Finished reading Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico 📚
📚 Just re-read Land of Mirrors by Maria Medem, such a stunning and dreamlike graphic novel.
This documentary Death of a Fantastic Machine explores how photography has shaped our lives, from early photographs to AI-generated images.
📚 Finished reading: Final Cut by Charles Burns.
Day three of the Micro.blog photo challenge is shadow, and I thought I’d share a photo of the bridge near Fort York. In the spring and summer, spiders like to build their webs under the lights, casting the coolest shadows.
Day two of the Micro.blog photo challenge, the prompt was curve.
On the first day of the Micro.blog photo challenge, I took a photo of a tree on the shore of Lake Ontario.
Saw this window display near Dundas & Howard Park: a stack of blinking alarm clocks, a fake fried egg, and a line of chips sorted by size.
One day, I dream of opening Spotify and not seeing an auto-genreated playlist with “sad girl” in the title.
Still thinking about this passage from Ballerina by Patrick Modiano.
Finished reading: Ballerina by Patrick Modiano 📚
I recently got a new lens for my DSLR, and it’s made from a recycled disposable camera lens. I’m totally obsessed with the unique look it gives my photos!
Finished reading: Land of Mirrors by María Medem 📚
I finished reading Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang 📚
401 Richmond’s courtyard. 📍
📚 Finished reading: The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood.
📚 Finished reading: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
🎥 Watched Mickey 17.
🎥 Watched La Jetée.
📚 Finished reading It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood this afternoon. It was so good.
It was a Quince, not a lemon.
Japanese Rural Life Adventure is such a cozy game.
I went to Slow Night’s Vision Board Collage event tonight, it was a lot of fun.
“Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.”
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers by Rebecca Shaw.
Finished reading: Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki 📚
I wrote a small library for formatting dates in Python using Moment.js like formatting: gist.github.com/myles/a17…. Useful if you want to integrate Python and Obsidian’s date and time formatting.
I mapped out Ledbury Park on OpenStreetMaps.
The LLM that cost billions of dollars and the energy output of a midsize country to train isn’t that great, so they gave it a cute and flirty voice. Most Silicon Valley thing ever.
Arc App's JSON Export to SQLite
I started working on a Dogsheep utility for processing Arc App’s Daily (or Monthly) JSON exports into a SQLite database. This provides the ability to analysis the places I visit and activities I am doing in Datasette.
I’ve published a working alpha version of the Dogsheep utility, arc-to-sqlite, on my GitHub. Check it out if you are interested.
This is the first time I generated an image in Midjourney where I actually couldn’t tell it was generated by a text-to-image model.
Just released version v0.2.1 of mastodon-to-sqlite!
First PyDataTO meetup of the year.
Made a small Django function to back-port update_or_create from Django 5.0, specifically adding create_defaults to the create operations. gist.github.com/myles/a6905f94e4e9955f02fea2554db982a7
My favourite comic book series, Fables, has been added to the public domain by Bill Willingham, its author.
Polaroid’s new instant camera, the I-2, looks incredible. I hope this resurgence of instant cameras continues. Jeremy Gray’s review for PetaPixel.
Playing around with Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature. This was two similar photos I took at Ontario Place this winter.
😢 My Stupid Weather Twitter Profile Bot Got Suspended
Seven years ago, I created a little Python script that would add a weather emoji to my Twitter handle, based on the current conditions in Toronto. I don’t think anyone besides myself notices, but it always made me happy to see my handle change to ☀️ Myles Braithwaite on a sunny day.
Today, I received an email from the Twitter Developer Platform, informing me that my bot was suspended from accessing the Twitter API. I tried to appeal the decision, but the web form kept giving me an error.
I knew this day was coming when I had to give up on this bot, I used DarkSky’s API to get the current weather, which API was disconnected on 31 March 2023. Strangely enough, my bot continued to work for a while after that. Just all feels pretty sudden.
Playing around with Adobe Firefly’s beta.
So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home?
Interesting article about the conversion of office buildings into aparments, one of the hurdles is the footprint of office buildings have been getting larger.
Exploring Toronto's Restaurant Inspection Data with DineSafe
As a lover of good food, I’ve always been curious about restaurant health inspections. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a tool that makes it easy to explore Toronto’s DineSafe data.
