It’s my first time playing any Civ game ever. I’m currently at the top of the scoreboard for reasons entirely unbeknownst to me. My advice for anyone else considering playing their own game: form an alliance with the server admin.
This post prompted me to fix a problem I’ve had for literal years. Forgive the tangent, but I’m so happy that I needed to share. I imagine I’m not the only one who’s run into this particular issue, so hopefully it’s helpful for others too.
If you’d prefer, feel free to skip over the story to the links at the bottom.
I use a single large(ish) monitor and multiple virtual desktops, or “spaces” as macOS calls them. I have Chrome windows on all of my desktops. When I quit Chrome with ⌘Q and then relaunch it, it collects all of my Chrome windows onto one desktop instead of restoring them to the desktops that they were on previously.
For something like 14 years(!), this has driven me up a wall.
Notably, it doesn’t happen when Chrome relaunches to update itself or when I reboot my machine. In those cases, the app happily restores all my windows to their respective desktops. It’s almost as if it’s taunting me: “oh sure, I can do what you want, I just choose not to sometimes.”
Every once in a while, I go down a rabbit hole, trying to find a solution. I always come up empty-handed. Usually I just find a small handful of other people complaining the same issue. It was never a particularly easy thing to google, and it didn’t help that that it wasn’t clear who was even at fault. Was it a Chrome thing? A macOS thing? Maybe some combination of both? Or even worse, maybe it was a “wontfix, works as intended” situation?
Over the years, I’ve learned to cope. I rarely quit Chrome anyway, aside from updates and reboots, so the itch wasn’t that strong. Or maybe the itch just became part of me. Who knows.
But today, reading this post about things that suck in macOS, I thought of my own thing that sucks in macOS. Like remembering an old friend. An old friend who drove you crazy but who, nonetheless, you cared about.
And today, for old times’ sake if nothing else, I once again googled some combination of the words “Chrome”, “restore”, “windows”, “multiple”, and “spaces”. And folks, this time, I found it.
There’s a setting called NSWindowRestoresWorkspaceAtLaunch. (How had I never found this before? It’s so simple!) You can change the setting for any app, not just Chrome.
In case the Stack Exchange network finally succumbs to whims of private equity or otherwise gets lost to sands of time (it’s a fear I have), here’s a gist with the same instructions:
I can also put to rest my internal “feature vs bug” debate. Here’s Apple’s response to a bug report from the Chrome team (presumably from before they added the NSWindowRestoresWorkspaceAtLaunch setting):
This issue behaves as intended based on the following:
Application restart does not preserve space assignment.
We are now closing this bug report.
Digging around a bit more, the original webreference.com (along with this article) existed until around April 2020. It's since been replaced by a generic landing page with a prompt to "subscribe to be the first to know when we relaunch". Shame that the article's URL doesn't work anymore after being maintained for 22 years. I imagine the domain was sold or something?
Double clicking selects a word, and triple-clicking selects the whole line. If I double- or triple-click-and-hold, I can drag the mouse to expand the selection word-wise or line-wise, not just character-wise. This works with the paragraphs of text in the body of this blog post, too.
I had no idea that you could end with a drag to expand your selection by word or by line like that. That's really cool. (The author's using Linux, but it works on macOS too.)
Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)
For anyone who's curious, here's a video of the Easter egg in action, along with a some more interesting backstory on Jacques Servin, the programmer in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI&t=495s
Totally agreed that it's invasive. Same for the "typing" indicator, which also can't be disabled. If I'm writing something longer than a sentence or two, I usually just compose it somewhere else and then copy/paste it into WhatsApp, just to avoid feeling observed.
The fact that those two things can't be disabled actually makes me want to use WhatsApp less. I doubt I'm alone in that. Makes me wonder if Facebook's "engagement" stats account for those types of disincentives.
I disagree — those issues are totally for the company to solve. Or at least, the company should be prepared to meet employees halfway. If a North American company is going to insist that I work North American hours whilst living in Europe, I'm just not going to work there. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
I live in Europe and work for a very remote-friendly, NY-based company, and I work pretty normal European hours. I have 2-3 hours of overlap with the various members of my team, and that's all I need. (In fact, I'm more productive in the morning here because it's easier for me to focus when our group chat is mostly quiet.)
Of course, it's not as simple as saying that you can work from anywhere for anybody at any time, but I don't think it's fair to say that timezone issues are not for the company to solve.
And I wish I had a reference for this, but I seem to remember reading that any future performance optimizations that could be applied to function components could probably also be applied to class components (at least ones that contain only a render() function and nothing else).
In any case, I'm hoping that React eventually gets to a point where developers don't have to make a choice between class and function components, and the compiler or the runtime makes that decision for us on a per-component basis.
EDIT: As an example, here's a Babel plugin that takes care of the conversion for you at compile time: https://github.com/remcohaszing/babel-plugin-transform-react.... Not sure what its heuristics are for determining what should and shouldn't be converted though, if any.
I think GitHub's great, and I'm mostly okay with having to rely on it heavily at my day job, but I dislike how code reviews + PRs are necessarily tied to branches.
What are the chances of GitHub introducing stacked diffs (or a similar abstraction) as an option? It'd be great to try out this workflow on a non-trivial project, but it seems like a hard sell organizationally when it involves migrating to and supporting a completely different tool like Phabricator or Gerrit.
This is awesome! I particularly like being able to spin up a local instance of GraphiQL against any endpoint (with auth headers and everything). I tried it with GitHub's GraphQL API, and it took me less than a minute to get going.
Berliner Morgenpost published a cool little interactive thing last week where you draw where you think the wall used to be and it tells you how close you were:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...
https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)