Availability is more valuable than time. As such it should be respected more, and dealt out/guarded more carefully.
Availability is more valuable than time. As such it should be respected more, and dealt out/guarded more carefully.
First #indieweb package derived from indiewebify.me code: indieweb/rel-me for consuming the rel-me microformat and verifying silo backlinks. Perfect for implementing an indieauth.com clone in #php…
Managed to get hold of some proper bufala mozzarella from Piccolo Italia — looking forward to trying it out on a pizza!
The Flex’s long battery life, water resistance and sleep tracking allows it to stay on my wrist pretty much constantly, meaning I never forget to put it on. Their web UI is quite nice, and the syncing process is adequate. It’s stupid that the only get at the data on the device is to sync with an iDevice or upload it to their silo and look at (admittedly rather nice) graphs, but that’s a known bug with these devices (which Aaron Parecki has written at length about.)
The Fuelband can be quite painful to put on if the catch pinches skin, its display is nice, and the fact that it doubles up as a watch which automatically syncs timezone with my computer is pretty great. Their web UI is fairly horrible (doesn’t work at all on Firefox due to JS errors), complete with Nike product advertising and confusing comparison charts.
“Nike Fuel” is a singularly useless unit. I’m imagining the reasoning behind it was something like this:
If this is true, I question Nike’s motives — helping people become more active or using vendor lock-in and social manipulation to sell as many devices as possible.
Obviously it’s the second one, but Fitbit exhibit no such problems and seem to be doing okay. Everything is relative.
Both devices are rubbery wrist straps which can make clothing a little bothersome, but presumably that positioning helps them gain more accurate results as opposed to, say, a belt clip.
I’ve been unable to adequately compare the accuracy of either product. The Fuelband seems to think I’ve done far fewer steps than the Flex, but as I can’t get numbers off the Flex quickly it’s difficult to compare the two. One way would be to actually count how many steps I do one day, and see which device is closer.
I’m looking forward to continuing to use both devices, hopefully beginning to follow in Aaron’s footsteps (no pun intended) and pull the data in to my own site.
Renaming “Chrome” to “That browser with Flash”
The medium with which you choose to express a message shapes that message — be careful it doesn’t contradict it.
Case in point: A Rational Web Platform (via @brucel)
article
markup — even js-generated markup is predictably disgusting Everything about this is anti-web, practically screaming “ignore me”.
Improvements:
Signed up for brid.gy. If your site accepts webmentions it is a no-brainer; if not then you’re missing out! Implement today: indiewebcamp.com/webmention
An excellent implementation of a indiewebcamp.com/backfeed service, ≈2 years after I drafted that wiki page. fantastic work by snarfed.org!
Mac OS 10.6 spaces vs 10.9 full-screen apps/desktops — switching gestures a welcome addition, but muscle memory persistent “physical” location lost, replaced by ambiguous time-based UI which does exactly what you mean half of the time, and causes flow-breaking confusion+excise the rest of the time
@benwerd @chrismessina @walkah @ADJOTERUS @emilychang go team YYYY-01-07! #oneoldernessday
Celebrating oneoldernessday at the office by finding my Icelandic name – it’s either Bjarndal (bear dale) or Bjarnhéðinn (bear skin, pronounced byarn-hey-thinn).
The ever-awesome @briansuda and Ninja got me a copy of berglondon.com/products/svk — loving the affordances of having ink you can choose not to see, also pondering the possibilities of additive fanfiction where you add your own internal monologue/headcanon/background details in-place over the canonical storyline.
Compilation of some sub-optimal gauge design I’ve come across recently. First up is BBC iPlayer’s speed tester+comparison tool:
Ignoring the questionable pyramid chartjunk, there are a bunch of issues here — the use of arc length and exceedingly inconsistent scale on the skeuomorphic gauge, the strange choice of colouring on the comparison bars (is green good and red bad? or better/worse than my connection?) and the totally useless “status” column add up to a confusing graphic.
The next is this set of dials from pool.dogechain.info — again the use of arc length is unnecessary, and very few comparisons are possible. At first, the scales look fairly sensible — perhaps the maximums are pool maximums, or averages or something?
Uh, apparently not.
These dials are always half full. They use up hundreds of pixels of colour and drop shadow, taunting you into thinking you’re getting some sort of useful comparison, when actually they’re informing you that two times twenty three is forty six. Astonishing.
Simply erasing the colour creates a much cleaner graphic
which can be further improved by clearing some of the resultant whitespace
The addition of time-series data might make a genuinely useful contribution, as could some comparisons or proportions allowing your rate to be compared to the pool average or total.
Another welcome, and obvious addition would be “how much do I make per second/minute”, “how much have I made so far”, “how does that compare to other miners” and “how much is that in real money” — these are the questions that I as a miner actually want answered when looking at a dashboard, but the few relevant statistics which are shown are relegated to a small corner.
Apparently, making sure a directory exists is an exceedingly complicated task: stackoverflow.com/questions/273192/create-directory-if-it-doesnt-exist-for-file-write
Idea for focus-maintaining anti-rabbit-warren UI: “current task” bar, simple user-editable text field present on all screens, subdued but not inconspicuous, persistent reminder of current short-term goal.
Should be somewhere out of the way but accessible at a glance, i.e. only eye movement required to see what it is. Key combo to instantly clear and focus for editing.
@w03_ practising for our pizza night, obviously ;) It was unplanned spontaneous pizza otherwise I would have alerted you
@brennannovak wow; such wealth; very processor-intensive; much fan noise
Moderately productive Sunday — set up bitcoin, dogecoin (mined 9 DOGE!), tor and GPG, made best pizza so far and repaired headphones.
Cryptocurrency prediction: the easiest one to use will succeed. Currently it seems to be dogecoin.
It’s not often I come across a cringeworthy wikipedia article, but Educational Technology is particularly bad
@w03_ thanks, and YES PIZZA
Achievement Unlocked: sleep cycle disrupted without crossing any timezones. Back in Iceland again.