Week #729
This week shares its name with the year 729. In that year, the construction of the Kanhave Canal, on the island of Samsø, Denmark is completed. The island’s skinniest point is of about 500 metres long and that’s where they build the canal. It is one of the largest engineering projects undertaken in Denmark during the Early Middle Ages. It was dug and clad with wooden linings and there are plans to dig out the canal again.
We also share this week with a rare-type asteroid named 729 Watsonia.
On Tuesday, we published our post about Optimized Charging. With the slow migration from USB-A to USB-C, from wired to wireless charging, we wanted to go through all our hardware and actually see what power plugs made sense. TL;DR: 30W for phones and Tablets, 5W for everything else.
For awhile now, we’ve been working on some VR/AR tools to show-off 360 Images. Things have been going really well and the reception has been great. The next task is to get a “similar” experience working on tables. We found some plugins, but they either didn’t work, or included several dependencies which were not up to the same version of swift as we are using. After downloading the source and commenting out references to the dependencies, we tracked out the 2 places that were erroring. We swapped the library functions with native functions and we’re back on track! (Sometimes helper libraries are more bloat than what’s needed).
It was also the end of the month, so we paid all the bills and closed out the 02024 tax year. That’s off to the accountant and the state to deal with now. The only two guarantees in life: 💀 Death and 💰 Taxes.
Week #730
This week shares its namesake with the cancelled Avro 730 Mach 3 British reconnaissance aircraft.
To Tuesday, we started two big parent surveys. We took Monday to get the last of the participant lists and triple check everything. The weather here has been horribly stormy, so there are a lot of distractions outside of work. We sent out all the first pester emails on Tuesday, an SMS follow-up on Thursday, a 2nd email reminder on Friday letting people know about the following Monday’s Robocall!
Late on Wednesday our remote NAS drive arrived and we’ve begun to configure it. This is the last piece that was missing in our 3-2-1 Backup plan. Data should be in 3 places, on 2 different mediums and 1 remote location. The 3 hasn’t been an issue: 1 Computer + 1 Time Machine network back-up + 1 Air-gapped portable hard drive. Now we’re going through the learning curve of how the Synology NAS works and the best way to keep data in sync. So far, we’ve been using a nightly cron task to rsync the data, but we’ll have to see how easy that will be for remote data.
This week we also started exploring a new Australian project with a scaffolding company. This is mostly an online system to track inventory, utilization, customers and subcontractors. Then an additional piece to connect to their accounting software Xero to generating invoices and bills automatically. It is a fairly hefty project that we’ll continue to scope out piece by piece, then estimate the total workload and try to get client sign-off on an hourly basis with a good estimate in place.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Iceland was hit with a Red Weather Warning. Luckily, everyone was safe and there were no problems, but it did mean that focus was very much elsewhere.
Fluxcapacitor
This time two years ago, there were big layoffs in the big-tech community. We wrote about how it’s possible to look at layoffs as something good. Lots of smart, talented people are free to go forth and create something new for the world rather than just shareholder value.
On a similar note, back in 02012 we wrote about Being Passionate for your work. Typekit had recently been acquired by adobe and we were at their offices for a Creative Mornings talk.