My crowd has been enjoying the app BeReal recently. The world is split up geographically in to zones; every user in each zone recieves a notification at the same time which is randomly chosen each day.
I’ve started keeping track of those times. US data is the best but hopefully I can record the others too going forward:
Edit: The BeReal API changed and this is no longer functional. Most of the data I collected is available in other data sets or here on Archive.org.
The L Train Brass Band is a community brass band from Brooklyn open to all.
We try to have as much music as possible memorized for parades (it’s more fun that way!) but for some low-key gigs and rehearsals we read music off the page. Many of us like to use our phones to read our music.
Neither I, nor the L Train Brass Band have any association with any of the products linked or mentioned here.
Many band members with smaller phones find that PopSockets fit well in standard lyres.
This configuration seems to work well for trumpets, clarinets, many horns.
This makes me so nervous but people do it.
Tonal Innovation makes a product called the “eFlip” in several variations—the eFlip holds your phone and the lyre clips on to the bottom of the eFlip. This is what I personally use on my saxophone and I like it a lot!
It’s not perfect, I wish I could buy an eFlip permanently fastened to a lyre and I wish it would hold my phone with springs instead of screws. But those would make it more expensive to produce and mechanically complex! EDIT: After additional time with my eFlip I’ve changed my mind on this—despite moderate movement the eFlip has never slipped out of my lyre.
These are less common, here is a brand called “Grip-O-Phone” mounted on a trumpet.
This trumpet player actually modified the original product to add longer threaded rods to hold a small tablet instead of a phone.
Here is a similar product (brand unknown) holding an iPhone on a trombone:
Sousaphone players seems to like flexible holders. I don’t have much to add about these.
Of course some people just hold their phone in their hand. This seems to work for sousaphones and trombones.
Here are some observations:
It’s worth paying $10 for a sturdier, higher quality product that will last longer and fold down to be more compact.
More expensive stands will have high quality “jaws” that grip the tablet. Cheap jaws are entirely plastic with a spring system. They’re secure but hard to take on and off.
Cheaper stands tend to use large screws on the telescoping pole. Once again these work but more expensive options have a lever arm that you fold open and close which is quicker.
The real failing of the cheap stands is the ball joint at the top that allows you to rotate the tablet around. This tends to be the first part to become loose and while it won’t fail catastrophically it is very annoying when you can’t secure your table at just the right angle.
I’ve been using the iOS Scriptable app and the fantastic Weather Cal widget to have an information rich homescreen for a while now. The built-in COVID widget only had data to the country level but I wanted to see the New York Times’ data at the US county level.
OK, so “New York City” isn’t technically a county but the Times makes an exception and groups the boroughs together—call it a hometown bias.
This also serves as a decent example of how to make a custom Weather Cal component that loads, caches, and displays data from a custom API.
The New York Times doesn’t present a REST api but they do publish their data to Github about 3 times a day!
#!/bin/bash
# Live moving averages
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/rolling-averages/us-counties-recent.csv -o data.csv
# Example of the CSV data:
# date,geoid,county,state,cases,cases_avg,cases_avg_per_100k,deaths,deaths_avg,deaths_avg_per_100k
# 2021-12-21,USA-36998,New York City,New York,17958,10049.14,120.54,33,15.43,0.19
# Data.csv holds the last month of data for every US county sorted in ascending date order.
# I only care about the most recent date so we can search it backwards using tac and grep
tac data.csv | grep -m 1 "New York City" > current_cases_avg.txt
# Grab the 6th column
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $6}' current_cases_avg.txt > current_cases_avg_only.txt
# Copy the text file to my webserver
cp current_cases_avg_only.txt /var/www/FAKE/PATH/current_cases_avg_only.txt
This bash script can live in cron and run every hour.
15 * * * * ~/update.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
In Scriptable, weather-cal.js in the existing custom = {} variable add the following:
async setupDanielC19() {
const danielC19Path = code.fm.joinPath(code.fm.libraryDirectory(), "weather-cal-danielC19")
// getCache(path REQUIRED, minTime OPTIONAL, maxTime OPTIONAL)
let danielC19Data = code.getCache(danielC19Path, 20, 60)
if (!danielC19Data || danielC19Data.length == 0 || danielC19Data.cacheExpired)
try {
//
// NOTE: Be sure to put in a real URL here!
