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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.

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Apple Earnings Q3 – 2022

Apple Q3 Earnings

Tim Cook, on his earnings call earlier today:

Apple is proud to report another record quarter with a March quarter revenue record of $97.3 billion, up 9% from a year ago and better than we anticipated. iPhone, Mac, and Wearables, Home and Accessories had their best-ever March quarter, and services set an all-time record on the strength of subscription growth over the past year.

Jason Snell, Six-Colors:

Apple’s fiscal results are out. The company generated $83B in revenue. Compared to the year-ago quarter, Mac sales were down 10%, iPad sales down 2%, iPhone up 3%, Services up 13%, and Wearables down 8%.”

Services have been a big part of Apple’s strategic plan over the last few years and they are reaping the rewards. According to chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, Apple now has over 860 million subscribers across its iCloud, AppleTV+, Apple Music, Apple News and other services.

MacRumors:

Speaking during Apple’s third-quarter earnings call, Maestri said Apple has over 860 million subscribers, which is an increase of 160 million over just the last 12 months. Apple does not provide a breakdown of subscribers counts per service, but Maestri said growth was strong in offerings like Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade.

Mac sales might have slumped during this quarter compared to last year at this time, but it was last year’s third quarter where so many more people jumped into buying new MacBooks because of the pandemic and as well because of the long awaited arrival of Apple silicon. I’ve been using the M1 MacBook Air since it came out, and typing on this new M2 MacBook Air that arrived earlier today, I’m convinced 1 this one is going to sell even better than the M1.

  1. Disclosure: I own shares of AAPL. Also, this is not investing advice, I’m just excited about my new computer and for the company.[↩]
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M2 Macbook Air

MacBook Air with M2

Ever since my MacBook Pro (2015) screen went kaput a couple of years ago, I’ve been sharing a computer with my wife. Back in March I decided to go all out and ordered a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro with M1 Ultra, but ultimately I cancelled my order and held out for this beautiful completely redesigned MacBook Air with Apple’s M2 processor. It arrived yesterday and as fun as that other computer would have been, I think I made the right decision.

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