Weeknotes 2025 W17: Wirtschaftsidentifikationsnummer

Quick bits:

• I have switched my Bluesky account to a verified domain (@denisdefreyne.com). I’m not sure why; I barely use Bluesky.

  Speaking of Bluesky: the only person I follow there is Jessie Gender and that’s entirely fine by me.

• I now have a Wirt­schafts­iden­ti­fika­tions­num­mer,¹¹1 German for “economic identification number.”  which replaces neither my Steuer­num­mer²²2 German for “tax number.”  nor my Steuer­iden­ti­fika­tions­num­mer.³³3 German for “tax identification number.” This is a number that is obviously completely different from my tax number.  The number of numbers will keep on increasing!

• I reworked my Ideas page to add a bit more structure to it. I’ve got far too many ideas!

Quick tech bits:

• I gave the Wails 3 alpha a try, and it’s unfortunately a bit too alpha-quality to use in any realistic project. I’m a fan of Wails, and would love to use it more. For now, though, I’ll need to stick to Electron for my JavaScript-powered desktop apps.

• This week I learned about Null MX records to indicate that a domain accepts to email. For example, denisdefreyne.com IN MX 0 . would mean that my domain name accepts no email (which it does — this is just an example). Checking for a null MX is useful for services that allow user registration; you’d want the provided email address to be from a domain that accepts mail!

Shower thoughts:

• Nouns are to verbs as pronouns are to… proverbs. Right?

• The holes in Emmentaler cheese are not part of the cheese, but without the not-cheese, the cheese would not be the cheese. Whoa! (I wrote this at 3:30 AM and I don’t know what that says about me.)

• The only way that Craig Mazin can make a Chernobyl season 2 is by creating a nuclear disaster of his own.

For years, I’ve been having strange headaches that no doctor has been able to identify. I’ve had CAT scans and even an MRI scan which revealed nothing out of the ordinary. One doctor identified my headaches as migraines, but they most certainly are not.

Earlier this week, I self-diagnosed⁴⁴4 Self-diagnosing on the internet is generally not a great idea. There is so much garbage on the internet these days, especially now when so much medical information on the web is AI-generated. So much of it is straight up wrong. The Dead Internet Theory feels rather true.  these headaches as occipital neuralgia caused by a pinched nerve in my neck.

The main evidence I have for this is that my acting warm-up exercises that target the neck and shoulders are extraordinarily effective at getting rid of the pain. Oh, the things my acting classes have been good for!

Despite not having published much in terms of fiction, I feel like I’m miles ahead of where I used to be in terms of writing skill. Every single piece that I write is better than the last — even if I don’t publish it.

Funny also how it is not the Season of Writing anymore (that was January to March). I suppose Quarterly themes don’t quite work for me.

Right now, I’m outlining what is probably the largest fiction story I’ve ever worked on. It’s pushing the boundaries of what I am capable of, and that’s a fun place to be in.

Fun, but exhausting too. Often, I feel like I’d rather do anything but write — yet I keep coming back to it. I crave fiction writing.

Some software updates:

• I’ve published a new ddenv release, v0.1.9, with support for pnpm and yarn. Even though yarn is on its way out, it’s still useful to have support for it.

• I’ve released two new Nanoc versions, 4.13.4 and 4.13.5. They add a few neat enhancements. I’ve also published a nanoc-checking release, which makes checks run in parallel — with a fancy textual UI too!

Entertainment:

• Still managing my Morrowind⁵⁵5 The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Game Studios, 2002), published by Ubisoft.  mods. I’ll start playing soon.

Toots and skeets:

• peak Bethesda moment from 2006 (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social): It wouldn’t be Bethesda without this sort of mess!

• “Remember the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA? Turns out they pirated both the font AND the music.” (@1dark1@masto.hackers.town): Oops!

• A Video About Digging A Hole (Jacob Geller). Quote: “I feel like I see these stories with shocking frequency” — I wasn’t expecting any less of you, Jacob <3

Links:

• The Talk (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

• Hyperwood - Open-Source Furniture: Pretty!

Tech links:

• Our interfaces have lost their senses (Amelia Wattenberger)

• Bluefish: This looks great! I might use it for my article on expression parsing.

• The tools I love are made by awful people (Ankur Sethi)

• Avoid continue (Lawrence Kesteloot): At least in Ruby, continue is called next!

• Polishing your typography with line height units (Jen Simmons for the WebKit blog): I will be making use of this!