Week #791
Monday was a public holiday, so Tuesday was our Monday. We started out working with a team in the UK here in Iceland doing some school observations. Some Icelandic schools are implementing the Starling (PALS) method of learning vocabulary and we’re tangentially connected.
Over the Easter break, we prototyped yet two more camera apps. One for RGB separations and another for Dithering. These are internal apps and as is are fun, but there are a few missing pieces before we can call them “ready”.
We also took some time to refactor the code. Previously, we pulled out all the common components into their own files and would duplicate them back and forth between apps if we made changes. Now we refactored again into a single Xcode project with a different target for each app. All the common code is in one place and it is also easier to see what other non-common code we are re-using elsewhere. In that process, we also setup Xcode cloud for each of the apps. If we make changes to any of the code-base and commit those changes to git version control, it automatically kicks off the process to rebuild all the camera apps.
We had our 4TB Time Machine hard drive go bad. We’ve written about our backup setup a few times (Backups, Backups 2.0 DAS Edition, Backups 3.0 Remote) We made a late night online order for another 4TB drive and bright and early the next morning it was dropped off. We hot-swapped it in and started-up some fresh Time Machine backups.
In the process, we remembered the wise words of wisdom “You don’t have a backup until you restore it”. That lead us to fetching one Time Machine image from our off-site backup and adding it back to the hard drive to see if we could pick-up from the last backup.
The drive was probably a bit over 2 years old, so that was much sooner than we expected. We didn’t amortize the cost over as many months as we’d hoped, but you win some, you loose some. Overall, we’re still doing better than paying for our cloud storage.
Week #792
On the backup hard drive front, after a few days of syncing and starting backups again, we’re back to where we were before the crash. But now we’re re-evaluating how we should backup older machines. Using Time Machine to take a snapshot of a computer that isn’t really being used or updating daily is probably overkill. Also, given that if the hard drive in the old laptop crashes, we wouldn’t buy a new computer and restore an old backup, what we really need todo is clear-off any files not used, and only sync what is actively being worked on (In our case, it is the photos database). But that’s a task for next week.
This week we continued to work on the WebRTC debugging. We now have everything working and have mimicked the “companion camera” feature. Now you can use any WebRTC capable phone (iPhone or Android) to connect to the Apple TV and relay your video and audio to other attendees. Also, in the future we could have an android ‘smart tv’ app so you can use your iPhone as the camera to an android TV and relay that to other participants. There were lots of little connections and audio bugs to work out, but now I think we’re in good shape.
On Tuesday we sent our Q2 ◍ Quarternotes newsletter. Be sure to subscribe to get it delivered straight to your inbox.
We continue to work on surveys. We had a staff survey in March, but a few organization wanted to move it to April. This month is also our biggest student survey and we’re also conducting a survey in high schools. After April, things will calm down again.
On another survey front, we finally got connected with another development team to work on how we can use their Single Sign-On solution. Iceland stopped allowing private companies to use the island.is SSO a few years ago. We have them a heads-up and it still hasn’t been implemented, but it looks like this finally might be the month!
In the land down under, we’ve got a few more requests from our concreters for updates to their work calendar. Right now we capture a start date and duration and plot that onto a calendar. Now we need to extend the duration to ‘skip’ non-work days (Sundays) and holidays. Plus a few additional UI requests. We’ll implement those next week after our travel meetings.
We also managed to rekindle a game idea from a few years ago. First we meet with the design team to talk about theming and the overall world. Then we met with the engineering team to get everyone up to speed on the previous prototypes. We started in Unity, then switched to SwiftUI and now back to Unity. After kicking the tires on the prototypes, we have a much better understanding of everything that needs to be done.
On Thursday morning we went into a local school in Reykjavik for an observation. Now we have a much better idea of the basic requirements that we’d need for an online support solution. That afternoon we flew to Miami, Florida USA for some meetings and planning.
The Friday meetings went well and we’ll continue on a proof-of-concept for next week.