Back in the day when I was a student, I travelled for almost 3 hours by train multiple times per month... I played Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 on my laptop all the way. Surprisingly, even while wearing large headphones, I connected with many people who saw me playing a game that they loved.

RCT2 remains a brilliant game today. The OpenRCT2 project is very well maintained and I can highly recommend it if you want to play it on your modern computer.

devRant without bugs (there are few), but with all of you (our community). ♥️

Except for the people who post jokes or memes without the appropriate tags!

Microsoft Teams 👎

Luckily most of our company uses Zoom, which is great UX-wise. But MS Teams... What a joke!

I've even been on a call with MS engineers for some Office integration support. Of course, they scheduled a Teams meeting. It was embarrassing how bad the quality and connections were. But likely they simply don't know any better...

My cat is diagnosed with leukemia. He has 4 months to live. What am I going to do without him? 🐈‍⬛

😿

Any Kotlin fans out here? What's your favourite feature?

To me: coroutines and the flow API. I can't wait for the state flow and shared flow APIs to be released. Goodbye Rx! It'll come probably in the next release, which might come in a week already, because then JetBrains (Kotlin developer) hosts their online alternative to KotlinConf.

Whoohoo: 🐈‍⬛
My phone supports the black cat emoji!
🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

I have a black cat ❤️

Does your view of this rant show the black cat emoji?

Is this a devRant bug?

I have a persistent (1) on my in-app notification bell (Android). I can't find any unread notification. It should be a comment notification. Maybe somebody generated such a notif, my phone picked it up, and then the other person undid the action that lead to the notif? (E.g. un-++, remove a comment or mention, delete their account, ???).

I see the (1) notification to on the web, and I can't find the actual notification there either!

Holy shit Realm. This DB.... On Android it will crash if you access a reference to the db from a different thread than the one it was created from! 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Why oh why can't they just have their own internals managing all the fucking thread they need? There's a reason they provide sync and async db access.

This basically means that my reference to a realm instance should always be tightly paired with the corresponding thread reference so that I can run my db queries on it.

👎

Brain fart.

In Java and many other languages there are basic types, like char and String. So why does Java have char and String, but not a digit type?

A number is basically a series of digits. For modular arithmetic it is very useful to be able to extract the 3 in the number 1234, it's just the 3rd digit in a number.

Base 2, base 10, base anything could be supported easily too. E.g. a base 2 digit would be:

digit d = 0b2; // or 1b2, but 2b2 would be a compilation error

A number would then be some kind of string of digits.

Any thoughts on this?

Kotlin

Look up the Kotlin Puzzlers presentations by Anton Keks, in which he shows the strangest behaviours of the Kotlin compiler. Bizarre syntax, strange results, bugs, etc. Some aren't even edge cases. And he's wearing a captain's hat.

2017: https://youtu.be/ukwVzLq_pHk
2018: https://youtu.be/Xq9vBZs0j-8
2019: https://youtu.be/_AM5VbPTKeg

I'm digging the new GH notifications UI (beta):
https://github.com/notifications/...

It might not (yet) be available to you.

What's nice is that notifications can now be shown regardless of (un)read state (but you can still only show unread notifs). This means that you can read all notifications and not lose track of everything that you have read. Just mark notifications as 'done' when you're done, but until them just leave them in the list and/or save them for later. The UI is also responsive to the browser window, which is much better than before, because a lot of context and content now is shown! And it is possible to handle issues and PRs from the notification screen itself, which basically adds some additional UI elements to the regular issue/PR screens.

And earlier this week the GH Android app went into beta too: https://play.google.com/apps/...

It's a good week to be a GH user!

I should've known about this GitHub checkbox much earlier!

https://github.com/settings/...

Today is KotlinConf.

Hi all in Copenhagen!

Slack being funny when you start a conversation with yourself...

Do you know any good frameworks, preferably with a large community and some popularity, to develop progressive web apps (PWAs) in Python?