//
let rawRequest = new Request("https://danielbeadle.net/FAKE/PATH/current_cases_avg_only.txt")
let rawData = await rawRequest.loadString()
if (!rawData || rawData.length == 0) { throw 0 }
danielC19Data = Number(rawData)
// Write Data to cache
code.fm.writeString(danielC19Path, JSON.stringify(danielC19Data, null, 2))
} catch (err) {
danielC19Data = code.getCache(danielC19Path, 20, 60)
}
return danielC19Data
},
async danielC19(column) {
if (!this.danielC19Data) {
danielC19Data = await custom.setupDanielC19()
}
// Set up the stack
let danielC19Stack = code.align(column)
danielC19Stack.layoutHorizontally()
danielC19Stack.centerAlignContent()
danielC19Stack.setPadding(code.padding/2, code.padding*2, code.padding/2, code.padding)
// Round to an integer and add commas
const c19rkiLine = code.provideText(`NYC 7-Day Avg: ${Number.parseInt(danielC19Data).toLocaleString('en-US')}`, danielC19Stack)
},
And finally at the top of weather-cal.js add the new component
const layout = `
row
column
date
sunset
battery
danielC19
space
events
`
Three years ago I soldered my first custom-designed PCBs, a set of ESP8266-powered temperature sensors for my apartment!
The original design worked with the ESP8266 modules I had at the time but hasn’t with recent modules (I think I forgot to pull the chip-enable wire high?).
This is a spinoff project of my dedicated, single-purpose temperature sensor boards. Instead of trying to be as cheap and small as possible it is intended to be an easy way to connect I2C sensors to the Wemos D1 Mini and probably to esphome.
Further documentation on github.com/djbeadle/ESP8266-Temperature-Sensor.
Designed in KiCad at NYC Resistor where I first was shown the joy of Esphome (compared to writing your own firmware by!).
First PCB order December, 2021.
Photo books I have owned / borrowed in no particular order.
9780947322120 Dupain’s Sydney by Jill White
9781884167058 RFK Funeral Train photographs by Paul Fusc
9780999243008 Just Yannis by Harold Evans and Yannis Behrakis
9780525560029 Of Love & War by Lynsey Addario
I also greatly enjoyed her appearance on Radiolab for the episode Sight Unseen.
9781580931465 Subway Memories by by Camilo José Vergara
9780714843087 Red Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng
Possibily my favorite book on this list so far.
9781426201981 Photo Nomad by David Douglas Duncan
This book is a window in to a world that is completly foreign to me, such as this one:
One hour later—eyes drilling straight into my gizzard—slowly turning my prints—asking had I any snow shots…you know…Santa Claus country…no! How about flying to Boston Monday? I saw that page on Helen and Joe. Have you been in a big plane, TWA’s two-engine job? Take our old company Pontiac - warm clothes - drive through New England shooting whatever you want - BUT - always – remember: leave space for our Merry Christmas to run across the bottom of our next greeting cards.
Cal Eby was editing my pumpkin story when I went to thank him.
My snow shots became Hallmark’s first gift box of photographs.
Many of the captions are completly lost on me but they’re made up for by the photos.
9781633451049 Dorothea Lange Words and Pictures by Dorothea Lange, Sarah Meister
9780500292914 Magnum Contact Sheets by Kristen Lubben
0143128418 It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario
My first introduction to Lynsey Addario’s work, I ploughed through this book over a weekend senior year of college.
1620405555 Group f.64 by Alinder, Mary Street
A living document of diagrams and notes on various Unix tools.
“Fun isn’t something one considers when
balancing the universecollecting sea shanties, but this does put a smile on my face”.
I will only link downloads of recordings that are not available for sale new (digitally or physically) anywhere.
In the beginning there was nothing except a business process (some piece of software that made money) and a database for logs and a few configurable values.
The process developers who built and managed the business process read the logs in the database and occasionally modified the configurable values by hand.
As the business grew subject matter experts were brought onboard. I’m going to call these people who need to make changes to the database but whose job description does not include writing code business users. For a short while they sent their requests to the process developers who made the changes on their behalf.
Of course if a process developer is spending time editing the database by hand they can’t be working on new features. And if the business users understand the business process and know what they want to change why not let them do so directly? So someone whips up a piece of interface software giving the business users a way to access the database without going through the process developers.
Since in this case there are limited advantages to understanding both how the business process functions and how to make a good human interface eventually the development team fractures in to two disparate groups, the existing business process developers and the new interface developers (aka “frontend developers”).
The interface developers spend all day writing software that translates questions and commands from the business users in to something the database can understand. The two ways they add value are by
Eventually a business user is hired who says “I’d really like to use SOME VISUALIZATION TOOL” to help analyze this data—this could be Tableau, PowerBI, R, or even Python. This gets plugged in to the database bypassing the interface software and reduces the first way the interface developers create business value (allowing business users to read the database).
