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Argh! My kingdom for a document scanner that has power, a network connection, a functional UI, and that works without needing some terrible app.
We’re currently one for four on this front: I can turn the scanner on. 😒
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Really enjoying these series of articles from The Verge about UI and UX design. Lots of facinating subjects there.
Oh, I also flunked the logo colour test, getting 1 out of 8. I guess a career of chromatology is out of the question for me. 😄
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🔗 Children’s author Paul Jennings reflects on childhood, success and his writing process
I’ve was a huge fan of Paul Jennings work when I was a kid. Everything he wrote that I read (or watched), I enjoyed. It’s been a while, but I’m sure I’d still like it if I read it today.
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It’s a shame that NetNewsWire and Feedbin have lost access to Twitter’s API. But, much like Google shutting down products, it provides a useful opportunity to trim my feeds to those that I’m still interested in. Most have had no recent posts for months now so I hope some of them are still out there.
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I heard that Apple Classical had movie soundtracks so I installed it on my iPad to see if they had the lost album I’ve been looking for. Sadly, they did not. I uninstalled the app after that.
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Here’s a free idea for a mindless action movie.
A middle-aged, middle-class, run-of-the-mill guy is walking down a suburban street when he spots a USB drive on the footpath. He’s pretty tech savvy so he knows that he shouldn’t plug in random USB drives he finds outside. He spends the afternoon talking with his friends/family about it, and they tell him he should just throw it away. But curiosity gets the better of him and that evening he plugs it into his computer.
What he finds is a single document with bank login details. He enters those in and finds an account filled with hundred of millions of dollars. He decides to transfer some of that into his own account.
But that account is being watched by law enforcement, and the transfer notifies them and pinpoints his location (maybe he needs to enter a 2FA and they get his location from his mobile). They begin to track him down. Turns out the USB drive was a honeypot that was left there to entrap some form of criminal enterprise, or maybe organised crime.
I don’t know what happens after that but I’d imagine it’ll involve some chase scenes, he finds someone who can help him, etc. Basically, it devolves into the plot of Enemy of the State.
Working title: USB, or the USB Drive, or something punchier. Someone would have to say “USB” somewhere in the film, maybe saying “You S. O. B.” with the O quickly and quietly: you! S! oh B!
Anyway, enjoy. And you’re welcome. 😄
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Overhead someone say, in not so many words, that my UI design for something was sub-par. 😔 Sad, but can’t deny that it’s true to a degree. Acknowledged area of potential development, I guess.
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Used ChatGPT a record number of times today (5). Asked a lot of questions about Stripe, like what happens to invoices when a subscription is cancelled. Proved more useful in giving me a direction to explore, rather than providing me a definitive answer, although that might come with time and trust.
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Listening to ATP #528 follow-up about putting ChatGPT in front of Siri. It occurred to me that doing so will completely defeat the purpose of Siri being there at all. After all, if you can train GPT to generate the phrases that Siri understands, wouldn’t it also be possible to train it to just produce JSON and send it to a service to execute? You might as well cut out the middle man at that point.
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Updates To Dynamo-Browse
In the off-chance that anyone other than me is reading this, it’s likely that there will be no update next week due to the Easter weekend. It may not be the only weekend without an update either. If I find that I didn’t get much done for a particular week, I probably won’t say anything and leave the well to fill up for the next one (although I do have some topics planned for some of those weekends). Continue reading →
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What would be a nice addition to the spell-check suggestions menu is a brief (3-5 words) definition of the word. I always find myself choosing the wrong suggestion, and a feature like this would help a lot.
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When I first saw John Gruber’s post post about Wavelength, I immediately dismissed it as yet another app I couldn’t use, forgetting that I actually do have devices I can try it on. So I’m trying out the Mac app now. First few minutes of using it: yeah, quite a nice app. We’ll see how we go with it.
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Currently reading: The Brand You 50 (Reinventing Work) by Tom Peters 📚
When three different bloggers you follow all write about the author retiring, you pay attention.
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First Posts Of The Day
It’s bit strange how the first post of the day can always feel like the hardest to get out. Every one after it is so much easier to write. I wonder if it’s because when faced with an empty text-box, there are these grand plans about what I’m going to write, as if everyone reading this is hanging on my every word: it’ll be my masterpiece of wit, inspiration, and insightfulness that will spread far and wide and blow the minds of everrryyywoonnneee1. Continue reading →
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Completely forgot how to commute properly. This is the second day this week I forget to bring my umbrella on a day with forecasted rain. I got lucky last time. Today, not so much. 🌧️
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Ugh! Mountains of work to do and only a week to do it all. Gonna be a bird-by-bird sort of day today. But first… coffee (well, coffee number two actually).
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Left work late and now caught in a train suspension due to an accident (someone got hit by a train). So… dining out this evening.
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Learnt a lot about digital video today. Fascinating stuff. Didn’t realise that frame rates can be non-integers (59.xx FPS). Turns out it’s a legacy of analogue TV, where they try to squeeze colour into bandwidth originally designed for a B&W signal. Shoehorns all the way down I guess.
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There are nice things about having separate IDEs for different languages — GoLand for Go, WebStorm for HTML+JS, etc. — but I can see the advantages of using a single one for everything. I was trying to resolve merge conflicts with my customised GoLand key-bindings and I was getting confused as they weren’t working. Turns out the reason was that I was actually using WebStorm, not GoLand.
The two IDEs are so alike I wonder if things like key-bindings shouldn’t just apply to all installed IDEs on a system. I guess since JetBrains is working on a brand new IDE it probably doesn’t matter at this stage.
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Love hearing from successful bloggers who’ve recently celebrated a major milestone (Manton, Ben Thompson, Kottke) that they thought that they were late to the party. Just shows that when you start is less important than just keeping at it.
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Got a small envelope with a US stamp delivered today. No idea what it was. Certainly wasn’t expecting anything.
(opens it up) Ah, my Incomparable membership notebook has arrived. How cool! I completely forgot about this, which makes it the best sort of mail to get.
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🔗 Google is killing most of Fitbit’s social features today
An amusing thought came to me while I read this: Google has an opportunity to play to it’s strength and act like the assassin for features or services. Don’t want to support something? Get Google to acquire you and inevitably shut you down. It’s such a unique niche that companies should be paying Google for this service.
I’m not a Fitbit user, but I know how it feels to be burned by Google’s obsessive need to shut down things I find useful, so I can understand all the upset over this.
