Ephes Blog

tldr: The chatGPT app on iOS allows you to pay openAI using Apple Pay

Last week openAI stopped working for me and I got an error about a billing issue. I use a credit card from bunq to pay openAI, which worked fine for almost a year. When I investigated the issue, I got several misleading error messages from bunq like "your monthly limit is not sufficient" or "you have already added the merchant to your allowed merchants list". I couldn't fix the problem. So I contacted bunq support and they couldn't help either.

Today I thought about using another credit card, but then I found a workaround:

The chatGPT app on iOS allows you to pay openAI using Apple Pay. I couldn't do it with Chrome, and for Safari the Stripe interface lets you choose Apple Pay, but that didn't work either. But the app finally worked 🎉.

unmuting my mic Hey everybody, sorry about my camera, but you all insisted on making this a morning meeting and, y'know, that curse the fortune teller robot put on me forbids me from being visually perceived by "seeing machinations" before noon; I've *told* you this, Stanley. --Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Usual work week. Side projects are still neglected, but I registered a domain for a shiny new side project sigh. At least I'm now up to something again 🤷.

Articles

• What is Utility-First CSS?
• uv: Python packaging in Rust | Hmm, dunno

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-19 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 7: February 12 to February 18 | Johannes

Mastodon

• Het leven is bitter, het leven is zuur Alles smaakt beter uit de frituur...
• This is not a drill.

Software

• svcs - A Flexible Service Locator for Python / svcs: Robust & TESTABLE Python Web Applications with ANY Framework! - the video 😄
• PageSpeed Insights bookmarklet
• Sorting Techniques | Updated Python documentation

Books

• Every Layout | Another attempt to learn CSS

Videos

• Loose Coupling & Dependency Injection the EASY Way!
• Match all things Python: Parsing structured content with Python's new match statement | Think I've seen this talk at an in-person event in Düsseldorf, just saving it here so I'll be able to find it later...

Podcasts

• Side-Projects: Zwei Entwickler overengineeren einen Podcast (Engineering Kiosk) | Nice, always interesting to see how other people handle this podcast production stuff 🎙️
• Kognitionswissenschaften, wie Sprache und Denken zusammenhängen – und wie nicht (Hörsaal) | Really interesting episode
• RZ120 Ulf Merbold (Raumzeit) | Cool!

it's pretty messed up that the Beatles released a song called "Help!" and then an album called "Help!" and then a movie called "Help!" and nobody helped them and half of them died. --sunny jay real estate

Normal work week. Still not back to full health, but getting better. Went to the theater and visited a bar around the corner, which was great.

Articles

• One way to package Python code right now | Very good!
• Contingency planning for me and curl
• (comic) Narrator: They did not in fact delegate maintenance
• Let Me Tell You A Secret | Yes, click it already!
• Tracking Engineering Time
• Hello world, and the future for PyO3
• My Obsidian setup
• A beginner’s guide to making beautiful slides for your talks

Videos

• htmx deep dive | Good one!
• my thoughts on ruff

Mastodon

• This is going to be a hard one to explain tomorrow during standup.

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-12 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 6: February 05 to February 11 | Johannes

Software

• pico CSS - What’s new in v2?
• py_webauthn - A Python3 implementation of the server-side of the WebAuthn API | This whole webauthn stuff looks not so bad, actually

Podcasts

• Prächtig mächtig - Über Beziehungen, Diskursmacht und Strukturen (Was denkst du denn?) | Nice!
• SE Radio 602: Nicolas Carlo on Improving Legacy Code (Software Engineering Radio) | Oh, new website? Someone cleaned up the legacy code base? Looks good!
• SimpleWebAuthn with Matthew Miller (Software Engineering Daily) | Nice!

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE I'VE ALREADY BEEN ON THE FEDIVERSE FOR A YEAR. ONLY 999 TO GO UNTIL MY DISTRESS SIGNAL REACHES OMICRON PERSEI 8. --LRRR

Normal work week. Still wasn't able to do anything besides work.

Articles

• Django: Join the community on Mastodon | Just do it
• If What We Made Were Real | Hmm...
• foam - all about photography | cool magazine

Software

• Python 3.13.0 alpha 3 is now available
• Announcing the Deputy Developer in Residence and the Supporting Developer in Residence | PSF paid Python developers += 2
• Neapolitan 24.2 release
• PGTune | Tune your postgres configuration parameters
• Django Issue - Improving contrib.auth | Detailed discussion of the options. Context: Historically (and currently, still) the Django documentation recommends using a custom user model. Lately, opinions on whether this recommendation is correct are starting to shift.
• Wagtail 6.0 release notes
• FRITTer - Frame-Rate IndependenT TimEr tRee | Really cool project!

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-05 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 5: January 29 to February 04 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins | Simon Willison

Videos

• Postgres Performance: From Slow to Pro with Elizabeth Christensen | Great talk!

Lectures

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics | Ah, didn't know there was a website!

Podcasts

• New Podcast: Hidden Figures of Python | Welcome!
• UUID vs Bigint Battle!!! (Scaling PostgreSQL) | Except when forced to use client generated IDs, I use bigint.

Out of Context Images

A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit entered a clinic to donate blood.

The nurse asked the rabbit: "What's your blood type?"

"I'm probably a Type 0", said the rabbit. --via George Takei

Normal work week. Too sick to do any programming related stuff besides work.

Articles

• Why not HTMX? | First good critical article about htmx I have seen. Yes, you have to be careful with adding hx attributes to div elements (breaking a11y etc), but I disagree with web components being the solution, because how to do hx-sync with web components?

Books

• Beej's Guide to Networking Concepts | With source code in Python!

Software

• django-zen-queries - Gives you control over which parts of your code are allowed to run queries, and which aren't

Mastodon

• My people! What’s a recipe you cook semi regularly that’s really simple but is has no business being that delicious (given the amount of time/effort it takes)?
• Conni kann das alles nicht mehr

Podcasts

• Bruno Preisendörfer: Sokrates (Das philosophische Radio)| Didn't know about this "not" vs "nothing" thing, nice!
• #408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Brr, I'm not interested in Lex human side at all, but Tal is cool.
• #369: The Readability Episode (Python Bytes) | Dunno why I listen to that show less often, lately
• Folge #80 Ist die NATO-Osterweiterung Schuld an Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine? (Sicherheitshalber) | I am still short of good resources on this topic, but this episode helped my understanding quite a bit.
• The Old Parser (core.py) | Great! Wow about this access stuff...
• Mastodon with Eugen Rochko (Software Engineering Daily) | Really good episode
• The website of the Bildungstrinken podcast is down, but if you are only interested in the audio content, you can still find it here. We did a kind of nostalgic drinking session while trying to listen to the first episode.

I take my hat off to Jörg Meyer. If your cocktail recipes are printed on ice cubes packaging, you've probably made it.