball walk up song would be, and someone said Purple Hat.
Turns out they were also the commercial music for the iPhone X
TIL that Apple’s recommended way to change Webview behavior in an app context is to use WKWebView.mediaType which sets a custom CSS @media type for the session.
Video here: developer.apple.com/videos/pl…
TIL about the CSS properties zoom and text-size-adjust. I wanted to make a Webview work properly with device font sizes, and found that I had to reset -webkit-text-size-adjust to auto because most CSS resets set it to 100% (e.g. telling the browser to trust that text is sized correctly for a mobile device)
TIL about Fastlane’s Spaceship. Powerful Ruby library for interacting with the App Store Connect API.
Today I used it to set up automated TestFlight build expiration when a related PR is merged
TIL that there are a good number of players in the World Baseball Classic who have non-baseball full time jobs. What a cool event
TIL about the difference between a spiral galaxy and other types of galaxies
Thanks to a parent teacher conference where we reviewed some homework about our galaxy 🙂
TIL that SNL still throws curveballs at the cast during taping. I knew there were little touches here and there, but I haven’t see anything like Passing Notes or the (seemingly sincerely) interrupted Ryan Gosling monologue
TIL a whole slew of things about the new F1 season and cars during the opening Australian Grand Prix
The most notable thing to me right now is the 50/50 power split. It’s dramatically changed how the cars interact in racing situations, since they can’t go full speed for consecutive straights.
I imagine they’ll adjust the split soon. It reminded me a lot of the 2022 opener where Verstappen and Lceclerc traded places on a series of laps before one of them figured out how to stay ahead
TIL that Rian Johnson is a “crossword fiend.” I too, love a good Thursday, and am willing to go to bat that The Last Jedi was the best of the Star Wars Sequels.
TIL that most Golden Retrievers are technically Field Golden Retrievers. A slightly larger, skinnier breed than the AKC standard
TIL that Apple documents CSS font rules for supporting Dynamic Type on the web. This may turn out to be a compelling feature for some work projects