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Rachel Brindle

@younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy

43 followers 3 following 444 posts

Tech witch. I'm building an electric airplane, kinda. It's on pause. I "maintain" the Quick, Nimble, and Swift Fakes testing libraries for Swift & Objective-C. Avid […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ hachyderm.io/@younata, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

Good flight home this morning from SoCal. Overall very smooth (much smoother than the outbound trip). Decided to fly over the coast until shortly after San Luis Obispo. Despite the not-quite-direct route, we still made it in record time! (2.8 hours logged, 2.3 […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

A screenshot of metadata from track log for this flight.

Total distance: 341 nautical miles (392 statute miles, 631 km)
Total time: 2 hours, 45 minutes
Flight time: 2 hours, 23 minutes
Night time: 0.
All landings: 1
Average ground speed: 142 knots (163 mph, 262 km/hr)

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

Beautiful photo of the sun as we flew over Ojai. You can kinda see the Channel Islands in the distance, but the glare on the canopy makes that hard. (Credit: @nicaless) #avgeek #aviation

Late afternoon sun, as seen from my airplane some 9000 feet up.

The sun is reflecting off the ocean to create a beautiful orange, almost sunset-look on the water, despite still being solidly day.

Reposted by Rachel Brindle

Matthew Dockrey @attoparsec.clacks.link.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

This is what happened when I built a pedal-powered RV this summer: youtu.be/NH39M4AFdLM

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

By far the best of the three built-in options. #AppleNewton

A photo of my Apple Newton (a MessagePad 2100).

The note on the screen shows off different font options.

The note is titled “this is espy sans” and is in the espy sans font.

The top center of the note reads “Hello Mastodon” in what NewtonOS calls ink text. This is a slightly shrunk down version of my own handwriting.

The next line reads “This is the Casual font”, and is in a kind of handwriting-like text font.
The third line reads “This is the Simple font”, a sans-serif thin font.
The fourth line reads “this is the Fancy font”, a serifed font similar to Times New Roman.

Below that reads “as you can see, Casual looks best”

The final line reads “Ink text is used at the top - my own handwriting!”

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

[LLMs, work, kinda positive] Got a work email telling me that because I haven’t used it, my access to Claude will be cut off to save costs. Oh no, anyway.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

Haven’t gushed about my #AppleNewton in a bit: I adore the Casual font (default note font in NewtonOS 2+). It’s just full of personality. It’s readable, yet evokes a sense of actually being scribed by a human. It’s everything comic sans wishes it was.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

[Baldur’s gate 3. No spoilers.] Several times, I started to wonder if I should temporarily drop the difficulty so I could more easily pass this fight. Glad I didn’t. That was very fun, if very frustrating.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

[Baldur’s gate 3. No spoilers.] Been doing a playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, on the highest difficulty without turning on single-save mode (so, honor mode, but you can save scum). After, like, 3 days of trying, I finally beat the act 2 boss. I wasn’t underleveled (I have mods to increase […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

I did not expect myself to ever care this much about screw head standards, nor to encounter that others also cared about this as much as I do.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

I am getting to the point where I dislike phillips head screws almost as much as I dislike flathead/slotted screws. Slotted screws are still far worse, but at least I don’t destroy them during “normal” use. Given how much philips head screws will cam out and strip the screw. I really should […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Gosh, the weather today is so nice. It’s so clear out. I really want to go play hookie and do a bay tour. But no, I have to contribute to putting a roof over our heads like a responsible adult. 😭

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Speaking of faffing about with other tools, I still want to create a swift-native tool that on-the-fly generates slippy map tiles (yes, that’s the name of the tech. You can blame google in the mid 2000s for this) from the FAA sectional data. It’ll allow me to save on storage for this little […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Tonight, I added support for rendering VFR sectional tiles to this fun little tool. That took way too long faffing about with locally creating tiles from the FAA source (from one of several CLI tools that aims to pre-render all of these). Now I’ll be able to better show “yeah, I was at this […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Oh. Great. I somehow no longer have access to my fastmail account. Account password + all my application-specific passwords are seemingly wiped. No idea how this happened. Their status page shows them as up, so might just be a me problem. I sent a support ticket to request an account reset […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Throwing this out there as a request for swift 7: update the package description API to use a ResultBuilder. Respectfully, someone who was just caught by forgetting to add a comma. #SwiftLang

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

Me, recording a multi-hour flight: fuck yeah! Let's do this! Me, editing all that together: Oh no! There's so many hours of footage to deal with!

