For design work, it seems like all I hear is “Figma this” and “Figma that”. I’ve tried getting used to Figma and Penpot, but you know, my go-to is still Sketch.

I hadn’t visited their web site in a while and I’m impressed. They’re doing a good job telling and showing why Sketch is great. It’s still the best in my opinion and am putting this bit out there to do my part talking about it! ✍🏻

I was looking up Yoko Tsuno, which I was a big fan of as a teen, and am gladly surprised that the English Wikipedia entry has a description that neatly explains what I loved so much about it.

Despite the often exotic settings and science-fiction plot lines, the stories generally remain realistic on the personal level between the characters and friendship, love and spirituality are some of the key themes of the series.

Apologies for the bit of self-promotion, but last April marked 5 years since I started hosting my social posts on my own site. 🎉

Five years later I’m still as happy with this decision as I was then. I post to my site, and it gets cross-posted to social media. Today that means Mastodon. Eventually it may mean something else. But no matter what, steveroy.ca will always be the source of truth.

Before anyone asks, I don’t cross-post blindly and I interact with people where they respond.

I was in a conversation about phone cases today. I miss phone designs that didn’t require a case.

I would argue that, today, we have to use a case because most phones are not easily grippable without one. My iPhone and my Pixel are nice but, without a case, I find that picking them up from a table requires too much dexterity. What I often do is use two hands.

The Nexus 5 is one of my favourite phones ever, in large part because it was light, had great grip, and I didn’t need a case.

What is wrong with Bettman? It’s clear the people in Arizona don’t care about the Coyotes. It’s been going on for a decade. Why the insistence on keeping them there? Meanwhile in Canada there are cities full of hockey-crazy Canadians who built arenas that are just waiting to get an NHL team. Thirty year-olds in Canada have never seen the Cup of their national sport being paraded in any Canadian city. That’s a whole generation. The damage Bettman has done is immense.

30 years without a Canadian team winning the Stanley Cup. That’s the legacy of the Bettman era.

22% of NHL teams are in Canada so, mathematically, we could expect to see a Canadian team win every five years on average. But obviously the proof is in the pudding: the Bettman era has stacked the deck against Canadian teams.

The NHL is too pricey, too big, too showy, too American. We produce enough players; I would welcome a Canada-only Pro league, WHA-style.

I just came up on this quote from Bjarne Stroustrup:

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

Generative AI is not what he had in mind, but it’s interesting to see this quote in this day and age. And I do agree with the general sentiment. Software development is creative work, and it’s not something we emphasize enough.

One question that comes up in social conversation now is: “my phone/computer did x, is that AI?”

The answer I always want to give is, it depends how you define AI. Artificial intelligence is not a hard line in the sand, it’s a slow evolution. For a long time we’ve had machines doing things that no human could ever match. Think Photoshop, Google, or Siri. Does ChatGPT sounding more convincingly human make it AI?

It’s still not imaginative, sentient, or able to think on its own. In my view, calling it artificial intelligence is doing ourselves a disservice.

I’ve been noticing a worrisome trend in programming advice where people increasingly give full samples of code and walkthroughs instead of just the short explanation or the specific lines of code needed to address the topic.

That’s on blogs and YouTube, but also on StackOverflow. It feels like people either don’t understand what it is in their solution that produces the result, or they are more interested in building their brand than being genuinely helpful.

I was talking with a friend about Basecamp today. I’ve never had the chance to use it professionally other than the free trial. But I was reminded of this excellent walkthrough that Jason Fried did three years ago. Everything in one place? Yes please.

I went to use Apache on my Mac but it kept dying on launch. It took me a while to find it was due to the LoadModule directive for PHP. Commented it out and it ran, albeit with no PHP.

The problem was that PHP is no longer built-in on macOS so my httpd.config was pointing to Homebrew’s [email protected] which I’d since updated it to 8.2, so the path was no good and Apache no likey.

The solution was to update the path and do the codesign dance again.

I worry about the need or effectiveness of violent climate action too:

Our demands are – and have to be – more complex than any that have gone before. While I believe that taking out pipelines, refineries, abattoirs, coal plants and SUVs is morally justified, do we really imagine we can bring down the Earth-eating machine this way? Can we really hope that government, industry, oligarchs and those they employ or influence will conclude, “Because we cannot tolerate the sabotage, we will surrender the economic system?” If you are holding a virtual gun to someone’s head, you need to know exactly what you are demanding and whether they can deliver it.

Yesterday was my last day at Coursera. After work I took my dog out for a walk. We had beautiful misty sun showers producing a rainbow; a perfect atmosphere symbolizing the sadness of the end and the hope of a new beginning.

Canada’s privacy commissioner announced an investigation of OpenAI and I agree with this take:

“You might say, ‘Oh, maybe it feels a bit heavy handed.’ On the other hand, a company decided that it was just going to drop this technology onto the world and let everybody deal with the consequences. So that doesn’t feel very responsible as well.”

In the wake of the Feedly protest-tracking controversy, I’m thinking that dropping them fits perfectly with my independent stance. After all, I stopped using many companies I disagreed with like Amazon, Facebook, and of course Twitter already five years ago.

