About software and adventures on foot.
Always fun when a favorite artist drops a whole album without warning after many quiet years: in this case, Inferno by Boards of Canada. I heard some things. Going to play the album once more and jot down some unedited thoughts. “Introit”. Mid-century futurist optimism, but it’s weak and lo-fi, and promptly obliterated by an all-consuming crescendo of red noise: “Prophecy At 1420 Mhz”. Everything…
The Mac is 40 years old . Like myself, it’s an elder millennial in age and spirit. Time to reflect. My first experience with the Mac was in the middle school computer lab: rows of beige plastic in various flavors of Macintosh LC and Color Classic. In hindsight it was a pretty great lab, well-stocked for a small-town school far from any city and always a decade behind the times. The Macs at the lab…
In which I find an excuse to use the word “unmoored”. Continue
Follow along as we build a fake computer architecture and assembly language from scratch, with a virtual machine/interpreter written in JavaScript. Why? I saw a fun YouTube video that posed the question: “Can you fit a whole game into a QR code?” . Long story short, this intersected with my hobby of dabbling with JavaScript games and game engines and some recent reading about 16-bit era games…
thinking about another playthrough of Breath of the Wild , with the emphasis on “wild”. as in, “in the wild”. the rules as planned, presented in bullet form because i’m a fiend for bullets: no* fast travel pro display mode the “Stable Rule”. no* use of the following outside of stables, towns, etc.: the sheikah slate map cooked meals. elixirs and individual pieces of raw/toasted ingredients are ok…
So I ran Twisted Branch 100K again. Previously had two finishes, one DNS, and a couple years of just hanging out around the event, pacing, etc. First time doing any sort of long race since 2018, and first time starting this race in six years. Signed up in January on a bit of a whim, wasn’t sure if I could survive the race anymore, let alone match what was very plausibly a long-past period of peak…
Trail Signs, a.k.a. wandering, a.k.a. my biggest ever day in the ADK high peaks. june 2022. on the trail at 4:57 am and the sun is already rising, with endless hours before sunset, not much of a plan, and endless miles of trails to explore. time for an improv session. decided lots of turns on the spot, based on a rough idea of a loop, some peaks to add to my June grid, trails i hadn’t seen yet,…
I’m 100 hours into Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (AoC). I’m having fun! I just finished the main quest and DLC quests, and have over 90% completion overall. Let’s discuss. This review has a single unequivocal assertion: if you haven’t played (and ideally completed) Breath of the Wild (BOTW), stop now. Close your browser tab, go finish that game, and return here a few months older to think about…
Revisited the Dix range on a perfect sunny weekday in mid-August. My first visit was approached from route 73; this time I started at Elk Lake to see it from the other direction. Had a rough idea of a route in mind, some specific things I wanted to see, but largely improvised the details, deciding in the moment where to turn at each intersection. Mainly was just looking forward to a full day of…
In late July, Strat and I did an extended version of the classic Rocky Peak-Giant traversal: starting at the east trailhead in New Russia, traversing Rocky Peak Ridge to Giant, but then instead of descending directly to 73, taking the north trail off the “back” of Giant deeper into the wilderness near Green, and then over Hopkins and Spread Eagle before finishing right in Keene Valley. Or more…
A nice pair of Adirondack hikes in May 2021. My first mountains this year — now that me and my friend Strat are fully vaccinated — and a warm-up for the season while working toward my goal to visit the ADK Hundred Highest. Both of these summits were new to us, as we had only seen a few of the hundred highest outside of the 46 high peaks. We both enjoy avoiding crowds and off-trail adventures, so…
great vibe at the starting line. something you can’t put a price on. most remote exit off a rural interstate, drive up a dirt road to the top of a hill, find the tents, pickups, and camp fire, that’s the race. by the time i had finished the race, you could still count on your fingers the number of cars that had passed the site. colin the nervous new RD. most people there knew each other, and would…
One of the features of my new iOS app Dayly Calendar is the ability to pick a color theme for each of your calendars. The default is a simple black and white theme, but the user can also select a colorful gradient for the calendar background, and some complementary tint colors for the calendar grid and buttons. I wanted to give users the freedom to follow their creativity and make color theme…
This is a very long story. But I don't really know how to condense it. You probably want to skim the first couple of sections and then skip to the end . Update: several friends with whom I shared the day have offered their perspectives on the race: Chris , Dan , Jason , Jeff , Laura , Matt , Rob . Every one of them showed incredible strength and spirit as they fought challenges that I can barely…
API-driven mobile app development requires more than good engineers and the latest technology. Whether your organization is a startup, or an established company expanding into the mobile space, you may be creating the app and API in parallel. The mobile and API teams will need to collaborate effectively in order to launch a successful product. In fact, I would say that communication and teamwork…
A problem lately: I start running, and within five minutes or so, I start thinking about a title or description for my online training log . I should be paying attention to the run itself, my body’s performance, the state of hydration and nutrition, monitoring aches and pains or enjoying a rush of energy, checking how this all relates to the day’s training goals. But it is too easy to drift off…
Compression of HTTP requests (not responses) is uncommon, so when I needed to support this in a ServiceStack application, I found it difficult to scrape together comprehensive information about how to implement and test compressed request handling. This post collects in one place everything you need to to know. What does a compressed HTTP request look like? Compressed HTTP requests are the…
While working on an iOS app, I found myself writing some NSCalendar extension methods such as beginningOfDay(relativeToDate:) , thinking that the NSCalendar class was a little lacking. Then I stumbled upon some undocumented NSCalendar methods that accomplish exactly what I was looking for. These methods are not yet mentioned in the latest iOS and OS X documentation, though they were added to the…
Minimum viable product (MVP) is often used in agile development to describe the first major milestone of new software projects. Both at my day job and in my personal projects, we try our best to realize this ideal of shipping a usable product to key stakeholders as soon as possible. But how often do we really accomplish this? MVP can be a challenge to realize with any type of project. At one end…
The final week of my participation in the 28-day stand up and work challenge has come and gone. Overall it was a great success. Observations: week four Day 16 , 192 minutes. To ensure that each day’s goal is met this week, I am committing to a schedule of standing three times each day. Last week , I missed the target on a couple of days by losing track of time. Day 17 , 204 minutes. I wasn’t much…