This is week #600! It shares its name with lots of car models (Fiat 600, Nash 600, Mercedes-Benz 600, Honda S600 and Trabant 600). In the United States, a credit score of 600 or below is considered poor. Now this site has passed ‘poor’. The minor planet 600 Musa also shares this week’s name.
School Surveys
The school year will be starting over the next few weeks. That means we’re doing a lot of prep work. We updated the deployed data collection servers, updated the heroku images and corresponding versions of Python and libraries. We also took the opportunity to move all our git repos from master to main. We sent the translation strings off to get Ukrainian as a language option and continued to work through some of our older tasks.
Data Analytics
This week we were back into Data Analytics mode. We collecting a lot of event data from game play and converting that into a flattened set of tables. On top of those tables, we can create our charts and graphs for investigation. It is still early days, so there isn’t much data, but we’re already finding issues and ironing them out before the public starts to use it.
New Computer
This week, we also got a new laptop. The machine we are retiring is a great machine, it is a 02016 MacBook Pro, but the keyboard doesn’t work (that old butterfly keyboard was a mistake) and it is an Intel machine (which for Apple is being phased out) and the battery doesn’t hold a charge. For working in text editors and terminals, it is still a perfectly acceptable machine! Now, it will find a home as a print and file server for as long as it can remain useful.
We’ve upgraded to a new M2 MacBook Air. Rather than migrate all our files, we decided to start from scratch. In the last 6 years, we’ve ditched products from Adobe and others, so good to not migrate all those preferences, drives and cruft. It took several days to find Apple Silicon versions of software, migrate SSH keys, Terminal preferences and other settings, but now we’re up and running.
Meetings
We are getting back into the swing of regular meetings. Monday planning, Friday recaps, daily standup, etc. We also are pitching a few projects to our customers down in Australia. We might also have a Hyperion meeting next week, or the week after, we’re waiting to see.
Several people have contacted us over the last few weeks, but since everyone’s been on summer holidays, it was hard to find a time to meet-up. Finally, we sent off a bunch of potential meeting email to start to coördinate a time to chat.
Print Projects
This week we took delivery of some prototypes bags. Using some of our Icelandic Icons, we printed them onto tote bags as a first test. This was interesting because the higher the quality of the bag, the more texture. The more texture, the harder for the fine lines to get inked. We’re not thrilled with how the bags with failed printing looked or how many there were, but the ones that did come out look amazing. Now it is a matter of that balance of textured/quality bags versus quality control from the printer. It was a great first step that we learnt a lot from!
Fluxcapacitor
Back in 02013, we wrote about week #130, that was our first weeknote. Here we are 470 weeks later.
In 02014, we were up to week #181-182. At that point we were deep into the Analog Notebook kickstarter.
Chained Libraries was an article from 02010 about an analog equivalent of DRM.
In 02014, we mused about Second Generation Usernames. Will people think about their baby names so they can get good social media handles?