Hi, I'm Harrison. I currently work at me&u as a software engineer. I enjoy golfing, gaming and travel.

Recent Posts

Monday, November 24, 2025

Zed So Far

I've used Zed for around a month now as my sole text editor and I'm enjoying it.

I like its speed and simplicity. The team is actively rolling out updates and it's super simple to just setup and start coding.

There's two things I currently miss from VSCode (one of which I think is getting fixed soon):

  • Pretty TypeScript Errors is one of the best extensions in the VSCode marketplace, I think this kind of TypeScript error view will soon be natively supported in Zed and it seems like it'll be in the next stable release
  • Jest Runner is such a convenient way to run tests, I hate having to memorise the command line args for jest and prefer to have my tests run directly in my editor so I don't need to switch windows

Jake Malone In Bali

Was awesome having my brother come visit us in Bali this week. We did a lot of surfing. Was really nice to feel a bit more confident on the board and be out there in some bigger waves. I still suck at surfing but its definitely lit a bit of a fire in me to have more of a crack at it when we get home.

My current problem is that I get too stiff with my upper body when I stand up on the board. I need to stay low and put more pressure on my front foot when I stand. That will help me wipe out less as I was often falling off the back.

My new favourite spot to surf in the world is Balangan Beach.

Bizarre Ashes#youtube.com

This has to go down as one of the weirdest Test matches of all time. I honestly don't know what to make of it going in to the Adelaide night test. England's bowlers are good but their batters are trash? Maybe? Australia are also really bad at batting apart from Travis Head?

Test, Odi, T20,IPL,Pressure match,ICC Finals...Travis Head is absolutely beast!!!

Saturday, November 22, 2025

More Safari Things

I already posted this a little while back but here are a couple more settings.

  • Shift > Option > Command > 0 to open a new window with my personal profile, Shift > Option > Command > 1 to open a new window with my work profile
  • I'm now using wBlock for ad blocking, it seems solid so far

Friday, November 21, 2025

Nightmare Ashes#youtube.com

Well this is a terrifying watch. I think we might be in trouble here.

Khawaja needs to go. Boland also had a mare.

Scotland Football#youtube.com

Some of these goals were absolute worldies. Loved the Scottish commentary too.

There would have been a lot of hangovers the next morning.

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Metroid Prime Annoying Guy#youtube.com

Nintendo what have you done.

No one should ever say "BOOYAH!" in a Metroid game. Sigh. What the hell were they thinking?

Hearing the beautiful music interrupted by Marvel millennium yapping is insane. Nintendo really fumbled this one

Monday, November 17, 2025

Old Hemp#en.wikipedia.org

The more I look at Old Hemp the more I think it's actually Boots' ancestor.

First following sheep at the age of six weeks, Hemp grew to have a great ability to herd. He moved sheep quietly unlike the louder sheepdogs of the era and was far more mild-mannered, although sometimes worked so intensely that he physically trembled; within a few generations, his style had been adopted by almost all Border Collies, and became known as the Border Collie style.

Sunday, November 16, 2025

Third Last Week Bali

We've done a lot this week. Photo highlights include Nyang Nyang Beach, Uluwatu Temple, Puppy Yoga and Sundays Beach Club.

Lazygit Blog Post#bwplotka.dev

Personally, probably the best thing about the lazygit is its UX, notably how easy it is to use this tool, with just a basic understanding of the git CLI. Generally, it seems that a nice user experience is achieved due to deliberate choice of strong consistency, deliberate visualizations and interactive menus. Let me explain.

Yes to all of this.

Upgrading React Native

At work this week I've been upgrading a very out of date React Native app. I'm upgrading from 74.5 to 79.6 along with all the Expo changes. It's been a painful upgrade where I've mostly been relying on ChatGPT to get through various bugs and issues.

I had this thought when getting very frustrated with the upgrade:

primitives are so much easier to deal with using AI, anything that is a bit more high level like React Native gets so annoying to debug

To me, React Native and Expo really has so much magic to it and it makes deep diving into the actual issue difficult. ChatGPT has helped a bit but its been a real grind to get the answers I need.

Pokemon Rom Hacks#ko-fi.com

I'm keen to give Pokémon Lazurus a go. The art style is beautiful and I've heard good things about this developer and their previous work.

Thursday, November 13, 2025

Valve Box#youtube.com

These are some really intriguing products. The killer thing that Valve have done is on the software side with SteamOS and Proton.

Monday, November 10, 2025

Monkeys And Beaches

A couple more photos from Uluwatu.

I really enjoyed Padang Padang. It's a gorgeous beach.

Somewhat interesting side note about all the beaches around here: none of them are free. You usually need to pay around 20,000 per person (~$2 AUD). Obviously this is nothing in terms of cost but it's something that differs to the Canggu beaches.

Wildcard#theage.com.au

The AFL will introduce a wildcard round in 2026, giving teams that finish as low as 10th on the ladder after the home-and-away season a chance to win the flag.

The wildcard round would mean the team that finishes seventh on the ladder in the home-and-away season would play the team that finished 10th, and the team that finished eighth would play the ninth-placed team.

It would add intrigue to where clubs finish inside the top eight, too, as the top six would be rewarded with the week’s break, while teams finishing seventh and eighth would earn a hosting rights in the wildcard round.

The winners would then advance to play elimination finals under the same final eight system as has been in place since 2000.

Why do we need this? I really don't think this is a good idea.

I guess it's nice that there's no longer that weird week break anymore between regular season and finals. Channel 7 will be happy.

You'd think this eliminates any hopes for a Bulldogs like run in 2016 again if you have to play a whole extra finals game.

Saturday, November 8, 2025

Last Metroid Prime Trailer#youtube.com

This game can't come out soon enough. December 4th come at me.

Ashes Buildup#youtube.com

I've been watching a bunch of old Ashes footage this week from the early 2000s.

There really is so much nostalgia: channel 9, the commentary, the scorebug and graphics. It reminds me of being on summer holidays in Inverloch.

The players too - this Australian team was just completely dominate. Australia A might have beaten this English team.

I then watched the documentary from the 2005 Ashes and it was a reminder of how fantastic that series was.

Friday, November 7, 2025

Recordings

I have a new page on my blog at /recordings.

This is the space for my long talked about project recreate game music.

I'm using my LPK25 MKII 25-key Keyboard Controller to record directly into Logic Pro.

I use MuseScore to find sheet music which I can export as MIDI and then import into Logic Pro. This then allows me to have one track as a reference where I view the MIDI in the score editor and then record to another track.

Once the audio is recorded to a standard I want I do a tiny bit of quantising and then export it out.

It was a bit finicky to set things up the way I wanted in Logic Pro as when I'd record I wanted to view the reference material. However, what would happen by default is that my recorded MIDI would render on top of the reference material which was very annoying. With some ChatGPT usage and just trying a few different settings I got it sorted.

You can see the setup below.

The key settings I had to turn off were:

  • Make a duplicate software instrument track with duplicate settings
  • Ensure the Link icon on both of the tracks in the score editor is turned off
  • Make sure that "View" > "Explode Folders" is toggled off in the score editor

Once I did this I could go to my track, hit record and everything worked correctly.

Week 1 Uluwatu

A couple of random pictures from this week.

Monday, November 3, 2025

Dodgers 2 Peat#daringfireball.net

Game 7 had some cracking highlights. This has to go down as one of the best World Series of all time.