Mike Roberts

A brown penguin chick of some kind. It looks very much like a man in a suit. It is bedraggled and miserable

Made it to Friday but at what cost

I was about to reply and ask was this directed at Labour or Reform but in a split second I realized the answer to that question was “yes”.

As was your’s. :)

Drop an album that was important to you when you were 19

This was the push I needed to finally export all my old Evernote data and close my account there. I haven't used it in a few years, but I just don't trust Bending Spoons (the current owners) with my data.

obsidian.md is all round a much better option for me.

On a Friday afternoon, even better.

The weather is Too Damn Cold.

(In my best Jimmy McMillan voice)

#TinyProblemsInComparisonWithEverythingElseGoingOn

John Hurt enjoying a meal in the film Alien

NASA say that the crew member who was ill and returned to earth is doing well and now having a meal with colleagues.

a man in a superhero costume is smiling at another man in a suit . Alt: Thor is smiling at another man in a suit saying “is it though”

Yeah, distinct “is it though” vibes to me. I notice there’s no mention in the article about who owns this - which I take to mean at the end of the day it’s a company or individuals in the US. So they can have all the local “operators” and “advisors” they want - if the owners want to bypass they can

You? Embarrassing brits? I don’t believe it.

Nearly crashed my car because I passed a van for a dogsitting service called IGGY PUP and felt the need to spontaneously applaud.

I mean - one flesh, one end - still kind of valid

2026 New York City Inauguration Ceremony YouTube video by NYC Mayor's Office

NYC's new mayor @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will rightly get the headlines, but at their inaugurations today public advocate Jumaane Williams @jumaane.bsky.social gave one of the most real political speeches I've ever heard. Incredible. Watch here, at 45 mins in www.youtube.com/live/iazY_UD...

Same. I was convinced there were hellhounds at the bottom of my bed for a long time after, and I can still remember feeling so.

Apparently today is a Sunday

I totally recommend having some good food and good drinks and listening to music you and your beau / belle / bex [1] have loved for 20+ years. It works well for my spouse and I. And happy new year.

[1] is that a word? Feels like it should be.

Attention @shs96c.bsky.social :

A photo of an MTA sign from the subway explaining the FM swap, with a logo showing the F and M lines swapping places via crisscrossing arrows.

Is the MTA making merch with the F M Swap icon cause they should be

I fell for a phishing attack yesterday. Got away with it, fortunately, since the fake site didn’t handle 2FA, and I didn’t use the password for anything else. But if you see an email from ”Mailchimp” saying “Campaign Issue Detected” that actually goes to “mailchimp accounts dot com” then be aware.

New #AWS architectural refactoring just dropped: "Replace Step Function with Durable Lambda Function"

But seriously - this looks like a very neat addition to Lambda. Will be fun to try it out and find where the holes are.

docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/lates...

#Servermore aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...

#AWS

Pope stands holding a baseball bat on a plane

Finally getting some theological clarity on the ethics of reclining in one’s plane seat

Are we dealing with an epidemic?

Rewatched Dungeons and Dragons: Honour among Thieves from two years ago and it really is a wonderful movie. Deserves to be considered in the league of all great action fantasy films that don’t take themselves too seriously, but are seriously well made.

Back in 2020 I published a book, with my good friend John Chapin, on using AWS Lambda with Java. Most of the book holds up well, but one thing that didn’t was the code examples, so I’ve made a few updates to the example repo. More details of what I changed here: blog.symphonia.io/posts/2025-1...

The thing I love about Viticulture is I think that theme and the rules work so well together.

Also the expansion (Tuscany) is small and adds a fun couple of extra elements.

I resubscribed to Netflix yesterday after 2 or 3 years away, and it’s a very jarring experience using a consumer app, that I’m paying for, that’s insidiously designed to maximize business KPIs rather than my own experience.

Examples and more thoughts here: hachyderm.io/@mikebrobert...

Oh interesting - no I didn't know about that library, or thi.ng generally

Screenshot of code example from https://github.com/symphoniacloud/hiccough/blob/main/test/hiccoughCore.test.ts

For my TypeScript + "doing it the old way" web dev friends - here's a small library - "Hiccough" that generates HTML using a tiny internal DSL. So no templates. github.com/symphoniaclo...

Based on the old "Hiccup" Clojure library.

I use it for both full pages, and snippets requested via HTMX

oooooh, that's a new one to me - I like it!