Week #757
The Australian project is winding down. The last major thing was around PDF creation – and wow that’s annoying. There are three major competing ways each with increasing difficulties and benefits. jsPDF creates pdfs in javascript but can’t do fonts or canvas, since it is rendering HTML in canvas and then making it a PDF. At the other end of the spectrum is a headless chrome instance. That’s as good as it gets, but it’s resource heavy! The middle ground we took in python is no longer supported, but we could get it all setup without more server overhead. Now, all the major tasks are done and they are using the system. There will be feature requests and bugs, so we’re on the ready, but in general we’re about to close the books on this one.
Luckily, another project is potentially opening-up. We’re looking at swapping an API in an existing system. We got the source code and WOW, it’s a crazy Vue app that was originally made by a team in China (so the tooling and comments are all in Chinese) and the native apps it creates are just WebViews on their Vue app. It was a complete mess to try and even get working!
It’s only August, but we’re getting a jump on 02026 and we’ve started to create the A0 poster. It is on GitHub so you can print your own. We might make a few more tweaks before the end of the year, but atleast now we’ve done our homework early and won’t need to stress at the year-end deadline hits.
Our survey projects are starting to come to life. Starting in September, our first wave of surveys will go out, so we’re collecting lists and starting the machine. Then in October we have two more surveys starting. We’ve streamlined the process as much as possible and things go relatively smoothly.
We soft launched our 3rd experimental camera app LUT Camera. This one uses industry standard LUT cube files to create a ‘bring your own filter’ camera. It is still in the super early stages, so grab it while it’s still free.
On Friday, we published an article we started back in 02009 regarding the Wii Music game and how it was a great example of how to move players from n00bie to expert.
Week #758
This week we continued with PETALS tasks. Our goal is to get this officially launched with a paid component before the end of the year. We’re on track. Several organizations are using the system and giving feedback. We fix bugs, implement changes and iterate.
The accounting software we used here in Iceland is called PayDay. They have an API to do most everything in the system. The one thing they don’t have is a Time Tracking tool. They have the ability to create customers, send in payslips and register invoices. We’ve done this several times for teams in Australia connecting with the Xero accounting system. So we took a crack and adjusting past projects and we’re happy where this is heading! (Yet another side-project)
We took a day this week to dig into some Apple vision tracking libraries for Body Pose Detection. The library takes an image and returns x/y coordinates for wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips and more. We wedged it into a video stream and got pretty good results on an Apple TV. This opens-up a bunch of possibilities for various projects and ideas.
Yet another project fell into our laps this week. There is some existing software and they needed an API url swapped out. Well, it turns out this is some Vue.js project originally created in China with a Java backend now managed by a team in Prague. What originally was going to be going in and changing some URLs might have turned into rebuilding it to the new API from scratch in SwiftUI using the existing design as a starting point.
Back-ups and Networking
Last summer (02024-06) we wrote about our network plumbing setup. We spent a lot of time tweaking and organizing our network as best we could given the circumstances around the building and network availability. Its worked out so well, we’ve pretty much forgotten about it.
Even further back in 02022-05 we were becoming much more aware of our backup situation. We were reviewing what was where and how many backups we had, etc. We still have a monthly reminder to backup everything (mostly to our air-gapped external hard drive now). In March 02024 we started to get a much more centralized backup 2.0 plan using a DAS. Things are in great shape, we’ve added a remote, off-site NAS which the DAS syncs to weekly. Now we have all our files and Time Machine backups both on and off-site. Things are going so smoothly, we’ve pretty much forgotten about these too.
What’s next? We’ll eventually need to upgrade the aging AirPort Extreme routers. WiFi 7 is out (although we don’t have any devices that support it), network cameras are becoming ubiquitous. Ideally, we’d like to run network cables and plugs, but it might not be possible. We’ve also looked into a NAS drive, but our old MacMini with the DAS also acts as a print server (which now supports AirPrint) and can run arbitrary cron task. We don’t use fancy RAID redundancy or SSDs, just standard Hard Drives that are rsync’ed night locally and weekly remotely.
We’re always looking to improve and Backups 3.0 is always on the horizon.