Week #779
The week started off slowly. We’ve sent out emails to book meetings and sync-up over all the loose-ends before the holiday season.
With the Skólapúlsinn branding, we’re updating templates slowly to better come into line with standard headers and footers across various sites: Marketing, Data Collection and Reporting.
This week we sent all the bookkeeping to the accountants to review. We’re ready and thought it might be helpful for them to help balance their workload. They promptly replied with: When we get the tax reports from the government, we’ll get started.
For the Australian concreters, they forked the company and the sister company is using the same web app, but are finding small areas that need to be different. Along with some infrastructure issues like migrating the sending email to a new domain, etc.
We have a crazy idea around old 3D photos from the Reykjavik Photography Museum. We went down to pitch the idea and their in the middle of a new exhibition setup. More to report next week!
On Wednesday we published the 02025 TIL article. This lists out the 1845+ headlines we saved in 02025 with tags and stats.
With 4 years of headlines: we added them into a database, re-tagged everything and created a much better interactive and searchable experience. It is nearly ready for the public, but that’s just phase 1 of what we want to do!
Week #780
This week started out working on the WebRTC project. The goal is to reconfigure the setup process so that you can use one screen to view all the incoming calls, but another device to act as your camera. It should be possible to relay the WebRTC stream from the camera to the screen, from the screen to everyone else.
We’ve been re-evaluating a lot of projects this week. Two old project ideas that we created prototypes for are waking-up. We’d like to be involved, but we’re also waiting for answers to other projects and we can’t be the lead development team for everything, all the time, all at once. Those other projects are also super old. Over six months ago, we sent in our proposal of all the next steps we’d like todo to improve the software… then summer, then busy times in the fall, then the winter holidays. Other big projects pulled them away from this ours, so we never got an answer about the plan. Plus, our old friend Iceland’s Single Sign-On. We’re just waiting and waiting for another company to finish their part before we can re-implement the login. We’ve been waiting almost a year for that as well.
The photography museum replied and sent us a few more links with hundreds, if not thousands, of more stereoscopic images in their collection! There are 3D images of Iceland from over 100 years ago. We took a few and cropped them, realigned the images and put them through some software to make Red-Blue 3D anaglyph images, wigglegrams and spatial photos for Virtual Reality.
Using Spatialify is also possible to make even more types of “3D” images using the left-right pair. For instance this is a wigglegram. It animates the two images fast enough to feel like they are moving in 3D.
It is also possible to make a spatial image for viewing in the Vision Pro (or other VR headsets). Download Magnús Ólafsson: Fólk (628KB) You can view the original on the National Museum’s website.
We spent a few mornings this week clearing-up old Trello boards. We had a few notes in there since 02014! The goal of this digital house cleaning is to help the dev team be able to pick up any task without needing more info and knowing that it’s still a priority!
We also managed to get a look at our next eBike prototype.
Friday is the first day of the Old Icelandic month of Þorri which also means it is Bóndadagur (Farmer’s day).
Bric-à-brac
As of January 1, 02026, you can no longer buy or refill an NYC MetroCard. They have been replaced by OMNY. There are collectors who have all the variations and special edition versions of the transit card. It will be interesting to see how things evolve. With OMNY you can use your credit card, smart device or a new physical card you add credit too.
The biggest concern (and we’re seeing this everywhere too) is for the ‘unbanked’. If all you have is cash, you are being blocked out of using public transit. Owning a smart device is quickly becoming a requirement for citizens.
Chicago ended their CTA cards in 02014 (I guess it’s been awhile since where in the windy city!) and replace it with Ventra.