Week #505
Minor victory fixing printer drivers. We have a perfectly fine working Dell laser jet printer. The problem is that Dell got out of the printer game (so at some point toner will be impossible to find!). Which also means they are not updating their drivers for various new operating systems. After fighting for awhile, we managed to get it working!
There was a bunch of work connecting OAuth to xero accounting system for our Australian Plumber project. That’s in good shape. We have hooked-up their login, the ability time track their hours, now connecting Twilio SMS service to pester anyone who hasn’t submitted hours at closing time.
We ended the week with a call to a potential new project. Sometimes we get referred to someone and everyone finds a time to meet, but the project scope wasn’t ever defined or discussed until you are half-way through the meeting. This was a bit like that. It was a great meeting, team and project, but their needs in immediacy and amount might just not mesh with what we have to offer, but we’ll see. Start-ups are very busy and change rapidly, so we are here if and when they are ready.
Week #506
We stared the week recording a podcast with our old friend Simon Jobling. By that friday, it was published. You can read more and listen at the Make Life Work Podcast.
Our hosting provider had been purchased a while ago and they are continuing the transition. As part of that, some of the way we host websites needed to be changed. We spent some time this week cleaning up unused domain settings and changed the way we hosted a few things to make the transition work.
There was just one straggler, our PDF smasher. It is a longer running process that needed to be hosted in a specific way. We changed a bunch of things and managed to get it working until we hit the next snag: email sending.
We were onsite a bit with one client, continuing to work on merging notification data in with a larger data set to help figure out if the funnels’ objectives are working.
Week #507
We released our Text Stats app for free on iOS for the month to support NaNoWriMo. To kick that off, we wrote a longer article about the process of making Text Stats and some of the decisions we made along the way.
Some more Plumber project tweaks and meetings. Onsite with client working more on Notification merging SQL. Lots more design updates to our Top Secrete project.
We attended one of the Stay Curious live events this week. We learnt a bunch about AR/VR on the web and working with SVG. It is a great, digestible format: Two speakers, 30 minutes each with some Q&A. They even had a live DJ in the interval.
We worked more on our publishing schedule to get more articles written. We are doing well and wrote and collected text and images for something on Monday. That required us to dig out an old laptop to find a working copy of InDesign to open a file just to get some text. While we were at it, we made a PDF version. There are lots of files we have on hard drives now in legacy and proprietary formats. When you stop paying Adobe for their Creative Suite, you better have replacement software which can open those files. We’re in good shape with the exception of InDesign!
Bric a brac
This is an amazing fine. Fossilised human footprints. There is a mother carrying a child which she periodically sets down, producing another set of tracks. Giant Sloth and Mammoth prints also cross these paths.