Weeknotes (2023 week 7)

iOS and Kiosk mode

I did some research on easy ways to put an iPad into Kiosk mode because I want to build a surveying app for an exposition. The web platform is perfect for this especially given the budget constraints…

I thought What is iOS kiosk mode and how do I enable it? was a great overview over the available options for using iPads in Kiosk mode. I definitely don’t want to build an app myself even though this would be relatively straightforward e.g. with React Native¹.

The MDN Foxes example worked nicely apart from the fact that the bar containing the clock and indicators is still shown. This is probably an acceptable trade off, but we’ll see.

Bitbucket to GitHub migration

I have finally managed to bump against the GitHub API’s rate limit. I have transferred more than 300 private Git repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub. Most repositories aren’t used actively anymore, so it’s not really about GitHub vs. Bitbucket. The goal was simply to have one less tool to worry about.

Downloading the list of all repositores in a workspace was surprisingly annoying and I spent too much time bumping my head against the API authentication. In the end all I had to do was to generate an app specific password and authenticate with that and with my own username. It’s funny to me how simple things like that are still hard after working more than 15 years in this industry.

Off by ones

I’m still progressing with learning Rust using Advent of Code puzzles. Last night I was really close to a working solution but then I spent a lot of time chasing down off by one errors. I was totally aware that I should pay attention when writing the loop (respectively the range) and I still failed. Oh well, in the end it worked and I still had a good time.

Where do stolen bikes go?

Everyone has probably seen that one already but I thought it was a really interesting study: Where do stolen bikes go?

The research team also charted the movement of the bikes. Out of the 70 stolen bikes, 68 remained in the local Amsterdam area. Between three and six of those spent enough time in the vicinity of second-hand bike stores that the researchers concluded they were probably sold there. Another 12 bikes were taken to locations identified as places where bicycles are known to be sold informally, on the bicycle black market.

Releases

• feincms3-data: I wrote about circular references last week; this week I got confirmation that the code works and so I released it.
• django-admin-sso: It’s a project I’m not really using anymore, but I’m still maintaining it when it’s not much work. Switch to django-authlib’s admin SSO support if you can since django-admin-sso still uses the deprecated oauth2client library.