Week #793
This week we wrapped-up several surveys that were lingering from March and finished directly pestering high school students and now turned it over to the schools to get the minimum response rate.
On Wednesday we started our trip home from Miami. We were there almost a week having meetings, checking-in with friends and quickly prototyping for more meetings. Overall, the meetings went well, it was fun to get out and see Miami, and we made a few new friends.
On Thursday, it was a public holiday here in Iceland it was the First Day of Summer. It is also the start of the Old Icelandic month Harpa, which is the start of the six month summer period. The first day of winter is not really celebrated, but it is trying to be re-branded as Meat Soup Day in preparation for the cold months ahead.
We published an article about 100 year old spatial images that we’ve been experimenting creating. It has been a fun project that has some interesting possibilities going forward.
In the background, we continue to update our Web app for the Australian Concreters. The more they use it, the more they need small fixes here and there: More columns in the table, adding public holidays to the planning calendar, etc. We’re over the hump of getting the app working, now we’re making improvements and refinements.
We’re always improving our backup regime and this week we started to revisit the old MacBook Pro from 02016. Currently the laptop is being used as our photo database. Hardware-wise it is a 1TB SSD, but the keyboard is broken and it is an Intel machine with limited support. To keep our large photo library off our working computer we are using this one to store photos. We really need to keep those back-ups in triplicate: LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”). Currently, the whole computer gets backed-up with Time Machine and then replicated to an air-gapped external HD and also saved offsite. The issue we realized is that if that computer dies, we don’t actually want to restore the whole HD Image to a new computer, we just want that photo library! It is a bit of a waste, but right now it is easiest to continue to use Time Machine to automatically and periodically backup. We can mount the .sparsebundle file and retrieve any file without needing to do a full restore. Now the task is to delete all the un-used apps, preferences, etc. to lighten the backups of the old MacBook Pro.
Week #794
It is another short week because Friday is May 1st. That’s another public holiday in most of Europe.
This week we spent mostly dusting around the edges of things. We have a small iOS app project around video feed from various cameras. We’re waiting for some backend updates before we can finalize it. We met with the team, talked with the manufacturer and we think we’ve cracked how to get the info we need.
We’re also waiting for another project to be green-lit. Our contact is working hard to sell the idea internally and almost everyone one is on board. The last hold-outs are super busy and behind schedule. They are willing to go with an existing, tested company, then work with us to build something new. Which totally makes sense, but we’re still in the running, if not for next month, defiantly for the future. So to prep and not be under some horrible deadline stress, we started on the Django Web admin tool portion. This is going to need to be done no matter what, so we setup some basic models, authentication and file uploading.
We are working on a time tracking tool that tightly integrates with our accounting software. We’ve had a few external teams use it and this week we fixed a few more bugs and added a few new features that we needed. We took over direct control of a project down in Australia, so we needed to change all the hours from one project to another. Same thing, different entities to invoice. So we added a bulk time log update. While we were in there we fixed a few other bugs and did a bit of UI clean-up.
Bric-à-brac
Being in the US this week, we managed to watch Life Unearthed by our old friend Ariel Waldman. Normally it is geo-locked, but not when you’re inside the geo fence. If you can you should definitely check it out!
Back in 02010, we wrote about our experience with the Icelandair Boarding printable pass, which we designed in 02007. On our travels this week, we printed our boarding pass and lo and behold, it is pretty much our original design! Three sections, barcode multiple times, travel info, next steps. It’s missing the weather and social integrations.