Author: Jeff Milner

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20 Years

Today marks 20 years since writing my first blog post. That first post wasn’t much — my brother and I shared a blogger blog and I think we were basically our own audience at that time. I’ve since changed over to this solo WordPress blog and I’ve even added some pre-dated posts with content from before this blog existed but either way today marks 20 years since this whole endeavour started.

And on this 20th anniversary of blog posts, as many other blogs came and went, I can look back and say I’m glad I kept at it.

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The Bad Review Revue

The Greatest Beer Run Ever: “One thing is abundantly clear: Smokey and the Bandit is still, and without much competition, cinema’s greatest beer run. And that movie managed to deliver a whole truckload of beer without doing any disservice to the Vietnam War.” — William Bibbiani, Consequence

Amsterdam: “To describe Amsterdam as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery.” — Kyle Smith, WSJ

Blonde: “If you are hankering for a film where you are a toilet bowl and Marilyn Monroe pukes in your face, this film will not let you down.” — Bob Grimm, Reno News and Review

Luckiest Girl Alive: “[…] no one, especially not the viewer, is lucky.” — Amy Amatangelo, Paste Magazine

The Munsters: “There’s a hint of a decent origin story here but it all crumbles like a vampire at daybreak.” — Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

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Swimming Again

Over the summer I’ve gotten back into swimming. What’s been motivating me most is that I’m actually getting pretty fast again1.

I’m not as fast as when I was swimming for the Pronghorns but I’m feeling good about my progress. My best time this year is a kilometre in 16 minutes and 30 seconds (average speed of 24.75s per length). I’ve been using my Apple Watch to keep track of lengths and while I love that it tracks splits and distance, it seems to need a flip turn in order to register each complete 25m length.

I’m already below my goal of each 50m in 50 seconds but my ultimate goal is a kilometre in 16 minutes flat.

Update: I’ve got my time down to 16:20

  1. Or at least what I consider pretty fast for a 43 year old who was never particularly good at distance swimming.[↩]
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Microsoft’s Next Default Font

Over the years I’ve written a bunch about Microsoft fonts. Specifically my posts about Vista Fonts have long been pulling in random visitors. So I figure I should write about their new fonts:

The five new fonts that Microsoft are proposing as a new default are:

  • Tenorite – by Erin McLaughlin and Wei Huang
  • Bierstadt – by Steve Matteson
  • Skeena – by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow
  • Seaford – by Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, and Fred Shallcrass
  • Grandview – by Aaron Bell

After going back and forth about my favourite, I think Tenorite would be my choice for the new default font. I like the single story a and g as well it’s slightly wider than my next favourite typefaces. I like geometric simplicity with the q being basically circular and the lowercase L having the form of just a straight line.

I was thinking about this and wondering: why hasn’t Microsoft moved forward with picking their new default. The blog post pumping up the idea was posted 17 months ago. They said the change would happen in 2022 and that it would “be evaluating these five directions over the next few months” which, I guess means there is still time but something is amiss.

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The Follower

Using open source cameras and AI, Dries Depoorter created a website that creates clips of the exact moment instagram photos were taken.

From Dries’ site:

How does this work?

  1. Recorded a selection of open cameras for weeks.
  2. Scraped all Instagram photos tagged with the locations of the open cameras.
  3. Software compares the Instagram with the recorded footage.

It makes me wonder what the world will be like as AI begins to enable more and more of these types of projects. It’s exciting and terrifying.

(via Six Colors)

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Diffusion Bee

Homer Simpson depicted as a muppet by Stable Diffusion AI with a floating muppet head beside him

I’ve been watching the emergence of AI image creation tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, Craiyon and Stable Diffusion and I think it’s pretty neat. But not everyone has been happy about our new AI overlords. Art communities and freelance artists have been particularly vocal about their displeasure.

As much as I see there are serious philosophical issues, in the meantime I wanted to try it out and have been delighted at the news that users of Apple silicon Macs can now access the Stable Diffusion engine on their own computers using Diffusion Bee.

