Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W02: Extreme Danger

January 5​–​11, 2026

Quick bits:

  • Holidays are over. Back to work. Chop chop.

  • It is a borderline irresistible thing to pet internet cats with my cursor.

  • After years of using Rectangle, I bought Moom and I am delighted by it. Rectangle is great, but Moom is even greater. Worth the €10-ish that I paid for it.

  • I’ve been so sleepy this week. I’ve been low on spoons.

    Literally, too! I broke my big wooden stirring spoon. Crack.

  • My Tarmak-3 use is going much better this week. So when do I switch to Tarmak-4?

  • It’s been freezing for a week now. Temperatures haven’t gotten above 0 all this time.

  • I took the U4 for the first time ever this week!

Shower thoughts:

  • Not to brag, but my IQ is in the low three figures.

On Wednesday I started my new acting class. It’s the same concept as my last class: students bring work that they found or created; nothing is given by the teacher. About 50% of the students I’ve already worked with.

There will be a public performance on May 13th. Pencil it in! We’re still in the very early stages of putting the show together.

For the first time, I’ve brought my own writing to perform in class. I’ve considered doing it before, but always chickened out; being on stage can already be intimidating, and performing your own work is even more so.

A big challenge is shutting down my Writer mode and stepping fully into Actor mode. In Actor mode, one has to accept the text as-is. As my acting teacher says: “The writer is in Canada.”1

It is remarkable how much one learns about a text by performing it. I had assumed I already understood the text — I wrote it, after all. Not so much!

Week numbering is hard.

I had been using macOS’ Shortcuts app to automate the creation of new week­notes. But as of 2026, this is broken — macOS’ internal week numbers don’t follow the ISO 8601 standard, and there at long last is a discrepancy: macOS considers this current week to be week 1, but in ISO 8601, it is week 2.

For all the previous years — or at least since I automated it — macOS’ internal week number matched the ISO 8601 week number.

Strangely, macOS’ Calendar app shows this week as being week 2, in line with ISO 8601. My assumption is that the dates in the Shortcuts app don’t follow macOS’ localization settings (“Language & Region”).

I could not figure out how to get Shortcuts to behave properly. I also couldn’t get it to call external programs; shelling out to e.g. Ruby would allow me to handle it properly, but there is a bug in Shortcuts that prevents it from reading the stdout of spawned processes.

So I’ve moved my week­note automation to Alfred. I considered used Bunch, but I’m much more familiar with Alfred.

Earlier this week, I, along with all other Berliners, got an emergency notification for extreme danger.

Given the severity of the wording “extreme danger,” I expected a situation that would result in severe injury or death if I were not to take immediate action. I’m not exaggerating: that is what “danger” means, even without the word “extreme” in front of it.

But it turns out that there was no danger at all. It was a notification to mention that electricity service would be restored after a protracted outage. No “extreme danger.”

I think it’s woefully irresponsible to abuse the emergency alert system like that. This is the sort of alert that comes with the scary maximum-volume national emergency sound, mind you — I’m not talking simple text messages.

Anyway, I coped with the annoyance by making something of a movie title mockup:

A movie title screen with fiery explosions and the superimposed text “Denis Defreyne in Extreme Danger.“

Right — moving on.

Ugh, cars. A while ago, I wrote about cars driving through the crowd of people exiting and entering trams. I noticed this week that there is a new announcement at affected tram stops: “Please be careful. Exit is on the street.”

I don’t like the new announcement. It puts the responsibility on passengers, rather than the asshole car drivers who are absolutely are not permitted to drive through. It is reckless behavior that endangers lives.

I’ve also discovered that the intermittent flashes of light in my area is the firing of the traffic cameras. Unfortunately, I’m also seeing car drivers go just below the speed limit until right past the traffic camera, then accelerate right up beyond the speed limit.

Even in icy conditions, I’ve seen drivers floor the gas pedal, going far above the speed limit, straight through the red light at an intersection where I’m about to cross as a pedestrian.

Sometimes, it is a surprise that I am still alive.

So many drivers ought to have their license revoked. But in car-centric Berlin, that’s not going to happen. As long as there are no real consequences to this recklessness, this unacceptable behavior will sadly just continue.

I have made no progress on metadata filters in Nanoc. In my defense, I’ve not quite got the time now that I’m back at work and started my acting class.2

But I had one thought: what if Nanoc filters could return not just content, not just metadata, but a list of items — zero, one, many? This sort of one-to-many transformation would open new possibilities:

  • Deleting drafts: The filter could return zero items if the input item has the “draft” attribute.

  • Creating external diagrams: The filter could return new items for diagrams — PNG files generated on the fly.

  • Split items: The filter could take in an item, split the content on <hr>s, and return new items for each split.

Perhaps it’s worth allowing filters to have multiple inputs. It’d be useful to have a filter that takes all articles and returns newly created pages for all tags, categories, or years. Currently, this requires the use of Nanoc’s preprocessor.

But how would such filters work in the Rules file? The rules DSL is designed around the idea that a filter has exactly one input and exactly one output.

Also, the concept of “item representations” (item reps) might have to go away. This is an abstraction in Nanoc to allow one item to have more than one output file, but with multi-output filters, this abstraction might not be helpful anymore.

Lots to think about.

Entertainment:

  • Spencer3 is remarkably tense, keeping me hooked the entire time. It’s certainly not a traditional biopic. Also, the score is amazing — wait, it’s Johnny Greenwood again?!

Links:

Tech links:

  • It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons (Nikita Prokopov): I’ve got to agree, unfortunately.

  • I Cannot SSH Into My Server Anymore (And That’s Fine): Wow, I dislike this approach so much. Deploying a web site change should not take up to an hour. It baffles me how people like building overly complex systems that don’t perform well. Meanwhile, I can fix a typo, and build and deploy a new version of my site while holding my breath.4

  • Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory Leak (Mitchell Hashimoto)

  1. This expression perhaps only makes sense in the US. Maybe “the writer is in Denmark” for my fellow Berliners. ↩︎

  2. That reminds me that I’ve got a text to learn by heart. I’ve been slacking! ↩︎

  3. Spencer, directed by Pablo Larraín, written by Steven Knight (Shoebox Films, Komplizen Film, FilmNation Entertainment, 2021). ↩︎

  4. I’ve been wanting to move the Nanoc web site over to the same deployment mechanism. That site is deployed on Netlify, because that hosting service has out-of-the-box support for Nanoc, but I find it slow, and I don’t really use any of the features it provides. ↩︎

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