A double weeknote as we hit the ground running. Summer’s over, but we’re still feelin’ the (project) heat.
Week #654
This week shares its name with 654 Zelinda, a minor planet taking 1271.6 days to complete 1 orbit around the sun. Since we formed the company in 02011, Zelinda has completed ~3.6 orbits. We also learnt that the city of Melbourne, Australia is 654 km from Adelaide, Australia.
This week we spent time gathering numbers for international downloads of Spellstruck. It has now been localized into 5 additional languages and we’re hoping this continues to expand the reach of the game while increasing retention. It will take a bit for the numbers to settle down, but a trend should emerge after a week or two.
We published a short article about NeXT Sounds. Back in 02019, we managed to get time on an old NeXT Cube and copied off all the sound files!
We reconnected again with our old friend Si Jobling about his PETALS project. We’re keen to help and give advice from our experience in survey work.
Speaking of surveys, we’ve been ramping-up for this year’s academic school year’s worth of surveys. Lots of last minute changes and fixes along with spinning up the servers, updating code and starting with a fresh import. The student surveys will begin in September, then we quickly follow-on with younger students and high-school students in October.
Week #655
This week shares its name with G.655, an international standard that describes the geometrical, mechanical, and transmission attributes of a single-mode optical fibre and cable. Also, 655 Briseïs another minor planet orbiting the sub.
From 02007, the case 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011) or Glik v. Cunniffe, is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held that a private citizen has the right to record video and audio of police carrying out their duties in a public place.
Finally, The Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor D. 655 is an incomplete piano sonata written by Franz Schubert.
After a few discussions recently about the lack of start-up investment at the moment due to high interest rates, we decided to check on what our bank is offering. The account we used on a daily bases was offering 2.25% interest. We quickly opened two more accounts that hold your money for 10 and 30 days respectively. We then looked at our normal monthly spend, planned expenses and savings. We split some money into the 10 and 30 day accounts to get 7%+ interest. That should give us better returns and still have some cash on hand for any opportunities.
After stumbling on a crappy ad about ‘how you can make 20K a month with passive income making sudoku puzzles‘ we got inspired to revisit some of our old maze generation code. After a few prototypes, we’re going to continue to explore some possibilities!
We’ve continued to get numbers for the SpellStruck project, along with running more analytics to look into a few new questions about the different game modes.
Thursday as the last day of the month. That means it’s paid day and all the associated bills and paperwork. Friday starts September, which is an odd-numbered month, which means VAT is due to the taxman. Luckily, our accounting software, PayDay.is (which was recently acquired – see the standard “We’re excited to join … blog post”) makes things easy (for now).
Finally, we spent Thursday and Friday at a workshop put on by the organization who we recently received a government grant from to continue our work on a new type of eBike. It was a good refresher on a lot of topics that we haven’t needed to use in awhile.
Fluxcapactor
Back in 02014, we wrote about Paper Calendars. We still use them and continue to print some each year. The code is on GitHub for anyone to print their own A4 Quarterly Calendars.
The year before, in 02013, we wrote weeknote #133. In it, we mention our kickstarter project for analog notebooks and the Glutton Club which tried to eat various birds and animals not normally eaten.
Bric-à-brac
We’ve been doing a lot of dictionary clean-up for SpellStruck and here are two that made us second guess English!
Yanqui: a citizen of the U.S. as distinguished from a Latin American.
Hahnium: the name formerly proposed by the American Chemical Society for the chemical element of atomic number 105 (dubnium), and by IUPAC for element 108 (hassium).
Hahnium, is that even a word if its only claim to fame is that it was a proposed, but rejected name for a man-made element? It is a ghost of a word, with no meaning except that fact that it almost had a definition – now the definition cites it’s lack of existence.