Divam Gupta:

Diffusion Bee is the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. Comes with a one-click installer. No dependencies or technical knowledge needed.

  • Runs locally on your computer no data is sent to the cloud (other than request to download the weights and checking for software updates).

It works just fine on my M2 MacBook Air. I’m glad I splurged and got the 24GB of RAM. Because the results can be a bit random, I popped into Photoshop to improve the results of the above “Homer Simpson as a Muppet” prompt. (I’m not sure what the floating head beside him is all about, but I left it because it’s amazing.)

(via Daring Fireball)

Update: I’ve just discovered CHARL-E, another app that utilizes Stable Diffusion to create images on Apple silicon Macs.

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Pinched

A few years ago my wife and I bought a couple of self supporting hammock beds from Costco. It’s been a couple of years since I had them out and the kids were playing outside so I figured I would get one out and rest while I watched over them.

Pulling the hammock onto the support takes a bit of muscle and so this time I figured I would just leave the support not quite fully extended before I attached the hammock. Both kids watched while I slipped my hand under the canvas and snapped the frame into position. It needed quite a bit of pressure pushing against the resistance of the hammock but when I finally got it, it pushed passed the resistance into place.

~~~~~PAIN!~~~~~~~

I instantly realized I had caught my left ring finger at the last knuckle in a SERIOUS pinch. The resistance was too strong to pull it back out! “OUCH, OUCH, OUCH!” I yelled out keeping it kid friendly. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to pull the frame back out of place. “OUCH, OUCH, OUCH!”

I continued with the kids looking on in fear. Holy cow, I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was still pinching HARD. I thought am I going to have to send the kids in to wake Andrea from her nap to come out and help me? Was I going to lose my finger? I pulled again.

Nothing. “OUCH, OUCH, OUCH!”

I tried again — nothing.

I took a deep breath and thought to myself, I have to get it this time. I pulled hard and at the same time pulled hard on my finger to try and get it out.

“OUCH, OUCH, OUCH!” Unbelievably, I remained stuck.

And I continued trying — still nothing. The pain was intense.

Ok, one more time and this time I had to get it. I pulled on the bar and at the same time really pulled on my finger to slide it out scraping skin as it finally moved. Slowly, painfully… almost there, “PULL, PULL, PULL!” I said to myself. There was a giant squish mark on my finger, but thankfully no blood. I was finally free.

Both kids ran up to me and shouted, “Daddy, Daddy, are you ok?” and each gave me a hug.

We all walked into the house and a few minutes after putting it on ice I got this photo of my finger.

pinched finger

It’s been a couple days and the surface is still a little numb but, as scary as the whole ordeal was, I don’t think there will be any lasting damage.

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True Facts About Lethbridge (That Sound Made Up)

View showing the one stage of construction on High Level Bridge. The traveller is visible. Area of the river valley also visible.

I enjoyed reading this Reddit Thread of true facts about Lethbridge that sound fake.

Some of the most interesting facts include:

  • Marilyn Manson was puched out in a Denny’s restaurant
  • A city councilor faked her own kidnapping while on official visit to the States then ran away with her lover to Las Vegas before she was found out and caught
  • we renamed the city after some guy who had never been here and never came here after we named it after him
  • A girl dressed like a storm trooper was arrested on May the 4th because she had a blaster
  • Members of a Biker gang murdered some other bikers in a house in the London Road neighbourhood back in the 80s and the bodies ended up in a meat processing plant

These similar fact threads for Disneyland and Calgary are also great.

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RSS Feeds for Twitter

Dave Winer:

It is my pleasure to introduce TweetFeed. After you sign up, it’ll start reading your tweets and update your new RSS feed.

The docs are here.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Why now? RSS 2.0 will be twenty years old on September 18. One month from today. I’m working on something pretty big for that day, maybe it’ll be out a bit earlier, who knows. But in the meantime, here’s something new to spark a new use for RSS and Twitter — hooking people’s tweets up to feed reader apps like NewsBlurand The Old Reader.

I don’t tweet an awful lot, but nevertheless here is the RSS feed to my Twitter stream.