I built a scraper using Python and the sqlite-utils library. It gathers data on restaurant inspections and stores it in a SQLite database. But I didn’t stop there - I added some automation magic to make the process even more fun!
Now, thanks to a GitHub Actions workflow, the scraper runs every day at 9 am and deploys the database to an instance of Datasette running on Vercel.
Datasette is a super cool tool that lets you explore and visualize data in a fun and interactive way. So, whether you’re a foodie, data enthusiast, or just curious about what’s happening behind the scenes in your favorite restaurant, this project is for you.
Check out the GitHub repository to see the code and learn how to set up your own instance of the scraper. You can also explore the data and play around with visualizations on the DineSafe Toronto website.
I super agree with Kalynn Bayron, AI should be doing more the stuff people hate than the stuff that brings people joy.
Doing the holiday party circuit, this really resonated with me.
I’m Thrilled to Announce That Nothing Is Going On with Me by Alex Baia.
I’m kind of obsessed with this zoo in Sweden where 7 of their chimps have escaped and are trying to take over the zoo. The ring leader, Santino, has a pervious history of uprising when he lead his troop in a previous revolt by throwing rock at the zoo visitors.
Clive Thompson writes about what design lessons we can learn from guitar pedals.
Snazzy Labs has an awesome video demoing Apple’s Tools to repair an iPhone 12 Mini. The simple repair, replacing the battery and fixing a broken screen, requires 44kg of tools shipped in two pelican cases. It’s incredibly overkill.
Finished reading: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng 📚
This whole TikTok acquisition is reminding me of when Flip Video got bought by Cisco and shut down two years later. I really miss my FlipCam 💔.
This is a hard time. You’re doing the best you can. Be kind to yourself.
(via Gabz)
This Vox video on how the pandemic distorts time is so awesomely crafted.
Really like GitHub’s new profile customizations.
Current Status: Watching how to cut your own hair instructional YouTube videos because my hair is just to long and tying it up with a USB cable isn’t working anymore.
I just spent two hours trying to figure out a bug in my Vue form component, it turned out I was using rel='update' instead of ref='update' 🙃.
I’ll be presenting Jonathan Gray & Kavya Srinet paper, CraftAssist at Papers We Love Toronto on 18 March at 6:30pm.
I just spent the last 30 minutes trying to figure out why my tests weren’t failing. It turned out it was because I forgot to prepend test_ to the function 🙃.
🎥 I haven’t seen Cats yet but I’m pretty sure Disney’s live action Aladdin was the worst film of last year.
2020 To Do List
These aren’t really resolutions, they are just eight things I want to do in 2020:
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Build more things Last year because I was commuting so much I didn’t have any time outside of work to actually build anything new. So this year I want to plan more time to build things.
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Learn Go Go is a really cool programming language that I want to learn more about but haven’t had the time to get started learning. This year I want to follow Thorsten Ball’s books Writing An Interpreter In Go and Writing A Compiler In Go.
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Read more books I feel like i haven’t read any good books this year (that weren’t about programming), this year I want to read at least a book a month.
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Eat better This one is pretty easy, after doing the crazy commute and working in a food desert it was hard to stick to a schedule eating habits. This year I need to start eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
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Bullet Journal everyday I found Bullet Journaling was very therapeutic last year so I want to continue journaling in the new year.
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Take more photographs and shot more video I want to start taking more photographs and shooting more video in the new year. It’s something I enjoy doing and find relaxing.
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Get my house in order I still haven’t gotten a lot of furniture at my new place so I need to start getting organised at home.
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Be more active I want to start being more active durning the week (outside walking to and from work).
I’ve recently switched my personal email to ProtonMail, it’s pretty awesome.
Photos from tonight’s GoTO.
Went for a hike in the forest by the McMichael Canadian Art Gallery today.
Skate City for iOS is really awesome.
Software Development and the False Promise of Science
Richard Marmorstein on software developers and their lack of citing good sources:
You have opinions – strong opinions – on questions such as “do microservices encourage modular code design?” and “should software projects stick to a ‘novelty budget’?” and “should composition be preferred to inheritance?”. But are your opinions backed by peer-reviewed analyses of hypotheses subjected to statistical tests of empirical data? Not really. Your view that software projects should stick to a ‘novelty budget’, for instance, is backed by your experience reading about this idea in some rando’s blog post and the argument seeming plausible in light of the recent bankruptcy of your friend’s web startup built on WebAssembly, CockroachDB, Elixir and Unikernels.