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

Time for a silly bug overview! One of my side projects is a simple mac os app to render a flight track log (a series of timestamped GPS coordinates) onto a map as a video. With my default settings producing a realtime video of the flight as a map. I used it in an unlisted video of my wife and I […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Return flight up was great! Uneventful, which is exactly how you want it to be. As we were preparing to depart (in the runup area), a saw that an overcast layer was moving in. Being unable to judge how high up that was, I elected to go around LAX instead of over it via the special flight rules […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Flew down to LA this weekend. Lovely flight. Now we’re just waiting for some clouds to burn off before we can fly home. Sadly, the clouds are still too low to do anything except pattern work. If I was IFR current, I could punch through this very thin layer and head home, but nope.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

Yesterday, I opened/merged a PR fixing an oversight in one of our iOS build scripts (someone used $DERIVED_DATA_DIR, instead of $DERIVED_FILES_DIR). In the PR description, I wrote “this was likely a typo or slop” to indicate that the issue was clearly an oversight (I hadn’t done the blame to […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Friends, now that macOS 27 is out, should I upgrade straight from Sequoia to it? Or should I stay on Sequoia for the indefinite future?

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Fun day today! I took @b on her first #GeneralAviation flight! Quick hop over to Columbia airport, on the other side of the Central Valley from us. Checked out the CalFire ramp, trying not to annoy them too much. On the way back, I managed to break my ground speed record: briefly on the approach […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

Today, I had 7 hours of meetings at work. I am just absolutely fried. And of course there’s a heatwave so I can’t even nap/sleep early, because it’s 85+ F (30+C) upstairs in the bedroom.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

I already have an Apple Duo at home, though, why would I pay 2k for a new one?

An Apple PowerBook Duo 280c (circa 1994), on top of 2 Apple Quadra 605s (circa 1993), and next to a 512k Macintosh (circa 1984).
In the reflection of the PowerBook, you can make out me, holding my phone in my right hand and flashing a peace sign with my left hand.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

Fuck driving. I was (in my car, sadly) at a stop sign, waiting for cross-traffic (who did not have a stop sign) to clear. This fucking driver behind me decides that I’m being too cautious and starts to lay on the horn to get me to go. While there’s still fucking cars coming. We were on our way […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

[Project Wingman review (no spoilers)] Just finished Project Wingman today. Again, very good and right up my alley. For those who don’t know: Project Wingman is an arcade style air combat simulator. You’re flying modern jets, you carry enough ordinance to supply an entire base. There are tons […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Reposted by Rachel Brindle

Tao Neuendorffer @taonf.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton Doug Menuez (Photography) Markos Kounalakis (Text) Paul Saffo (Introduction) #AppleNewton #Retrocomputing

Re-evolution 1985-1989

Personal computers became tools that spurred revolutionary change in society, bringing data and information technology to both homes and workplaces

Programming engineer Sarah Clark delivers a message to the war room. Clark often brings her newborn baby to work.

Vikki Pachera takes a commuter train to the Sharp factory in Nara, Japan, to see the first Newtons come off the assembly line. As one of the key women on the Newton team, Pachera is fond of saying that Scully “set her up for success” when he personally introduced her to Sharp senior executives, and she was given full production responsibility for the MessagePad. July 1993.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

I am a few years late to this: Project Wingman is a very good game that is playable (enjoyable even! It does sometimes drop frames in the default settings, sadly) on steam deck. And of course I would love it. For related reasons, I am very much looking forward to Ace Combat 8.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

We also could’ve avoided this turbulence by leaving earlier or taking a different route (this was Oregon to Bay Area. We flew directly over the Siskiyous, west of Shasta). But we had other tasks to accomplish before we left (+ we got up at 9 am anyway), and the other routes available to us were… […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

New altitude record! We got up to 15,500 ft feet (by the altimeter, 16,300 feet by GPS). (4825 meters and 4970 meters, respectively) Was planning to cruise at 13,500 ft (4115 meters), which also is an altitude record for us, but the light chop turned into […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

