We have a few namesakes to this double weeknote. Section 564 of the 01938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act allows for the special use of drugs and other medical products during certain types of emergencies. Pantone 563-C & 564-C are both nice shades of teal.
Then there are the usual asteroids: 563 Suleika and 564 Dudu are minor planetoids both named after characters from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Week #563
This week was mostly small changes to a few of our projects down in Australia. When the work week closes, the tool send the staff an SMS alert for them to log their time. The problem was that several of the team were still on site at 5pm. They have until midnight to log their time, but tended to forget. We implemented two follow-up SMSes if your hours were still too low. Hopefully, this change will keep payroll, invoices and planning on track.
It was Thanksgiving in the US on Thursday, and Black Friday. All the communications came to a halt for the US clients and we had some time to get caught-up. We’re still recovering from being under-the-weather, so Friday morning the team all got their flu shots. A bit of preventative medicine will go along way!
It is also coming-up to our 6 month, 3rd vaccine top-up. No one at the office has gotten the call yet, but we are expecting it very soon.
This week we also started to work on an idea we’ve had kicking around for awhile. We have an analog 35mm Lomography Super Sampler. It is a fun little camera that takes 4 pictures a split second apart. But rather than some “burst” mode, it cheats by making four small panoramic images on a single frame.
Written in Swift for iOS, we managed to capture the video buffer from the camera and store the 25 frames per second (for 2 seconds) in an array. Then, when you press the shutter button, we find the correct frames into the past and create a similar collage.
It is the digital equivalent of the Super Sampler! It needs a lot of clean-up, but hopefully, we’ll release it for anyone to download and play with.
But this got us sucked down the rabbit hole of Core Image processing and camera filters. We started to mimic Lomochrome purple and turquoise analog film digitally. It is simple with digital to swap color channels, but way more impressive todo that with crystals on film!
We’re not sure where this will go, but it is another thing to add to the tool chest skills for potential future projects.
Week #564
We continued to work in XCode while we were in “Swift Mode”. We tweaked a few other apps and cleaned-up our camera apps. This sent us down another rabbit hole of Infrared photography. Most DSLR cameras have a IR filter over the sensor to block any Infrared (IR) light. We’ve known this for a while, so never explored IR photography, but the Lomochrome Purple “fake Ektochrome IR” film got us exploring this in digital again. It turns out, that the new iPhones that have LiDAR are still sensitive to Infrared Light! So we ordered a Hoya 72R filter to explore IR photography on the iPhone! Once it arrives and we have a chance to explore the possibilities, we’ll definately let you know how it goes.
It was the start of December, so that means paying bills and sending invoices. We’re transitioning the company from the old SLF to the new EHF. Now it is all the boring stuff like finding all the places the old Credit Card was registered and swapping that for the new one. It isn’t hard work, but something we do as we find issues.
Fluxcapacitor
From exactly 12 years ago, we wrote Welcome, the entire land. This is a write-up of a small joke that got out-of-hand and involved the Venn Diagram of people who speak Egyptian hieroglyphics and software development.
Exactly 11 years ago, we wrote Building a better business card with the infamous YouTube clip: Your business card is crap. It all still rings true today as it did a decade ago.
5 years ago, was weeknotes #298-303 and it seems that we were under-the-weather then as we have been now and the confusion of the US elections. It seems that the results of that win in 02016 will be felt this week in the US Supreme Court as they look to over turn Roe vs. Wade!