Richard Marmorstein (13 October 2019)
Photos From Nuit Blanche Last Night
Photos from last night’s Nuit Blanche exhibited in Fort York, Stacks, and 401 Richmond.
A love letter to personal websites
Tobias van Schneider’s love letter to his personal website:
In those days, our website was our home. An extension of ourselves. Every day we visited our page, tweaked it a bit here, adjusted something there, stood back and admired it. Our site was a little corner of the internet we could own.
Fast forward to now and a website almost feels old fashioned. Our social profiles are all-consuming. Curating our Instagram page is our second job. We almost feel an obligation to share our work there, in addition to our personal lives. Our little corner of the internet? It now collects cobwebs.
🎵 Ann Power’s review of Lana Del Rey’s new album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, is an awesome read.
Had an awesome cocktail tonight at Petty Cash, an Abraham Drinkin’, with gin, lime, cucumber, and basil.
I’m excited to be attending Polyhack 23 on 11 Septemeber 2019 at 6:30pm.
🎧 Lana Del Rey cover of Donovan’s Season of the Witch is awesome.
Hasan Minhaj on why public transportation sucks in the US.
In four weeks my long commute to Oakville will be at an end. I got a job located a twenty minute walk from home!
Apple spends more on R&D than the entire country of Spain. As in the entire country of Spain both public and private organizations. Spain the world’s 13th largest economy with a population of 47 million people.
Do boring speakers really talk for longer?
Robert M. Ewers in Nature:
The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds. The 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 min; t-test, t = 2.91, P = 0.007). For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled. For the audience, this is exciting news. Boring talks that seem interminable actually do go on for longer.
He also gives some good advice on giving a good talk:
To avoid banality, speakers should introduce their objectives early on and focus on pertinent information. They should avoid trite explanations, repetition, getting bogged down by irrelevant minutiae and passing off common knowledge as fresh insight.
Currently reading: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts, valuing data over design instinct puts metrics over users by Benek Lisefski.
Ugly Gerry is a font created by US congressional districts.
Amazon Is Using a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses
This is some dystopian stuff.
Amazon Uses a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses:
Amazon is not the only company that relies on what publicists call “employee advocates.” Lizz Kannenberg, the director of brand strategy at Sprout Social, which advises companies on social media use, said that employee advocacy had developed over the last three to five years.
Bromwich, J. E. (2019, August 15)
June Oven owners are reporting preheating incidents.
This is 100% the fault of June and not the user:
June CEO Matt Van Horn says that owners, not the oven, are at fault. “We’ve seen a few cases where customers have accidentally activated their oven preheat via a device, figure your cell phone,” he tells The Verge. “So imagine if I were to be in the June app clicking recipes and I accidentally tapped something that preheated my oven, we’ve seen a few cases of that."
Carman, A. (2019, August 14). Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
Currently reading Draplin Design Co. Pretty Much Everything by Aaron James Draplin. This page is probably the most useful advice every, Vectors Are Free!
Thinknum, a dataset serivce for revealing strategic movements within companies, made their pitch deck a comic book.
Scooter's aren't as "eco-friendly" as they claim to be
The study concludes that dockless scooters generally produce more greenhouse-gas emissions per passenger mile than a standard diesel bus with high ridership, an electric moped, an electric bicycle, a bicycle—or, of course, a walk.
The paper found that scooters do produce about half the emissions of a standard automobile, at around 200 grams of carbon dioxide per mile compared with nearly 415. But, crucially, the researchers found in a survey of e-scooter riders in Raleigh, North Carolina, that only 34% would have otherwise used a personal car or ride-sharing service. Nearly half would have biked or walked, 11% would have taken the bus, and 7% would have simply skipped the trip.
Temple, J. (2019, August 2). Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all. Retrieved August 8, 2019, from technologyreview.com
🎥 Hobbs & Shaw was really good.
🎵 Chance the Rapper new album The Big Day is awesome.