A selfie of my wife and I in our airplane. We are wearing canulas which are providing us with extra oxygen. We are both wearing sunglasses because of course.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Was going to fly today. Got most of the way to the airport before deciding I wasn’t feeling it. Still stopped by a home improvement store and picked up a lay-flat crawler (which they called a creeper. Gross). Which is both surprisingly comfortable and will make working under the plane suck far […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

So, for reasons, I am taking next week off work. Yes, I did just take a week off work. I am looking forward to taking care of a bunch of chores I’ve been putting off because I’ve had so much other things going on. Like setting my nextcloud instance up again. And my subsonic instance. And […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Reviewing LLM code is like reviewing code written by someone who actually followed those joke “how to guarantee job security by writing code that no one but you can maintain!” articles.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Had to travel to Fresno recently for a family thing. Strongly considered flying, but ultimately decided to drive. Flying would’ve saved about an hour each way, and obviously would be way more fun. The reason we didn’t fly is because it was forecast to be over 100F (38C) on the ground at Fresno […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

@attoparsec Best of luck! You got this!

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

So, I picked up a bass guitar yesterday. Last time I played bass was more than half my life ago. It’s been great. So happy I did this. So much to relearn.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

A few weeks later: 1. Still love this thing just as much as I did on day 1. If anything, I love it even more. 2. I wish the handwriting recognition was better. I am fairly certain that I could spend a week learning PyTorch and end up with a better recognition model tailored specifically to my […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

I’m landing on the opinion that unidirectional flow of data is, in general, not worth the required boilerplate. Like, yes, for very complex UI setups, it helps. But at that point, you’re way past what even a lax interpretation of SOLID would consider to be too much. It’s much better to be able […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Seems like this is taken care of? Got an email response confirming our cancellation. Might still go send them certified mail requesting cancellation anyway.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Having to keep telling myself “fool me once, shame on you” to try to get out of the feeling of shame from this.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Heads up, if someone shows up at your door and asks to see a bill of yours, tell them you’re not interested. Also, just straight up google the service in front of them.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Oh fun. I got scammed my statewise tonight. Next several days until I get this reversed are going to suck.

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

Whoa, if I'm reading this correctly, then Newton had Autolayout, at least as early as 1996 (Newton OS 2). Autolayout didn't ship on iOS until iOS 6 in 2012! > The viewJustify slot is used to set the view alignment and is closely linked in its usage and effects with the viewBounds slot. > The […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

(You can tell how quickly I'm reading the Newton Developer's Guide from these posts): Newton OS 2 had basically 3 ways of creating apps: 1. Do everything yourself 2. Create a "form" style app using NewtSDK 3. Create a "book" app, because epub didn't exist yet. (1) is basically how modern iOS & […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

[links to instagram] I don't know what other social media they have: I'm only aware of their instagram. But if you're interested, they're at www.instagram.com/palmstopinesairra…

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

Yesterday, I found out about the Palms To Pines air race, an all-women air race from Santa Monica, CA to Madras, OR. It's this weekend (well, Friday and Saturday). Organized by the Los Angeles chapter of the 99s. This apparently used to run annually 1969 to 2009, before taking a break until 2022 […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

If Walter Smith (the guy who designed NewtonScript) ever sees this, he'd be very indignant. If anything javascript was modeled after newtonscript (in actuality, they're both heavily influenced by a bunch of languages developed much earlier: Self, SmallTalk, C/C++, etc.) #AppleNewton

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

Reading more Newton Developer Documentation, and I learned that every app executes as a subroutine in the same process. Which means that you can fully crash every other app if you mess up particularly badly (probably wasn't that much of an issue in practice, because NewtonScript was, in many […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

A couple days late to this, but this was our experience of the #SolarEclipse on the 12th. Heads up, it’s at 4x speed. Too cloudy to see the actual eclipse, but it suddenly becoming night (and darker than the entire rest of the time we were there) was amazing. Good trip! A couple of my friends […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Rachel Brindle @younata.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

This study came out a couple years ago, and for reasons (see my recent posts), I'm reading through it now. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psycho… But fascinating to know that handwriting itself engages more of the brain than typing things. There […]

Original post on hachyderm.io