Week #767
This week we picked-up a new phone. We feel like a hermit crab moving from one shell to the next! There are plenty of utilities to moved an existing setup onto the new device, but then as you use it, you find apps that transferred but for security reasons, not the data. We needed to re-connect Signal, plenty of credit cards in the wallet.app and the Icelandic electronic id login too (Auðkenni). Other than that, it’s learning all the new buttons and features. As part of upgrade, the new phone does not have a physical SIM card any more, nor a lightening connection.
After 20+ years of using SIM cards, we made the jump to an eSim. The process was pretty painless, we logged into our phone provider, selected ‘convert to eSim” agreed to a few things and took a picture of a QR code. We lose the ability to use the Icelandic “Electronic ID” push service (since the old SIM card was doing the decryption) but we get extra battery life in return. Three years ago, we wrote about eSIM only iPhones and how lots of websites in Iceland were NOT ready for it. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case any more and it’s been a smooth transition (so far).
Last Tuesday we got an RFP (Request for proposal) and we’ve spent some of this week writing what is requested and gathering documents.
One of our Australian projects is also forking. For a concrete company, we’ve been adding a bunch of functionality into the online web management tool to handle some new equipment. Now the company has forked into two companies, so we need to figure out a clean way to duplicate the system, update the new instance with the correct XERO account information, and then cleanly update both code-bases going forward.
For another internal/friendly project we’ve took a bunch of equirectangular projection maps and loaded them into VR to see how they look in 360. The first pass of our prototype worked really well. The next steps are to clean-up all the issues for non-VR aware folks and try to get higher-resolution images so they don’t look so pixelated. This little experiment will potentially grow into a small map grant project through the University of Iceland and a conference display booth.
This week we’ve also been dabbling in another prototyping focusing on the open source tool sunshine & moonlight. If this goes anywhere, we can (hopefully) talk more about this project, but that’s MONTHS away if ever.
Our NFC Reader arrived this week as well. This allows us to attache the reader to a computer and run some python code to detect and read an NFC tag. Each tag has a unique ID, which can in turn trigger anything functionality that the python script can execute. For example, that NFC ID could be associated with a user account, which we could detect, read and augment the user’s profile.
Since this weekend the UK’s clocks to back, and next weekend it’s the US who gains and hour, we published an article about time for time zones and how it’s all managed by volunteers.
Week #768
On Saturday, the UK went back an hour, so all our UK meetings are now an hour later in the day (but the same time for them). Noon in Reykjavik, is now noon in London. The US has another week, which causes loads of confusion depending on who created the international meetings it has moved for some, but not others, until next week, when we’re back in sync (except Iceland, since we never shift).
Saturday was also the first day of the old Icelandic month of Gormánuður. In Reykjavik, they are rebranding this as “Kjötsúpudagur” (Meat soup day) 🍖🥣, to distract from the fact that this is the first day of Winter for the next 6 months ❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️.
On Tuesday we were going to send in our RFP. It was like those group projects from school, where one person (us) definitely did all the work. As the project went on, everyone’s interest drained to the point of “why even bother”, but we did and we’ll see what happens. It’s probably for the best we don’t actually win the project, because most of the concerns are with the team running the RFP and they don’t understand what they’re asking for and we don’t want to be on the hook for the imminent failure. In the end, we skipped everything we wrote and just sent it a portfolio and our reasons why we couldn’t submit.
This week was also a great evening for Northern Lights.
Wednesday, we forked on project and made a copy to heroku. In the process we made several more things generic so we can keep the same codebase for two separate projects. Now that they’ve started to look at it, they are finding a bunch of errors on old system. We’ll fix them, but of course (to them) they are immediately issues that need fixing now. So we need to shuffle our prioritizes. Much of this SHOULD have been caught in some review before/during launch.
We also managed to finally sync and bring on board a friend and designer into another project. This should be fun to have someone else to help and bounce ideas off of and someone now in the same timezone!
Thursday, we reviewed some survey data we did for another internal side-project. We tried to experiment with the Jobs to be Done framework and asked the same question twice, but slightly different. The first time we asked “How important is X to you?” and then we asked all those questions again through the lens of a competitor “How satisfied are you with Y when you try to accomplish X?” Taking all the responses and putting them into a scatter plot, we can find four quadrants: Low-importance/Low-satisfaction (ignore this), Low-importance/High-satisfaction (No one care, and your competition is handling it – ignore this), High-Importance/High-satisfaction (this is important and your competitor is doing it well – don’t focus on this yet), High-importance/low-satisfaction (Focus here first since it is a need not being satisfied!)
Friday was mostly meetings and catching-up on tasks that didn’t get done during the week. It is halloween today 🎃👻🕷️, but due to the bad weather, Reykjavik is inviting people to go trick-or-treating tomorrow instead.