Week #585 shares its name with several interesting characters; minor planet 585 Bilkis which is the Koran name for the Queen of Sheba and Area code 585 which is for Rochester and eight surrounding counties in Western New York. 585 is palindromic in bases 2 (10010010012), 8 (11118), and 10 (58510). It is also the E-Number for Ferrous lactate or Food Colouring (approved in the EU)
Week #586 shares its name with an E-number, 4-Hexylresorcinol is an antioxidant, in space, 586 Thekla orbits the Sun every 5.31 years, and Minuscule 586 is a Greek minuscule manuscript on parchment of the New Testament.
Week #585
A quite varied week in terms of projects. We worked more on our SwiftUI app Pixture getting it organized for multiple platforms and working in some Game Center leaderboards and multiplayer mode. There is still a long way to go and this is just a hobby project, but we’ll see where this little demo takes us.
We also worked with (Web)Sockets this week. Setting-up a webserver and javascript to talk to each other wasn’t hard. But getting a 3rd non-web client connect caused real problems. It seems that the different libraries and versions are not always compatible and the terminology between WebSockets and Sockets is used interchangeably when infact certain libraries do or do not support them both. Then there are both version issues of the libraries and sockets. But we got it all working and can later evaluate if sockets have any benefit over polling in terms of server load and usefulness.
Iceland offers a Single Sign-On service via island.is which we use on several projects. They have a new BETA version which is only available to Governmental organizations right now. They are keeping the old version active, but not taking any new requests to connect to it. So that leaves us a bit in limbo on this new project. Plus, they are going to start charging for the service. At an early published price list, it will be more expensive than a Twilio SMS. We are evaluating island.is’ usefulness going forward.
There is a shared folder called ‘IS_Icons’ that we have been using to make a series of Icelandic related glyphs. These are the sorts of typical objects you think about when you hear about Iceland. We are at 40 or so of these icons and are getting ready to let others use them on a few print projects.
Week #586
This week was the start of the new two month tax period. We spent one morning gathering and printing receipts for the archive and digitally uploading and tagging the entries into the accounting software. These are the gloriously fun things you do as a small company that are necessary, but not billable!
On Wednesday, Design March started. We are working indirectly with two booths, so some of the team were running around making sure things were printed and setup.
We have also looked into Mastodon (A federated twitter alternative) and more importantly ActivityPub and WebFinger. We want a small, simple, PHP, self-hosted solution. Gnu Social is one option, but after an initial install not everything was working. There is also a wordpress plugin so these articles can be pushed to the Fediverse, but then that is squatting the domain. So watch this space!
Fluxcapacitor
Back from 02009, we wrote about The PaperNet. A way to move digital information to the analog. It is still something we refer back to on a regular basis. Screens are great, but paper still has many advantages.
We also published an early triple weeknote #166, #167, #168. That was from 02014 were we just finished our kickstarter project for the Analog Notebooks.