I only used Feedly as a backend anyway. So I exported my feeds from Feedly to OPML and imported them directly into Reeder. It is slower because Reeder now has to fetch each feed individually, but let’s see how that goes.

So for about 4 weeks I’ve been surfing the web using private mode in Safari. That means no history and no cookies retained. That’s been fine, actually, and I haven’t received any funny emails after running a web search or visiting a web site.

The only downside so far is that CBC.ca does not automatically detect that my IP address is NOT, in fact, in Ottawa.

So pick your poison: IP geolocation or cookie tracking?

Some time around 1992, Discover Magazine published a piece about the EV1 from General Motors. Reading about the tech behind it, it made so much sense. It only took 25 more years for me to get an EV.

I’ve been driving a dinky little Nissan Leaf first-generation for over 5 years now and I still marvel every time I hop on. It doesn’t look like much but it’s quiet, has good tork, and feels more luxurious to drive than it has any right to.

We recently passed the 100,000 km mark. Glad I have it!

Penises are not OK. But guns? Sure that’s fine.

Never mind that the penis in question is made of stone, hangs on a 500 year-old celebrated piece of art, and that nudity has been a central theme in the arts from all cultures for thousands of years.

These are the things that make me think the level of intelligence and conscience humans have achieved in the 21st century is too dangerous when it can be wielded to justify just about any nonsense.

Or more succinctly: what planet am I on?

Maybe it’s just me, but Ontario wants to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 to help the housing market and all I can see is that it’s adding fuel to the fire. More homes without more regulation won’t make prices come down, it will perpetuate the problem. Crack down on house flippers and foreign buyers instead who use housing to make a buck at the expense of regular people who need a place to live.

There’s this really annoying autocorrect bug that I think started in iOS 16: Typing “love” in Messages always gets changed to “live”. Sure there is a certain poetry to it but still, “I live you” is usually not quite what I mean.

I figured out that it’s because I have “Love” in my contacts as my wife’s nickname. Removed it and it stops. But really, removing it is a non-starter so I’ll have to keep living with the bug until Apple fixes it. 🤞🏻

I love Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car à la McSweeney’s. 😄

This car is your ticket to anywhere. Just cruising in it feels like you’re entertaining yourself. It speeds so fast it feels like you’re drunk. Which, let’s be honest, is not recommended. I don’t want to feel like I’m drunk or buzzed while I’m driving; I want to feel safe and secure and, hopefully, get good gas mileage. I’m thinking maybe a Hyundai Kona or a Mazda CX-30.

Many things in politics make me want to cry, so I’ll gladly take this opportunity to laugh. Thank you, British humour:

Boris warmed to his stupidity theme. […] He wasn’t responsible for his own actions. Besides which, he had no idea what the rules and guidance were because he hadn’t yet worked out who had been prime minister at the time.

So psyched to be able to comment on a post on Kottke.org today! 25 years. What a milestone.

COVID is part of my daily reality. Not because I have it, but because I still do what I can to avoid it. Long COVID especially. I have seen what it’s like to have a long-term debilitating disease and I know the hardship of caring for someone in that situation.

Lately I learned that Diana Cowern, aka Physics Girl, has Long Covid. I find it very touching to see what she and her husband are going through. I hope she will pull through and be able to make fun and interesting science videos again.

I’m so glad I never bought a Tesla. I can’t imagine how I’d feel driving it knowing the antics of the deranged lunatic that Musk has turned out to be.

Confession time: I used to think he was smart. Now I’m horrified I ever thought that. It’s gotta be a disease, something must have flipped in his brain, right? How could he sleep at night otherwise. Is it money? If it is then I will never complain again about being in debt.

Just stumbled upon this bit from 2015 by Felix Salmon that potentially rings even more true today than it did then:

If your way to conquer global inequality is for rich people to get together and conquer it for you, then it’s not going to happen. Really.

I was searching online for a specific cable. I only found it at Walmart and Amazon. The latter was more appropriately priced but I don’t have an Amazon account so I asked a friend to order it for me. The purchase was not made on my computer nor using my email address, but within the hour I started getting junk mail from Amazon. Fuckers.

Considering that I already use content blockers and log out of sites when browsing, I decided it’s time for the next step in this arms race: clearing cookies. 🔥

This cry from the heart about the state of the Internet? I get it.

And that sucks because there are no real public spaces on the internet. Here in reality, I can fuck off to a park and hug a tree and sit on a bench and do stuff without ads, without anyone trying to track me, and without having to pay a dime. There was a time within my memory when people tried to make websites feel like semipublic places.

It’s not just that accounts are required on so many web sites. It’s also the ads and the tracking that you have to block. It’s the literacy in privacy that is needed to fend off the inevitable cookie prompts. It’s the algorithms taking control over what we see online. It’s the countless requests for a “good review” whenever you buy anything. It’s distinguishing the lies and the self-serving bullshit from the good stuff. The web now is so user-hostile.

Lately I’ve been noticing things that, if invented today, would require an account to use, but do not because they were invented before the digital age.

Example – Charging stations: You need an app and an account for every single brand of charger you want to plug your car into. But at gas stations, you can fill up, before paying even, and all you need is cash or a credit card. No credentials required.

Next up – Radio: Can you imagine if someone invented today a way to transmit sound over the air? It sure as heck wouldn’t be free.