This creates an interesting bubble for the interface developers. The business user’s are responsible for the care and feeding of the business process and the process developers have to understand the intricacies of the business process to improve and expand it. But the interface developers are stuck in the middle. Understanding the details of the business process does not make one better at creating a text box that prevents a business user from accidentally entering garbage input.
This section exists to help me explain what my job is to my family (hi mom!).
I’m an interface developer! The interface software is made up of three parts: the backend, an old frontend (AngularJS), and a new frontend (React). The frontends present data in a human-readable format and validates their commands while the backend understands how to communicate with the database.
The old frontend is not going to break tomorrow but is built with aging technology and we can’t keep it around forever. The new frontend runs in parallel and users will bounce back and forth between the two while we slowly migrate the functionality over piecemeal. The most difficult part is ensuring that the switch between frontends is a pleasant, smooth experience. They shouldn’t be the same (the old frontend is indeed old) but they must be similar enough and must load quickly enough to not break a train of thought as the business users navigate between them.
GaiaGPS is my my app of choice when hiking, kayaking, and exploring the outdoors in general. I will look at AllTrails for trail descriptions and reviews but on the trail I am always on Gaia.
Two built-in maps that I recommend are the 1900 and 1940 USGS Topo Maps! It’s very cool to look back in time wherever you are.
This useful list of free map servers from Tim Smith at TrailNotes.org. Check out his other cool mapping software while you’re there.
Bing Maps can be added with a free Bing Maps developer key using this free tool by Nathan Cahill
This is a large list of free map sources courtsey of Brendan on the Rokslide forums:
Data Sources:
ESRI Worldview:
https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}
Stamen Terrain:
https://tile.stamen.com/terrain/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
Stamen Watercolor:
https://tile.stamen.com/watercolor/{z}/{x}/{y}.jpg
Strava All:
https://heatmap-external-b.strava.com/tiles/all/bluered/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
ESRI National Geographic:
https://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/NatGeo_World_Map/MapServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}
Google Maps:
https://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m&x={x}&y={y}&z={z}
Google Terrain:
https://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrics=t&x={x}&y={y}&z={z}
Google Terrain Hybrid:
https://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=p&x={x}&y={y}&z={z}
Google Satellite Hybrid:
https://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=y&x={x}&y={y}&z={z}
Things that should be simple.
CMD + . acts very similarly to the escape key on iOS, you can use it to close out of many menus.
If you are using vim through SSH (via Blink, Termius) or vi (on iSH) the command CMD + [ serves the same purpose as the escape key.
HealthFit ($3.99) generates nice visualizations and statistics from your workouts. Its automatic synchronization feature is also very slick and can liberate your Apple Watch GPS tracks from the default Fitness app by converting them to the standard .gpx format (.fit is also supported, or both can be exported at once) to a folder in iCloud.
I rely on this workflow for geotagging photos from my DSLR. When I’m out and about I start an “outdoor walk” in the Workout app on my watch, shoot to my heart’s content, and end the workout when I’m done. HealthFit automatically detects the finished workout, converts the GPS track to a .gpx file, and uploads it to iCloud. When I sit down at my Mac to edit photos I can easily import the .gpx file in to Lightroom which matches the photo’s timestamp to the proper location in the .gpx file.
If I just want to glance at a .gpx track I recommend GPXSee.
Use the venerable exiftool.
Apple Books doesn’t sync custom audio books even if you have Apple Drive enabled.
Solution: AirDrop’ing .mp3s doesn’t work, they go straight in to Music. The share menu on .mp3 or .m4b files in Files doesn’t provide an option to copy add to Books like what happens with .pdf and .epub.
The only option I’ve found is to transfer .m4b files with Waltr2. From here you can use your Apple Watch as an audio book remote BUT you still can’t transfer the book to the watch this way.
There’s a discussion on the MacRumors forum describing a couple different apps you can use to play audiobook files on your Apple Watch including the popular Castro podcast app as well as iCatcher, and MixTape Audio Sync. I can’t speak about any of them, my solution was to import the book in to Apple Music, right click on the album, navigate to the options tab, and select Remember playback position.
I want DRM free audio book files like those I can purchase from Downpour.com but jeez, this process is miserable.
Working Copy by Anders Borum is your first and last app for working with the contents of Git repositories. There is an official app for GitHub called Github Mobile which allows viewing code in repositories and managing GitHub issues and pull requests but lacks any sort of editing functionality. GitHub Mobile has eclipsed GitHawk, an older, third-party GitHub management app.