PlantUML is awesome! It's versatile, code based (e.g. version control is simple) and the results are great and as portable as you need.

http://plantuml.com/
https://github.com/plantuml/...

'Oh, so can you fix my printer?' 🖨️

There. I described it for the whole world. 🌍🌎🌏

Go home Gradle, you're drunk.

🍷 Wine Q:

No, not about the drink, you alcoholic! About the Wine Is Not an Emulator.

When I run a full screen app (a game) on my MacBook with an external monitor, how can I run the game on that monitor? It starts full screen on my MacBook's screen and can't be moved to the other screen. Well, I can move the 'window' (it's borderless) to the other desktop, but it immediately minimises to the dock. Opening the app again moves the window back to the first screen.

So in other words: how do I properly do display management in Wine?

Today I found this 😂😂
https://youtu.be/NATZy-ZqD7A

(I mean: YouTube found me after my previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2215801/...)

Today I discovered by myself that...

...in a shell...

...when entering a password (e.g. ssh)...

...and you make a typo... 🤦‍♂️

...you don't need to smack that backspace key like a maniac! You can just use the clear line shortcut: control+U (^U). This clears all input to the left of your cursor and this also works for passwords.

https://youtu.be/djV11Xbc914

/badhumor

Make a song title or text geeky/dev related, e.g.:

JSON Derulo - Talk Nerdy To Me
Katy Proggy - Firewall
DJ KhaLED - All I Do Is Print
DJ snake_case - Git Push For What

Now you!

Jake Wharton
https://github.com/JakeWharton
https://twitter.com/JakeWharton

Used to not work for Google /Android, but since the entire Android community uses about everything he makes, and then everything he touches turns into gold and becomes part of the Android SDK sooner or later, because his work is so useful and good. He now works for Google / Android. He's one of the Android gods, a true rockstar dev!

Rust noob Q:

Given x a variable on the heap, e.g.

let x = String::from("Hello, devRant!");

Then, given some function that I didn't write (from a library) that takes ownership of its argument:

fn some_function(y: String) -> bool { ... }

How would you handle this situation:

if some_function(x) {
another_function(x); // not ok, because x has gone out of scope in the line before
}

Is it idiomatic to just clone() x in the first call? That seems bad practice, because it's the second (or some other additional) call that needs x. What should I be doing instead?

Learning Rust.

Holy brainfucking brain melt, those references, scoping and borrowing and cloning and whatnot, because there is no garbage collector, but also no direct memory management.

It's cool, but also hard for a noob coming from the JVM/Android. The compiler error messages are helpful, but I immediately found some cryptic ones that don't help me at all.

All the comments always get me:
https://github.com/danielmiessler/...

In reply to https://devrant.com/rants/2183632/...

Going from Java to Python is like ...

Update on https://devrant.com/rants/2127480

So I sent my Pixel 3a with a broken screen to the Google repair center and within 2 days I got a response that there's liquid damage. OMFG.

So now I get options:
1. Not repair, I get my money back.
2. Buy a refurbished one for basically the new price and I might not get the same colour device.

So basically I'm forced to choose option 1, because I could also buy a new one at the same price.

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

So just due to bad luck I now don't have a functioning Pixel 3a any more.

😢

On the bright side: I explained my story to Google in a contact form and they called me back within 10 seconds. I spoke to the most helpful employee ever (Chris). He was very understanding and called it an exceptional situation. He now is reaching out to the repair center where he can get in touch with the actual repair people and see what can alternative Google might be able to offer me.

I don't expect anything, but kudos for Google's customer support.

Also, why do I keep hoping that this multibillion dollar company would just say: hey buddy, here's your new phone for free, just make sure you will promote it with your friends and family if you like it.

Today my 2 week old phone slips out of my pocket while standing up, falls on the screen and now it's cracked in multiple places. FML.

RIP Stormtrooper (he's black and white).

Repair is 30% of the new price. Worth it, but still a lot of money and 10 days without the phone.

Aaarghhhh!