This is the Omnibus for 02023. This is where we look back at previous year’s posts and make various updates that we’ve noticed. We started this trend 14 years ago, all the way back in 02009. This is our 13th Omnibus article and things have morphed with time to focus on articles, communications, stats and the website.
This list is getting long, so we created an Omnibus category. That makes it easier to find all these related articles in a single place.
Past Omnibuses:
- 02009 Omnibus
- 02010 Omnibus
- 02011 Omnibus
- 02012 Omnibus
- 02013 Omnibus
- 02014 Omnibus
- 02015 Omnibus
- 02016 Omnibus
- 02017 Omnibus
- 02018 Omnibus (Did not post)
- 02019 Omnibus
- 02020 Omnibus
- 02021 Omnibus
- 02022 Omnibus
Articles
We published 32 articles this year. 24 of which were weeknotes and 8 non-weeknotes. That works out to be an article every 2.17 weeks. The total 46,257 word count for the articles averaging 1,446 words each. Of the 8 non-weeknotes, 3 were about internal topics and 5 about projects.
- NFC Business Cards
- NeXT Sounds
- iPhone IR Photography
- Business Card Notebooks
- Let a hundred flowers bloom
- 02022 Annual Report
- 02022 TIL
- 02022 Omnibus
There are 107 articles in the drafts folder, down 15 from last year. We set ourselves a publishing schedule and will do our best to stick with it. There is a nice cadence of quarterly newsletters (Quarternotes), monthly newsletters (Good Morning), fortnightly weeknotes, and an article or two a month along with various social media posts here and there.
This is normally where we look back over the year and see what updates there might have been to old and existing posts. We now have 530 non-weeknote posts! That’s a lot of remember and if something happened in the last 12 months to go back and update. But we’ll try. When we breakdown the categories, we have 30 posts in the Meta category. These are meant to be posts about (optional.is) not the company formally known as Facebook. With 27 posts, the You’re Doing It Wrong category is second, followed by Visualizations category with 25 posts.
Back in 02009, we wrote about the potential Near Future of Sports from a Spectator’s Point of View. There are lots of articles about tech for athletes, so we wanted to focus on the spectator. There have been several developments recently. Some NBA games have been completely rendered using volumetric video. It turns out looking weird and more like a video game, but this is the start of being able to watch a game from ANY location in the stadium. Recently, (this is new to us, but several years old), Pizza Pizza in Toronto, had a 100 points promotion for the Raptors NBA team. If they scored over 100 points in a game, you could redeem your ticket for a free slice of pizza. We were told that when they score over 100 points a QR code would come-up on the Jumbotron and if you followed that link you could redeem the slice, but people just took photos of the QR code and shared that around. We met with a company with a potential solution!
Also from 02009, How Dark is Your Data Shadow looks at our digital exhaust and how big companies hoover it up and use it against us. In the USA, with changes to Roe vs. Wade individual states criminalized abortion and all of a sudden, your personal data about reproductive health is now just one warrant away from a potential jail sentence for a normal person! It also came out this year, that your car is probably one of the worst vectors for your personal data. When you connect your phone to the car infotainment system, it slurps up as much as it can and sends it home for resale or to be passed along to law enforcement. When it went to court, the car manufactures “won” (it was dismissed), because the average person couldn’t prove they were “harmed” so they had no case to bring. It seems like we continue to comeback to this article, so maybe it’s overdue for an update?
From 02022, we wrote down our back-up scheme to help others think about what they want to keep. In 02023, we’ve looked more at dedicated NAS drives. Our current WiFi routers have a USB port which allows for an external hard drive to act as a NAS, so we haven’t invested in a hardware solution (yet). But it is getting time to upgrade the routers. (One is an AirPort Express which is 6+ years old and id NOT Gigabit ethernet, the other two are Airport Extremes. These are ok, but the signal strength isn’t great, they are no longer supported, but totally serviceable for a few more years). As part of the back-up scheme remember 3-2-1. Three copies on at least 2 different mediums with 1 remote backup.
Newsletters
This was the second year of our second newsletter. Our main newsletter is quarterly and focuses mostly on the company. The new monthly newsletter, ⪮ Good Morning, focuses on interesting links. The format is 1 photo and 4 short links. After another year of sending ⪮ Good Morning, the reception was well received and we’ll tweak and continue to send it monthly in 02024.
📩 Subscribe to get each episodes delivered monthly to your inbox.
Travel
In March, we went to San Francisco for GCD (Game Developers Conference). We didn’t attend the event, but had several meetings with other attendees. As part of that trip, we went down to Burbank for meetings with Disney since we were getting ready to launch Spellstruck on Apple Arcade.
What’s Next in 02024?
The newsletters have been going well and continue to grow in subscribers. We send everything ourselves, without any tracking. Our only metric of “success” are the replies and mentions we get from readers – so keep sending them in.
Our travel is minimal. There are only rough plans for a team meet-up: either in March or June. There is a new prototype project with a tight February deadline. We might meet for a general cram/hackathon, but nothing planned.
Our article writing output was down from previous years. This is due partly to bad-timing, projects, sickness and more. It is certainly not for the lack of ideas! Our publishing schedule should help, but to quote the infamous Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by!“
We have also started to dip our toes into more products rather than hourly billing. To help with figuring out what’s feasible we have a few print-on-demand books available on Amazon.com under Adventure Mazes. It is still very early days, but we already have another project ready to go. This could develop into a small side-income, but it will only work if we tend this garden. Something side-projects lack when real, paid work lands on the doorstep, but atleast when we have a slow week, we always have something to pick-up!