A triple weeknote because last Friday the office was closed.
Week #607
This week’s namesakes are: number 607 is a prime number and sum of three consecutive primes (197 + 199 + 211) and 607 Jenny, a minor planet.
This week was lots of internal tasks. We worked more on the Hyperion project and update some dashboards and data collection.
We published a short article about issues with eSIM only iPhones and how they will break Iceland’s Single Sign On service.
Week #608
608 Adolfine is a minor planet, IBM 608 Transistor Calculator, a plugboard-programmable unit believed to be the world’s first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commercial market, and EIA-608, also known as “line 21 captions” was once the standard for closed captioning for TV broadcasts in the North America, are all this week’s namesakes
This week we started two more major surveys. One for 2nd-5th grade students and another for high school students. These last only one month, so at the start of November, we’ll close them down and calculate the results.
We also registered (yet another) domain for another project. More about that soon. As we’re waiting for some test prints to come back and tweak.
We sent out the Q4 newsletter. Known as #quarternotes you can read 02022Q4 online. We’ve already linked to news about the correlation between amazon reviews of scented candles and the spread of COVID.
This was a milestone week for Hyperion and we gathered our parts of the submission, profiling various aspects of the project for review.
We also spent a big portion of this week on another, new project to help Icelandic Children and those with reading disabilities to better parse and understand letter sounds and words. It is in the very early stages and we’ll built a prototype (what we’re really good at) and floated it for several experts in the field. We’ve gotten some great feedback and we’ll fix what we can. The next step is apply for some grant money to further build the tool and make it available for schools and the general public.
Finally, we had a meeting about an older project that’s been running in the background. We made a prototype months ago for a new game idea. People have been playing this and seeing what we like and what we don’t. After a meeting and pitch deck review, we made a second prototype where it keeps the core concept, but removes the game board. We’re seeing how that works and how that shifts the focus.
Week #609
609 Fulvia, 609 mph is the start of Transonic speeds and are this week’s namesakes.
We’ve been working on a pitch deck for an older project. This is new territory for us, because it involves something beyond the analog, paper, web, tech, and apps. It will take some time and a few mistakes, but we’ll see where this leads.
A few weeks ago, we floated that we will have some availability in the next year. As part of that, we started meeting more folks to see what everyone else is working on. We met-up with three old work colleagues this week, and plans for three more next week. While, none of these are direct ‘work’ related meetings, they will certainly help get the feelers out there on potential future projects.
This week, we sent out robocalls via twilio for one of our ongoing surveys. First, it was an email, then SMS, then another email, and now a robocall. Every little bit moves the participation rate needle a little more towards reliable results and it is that much less work our contacts need todo to get them over the line.
Finally, we’ve been spending time on the Hyperion project. For this portion, we’ve created an AWS lambda function on a public URL which accepts a JSON blob, validates the fields and saves the values into an AWS RDS mySQL database. That took longer to setup than expected, mostly due to AWS permissions and some things working only with mySQL and not postgreSQL databases. But, we have that knowledge and anything going forward should be much easier.
Fluxcapacitor
Nine years ago, back in 02013, we published Weeknote #139. In there, we linked to a video of Microsoft Research’s Songsmith playing the backing music to Queen’s We Will Rock You – it’s cringeworthy.
This week, from 02009, The Albatross’ necklace 2.0 was originally published in SCROLL for Webdirections, but we’ve posted it here for those not lucky enough to have a copy of the magazine.