Week #644
The week started with several SpellStruck tasks. We’re always making improvements and sometimes that requires tweaks to the backend API. Other times people are looking for more analytics data.
We read a tutorial about how to use Stable Diffusion to make some crazy QR code art. We set that aside for a weekend/hobby project. We had an extra hour on Thursday so we followed the tutorial and it was much easier than we expected. We spent the next few days constantly testing different prompts and settings to generate QR codes.
Many of these work just fine. Which leads us to an interesting conundrum. It is possible to make QR codes look nicer as if they are part of the larger design. In doing so, less people will understand they are a working QR code and use it as a link! The better we do to make it disappear, the more it disappears and people won’t use it. So it was a fun exercise and now we know more about Stable Diffusion img2img applications.
Week #645
Monday was Juneteenth in the US, a public holiday, so things were a bit slower than normal. That gave us a chance to catch-up on a few little internal things that were lower-priority when no other fires would be erupting.
On Tuesday, we sent out episode 6 of the ⪮ Good Morning newsletter. This our monthly newsletter of 4 interesting links – no self-promotion.
Apple’s WWDC is done and the videos are all up online. We took one of our hobby projects and updated the widgets so they would work better in some of the upcoming iOS10 areas on the iPad and iPhone. We’ve also been keeping a cursory overview of some of the spatial computing topics.
One of our Australian projects has run into three bugs. The first is that they get errors when sending message from their system. After looking into it, the name or password has changed because we can’t authenticate. The good news is that our code isn’t broken, the bad news is that they need to figure out what happened. The second is a strange bug that we haven’t (yet) been able to reproduce. The third is a general “Error” screen. This is something higher-up the stack than our code coming from the server. With an 11h delay the debug logs are problematic since things roll-out. But we’ll get there.
On Thursday, Apple released the next Xcode beta tool to create VisionOS applications. So it is time to start tinkering and seeing what’s possible.
June 21st was the solstice, but it was also “Show your stripes Day“.
Fluxcapacitor
In 02009, we wrote about How dark is your data shadow? With every website you visit, you are leaving some data exhaust that someone is collecting and selling. Things have changed. We are both more aware of it and more tools, like Ad Blockers and VPNs, to block it. This will be forever a cat-and-mouse game.
Back in 02011, we wrote about Accessible Color Swatches. It is something we’ve always been meaning to come back too since our first pass at the colors were not so ‘pretty’ and we’re sure we can do better.
In 02015, we wrote a quadruple weeknote (#224-#227). Looking back, it has several interesting food tidbits.