Such a shame what happened to the brand design of the fashion world.
Such a shame what happened to the brand design of the fashion world.
Fascinating read about the redesign of Wikipedia and the role that prototypes played in it.
The irony of Chat GTP asking me to verify Iβm a human π
Finished reading: Foundation & Empire by Isaac Asimov π
My iPhone has taken to having phantom touches and doing things by itself. It appears it might be time to replace my XSβ¦
Exploring the IBM Design Language is really rather beautifulβ¦
Iβm just gonna get this off my chest here.
I donβt think VR is the next big thing and I donβt think it will be the success everyone seems to be saying it will be.
Finished reading: Diddly Squat: ‘Til The Cows Come Home by Jeremy Clarkson π
I need to stop reading the comments on political things.
I’ve had the app Soro on my iPhone/iPad for ages so I could use shortcuts to play stuff on my Sonos. Discovered last week that it’s also on the Mac and now I can’t stop finding ways to use it! Brilliant app.
Found myself installing Evernote to play with again yesterday. The one thing I’ve always liked about it is how easy it is to get stuff into.
Decided to carry out an experiment. One todo app for work and a different one for my personal stuff. Todoist for work as it integrates better with Microsoft 365 and Things for all my personal stuff. Let’s see how it goes.
Instruction from the doctor: Lose weight your cholesterol is too high. Nothing like a statement like that to make you feel worse about yourself.
A terrible thing has happened. I’ve run out of coffee beans and there’s no time to go buy some before my first meeting of the dayβ¦
Currently reading: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson ππ§
Absolutely love this. I’ll be saving this to return to many times. Go and read Lessons of Design.
May finally have got it working⦠sometimes it takes a vent post to make you reset and look for a different way.
No matter what I do, I can never get tags to work in Jekyll. I’ve followed so many tutorials to try and get tag pages to work, but the plugins never do.
This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to Wordpress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.
It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.
Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.
When I first built this version of my site I started to add tags to my blog posts. I managed to figure out how to display them on each posts page but that was as far as I got. I made a couple of attempts at adding the functionality I wanted to the tags in the form of a page for each tag that lists the post attached to the tag. I wanted people to be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the posts and go to the tag page, and I wanted to list all the tags in use on the site in the archive page.
Finally today I came across this list of Jekyll plugins. In the list was a plugin designed to generate archive pages for years, months, days, categories, and tags. With the aim of todays tinkering focused on getting tags working I limited the archive plugin to just generate the pages for tags. Joyfully it worked first time. It took me some playing around with the templates to get them looking how I wanted, but I had pages generated for each tag and links to each page from the bottom of the posts.
The final task was getting a list of tags on the archive page. It took a lot of googling and faffing but eventually I managed to achieve what I wanted.
Now I just have to spend a bit of time making sure everything is tagged up as I want before I can explore how to make use of the tags in other ways.
First steps playing with Figma today. We’ve been all in on XD for visual design but it seems to be dead and keeps breaking things.
1Password is going to support passkeys. This looks really interesting, might be time to do some passkey research.
Spent a bit more time working on my personal site. I’ve now revived the Jekyll powered blog and plan to keep playing with the site. Need to add a little personality to it but more of the bare bones are there now.
For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.
I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too. Sadly, the outcome more often than not, was abandonment and my site fell into disrepair and neglect.
At the start of 2023 I decided I needed to revive some hobbies. One of the biggest, longest, and most enjoyable hobbies I’ve had has been running my own personal website or blog. So I’ve dusted off my old MacBook Pro and begun to play around once again. It’s been fun and refreshing and I now find myself wanting to write more as well. Having a thing that I’ve built as a home on the web seems to make a big difference in how much I want to write things to publish.
Sadly, using my MacBook Pro (from 2015) has shown me why I wanted to replace it with my iPad. I like the flexibility of the iPad, I can draw on it, I can write on it, I can do nearly everything I want to on it, except code and build a website. But my Mac is showing its age. It can’t run the latest version of macOS which makes me nervous. It means it will stop receiving security updates and apps will eventually not be able to receive updates. I’ve already experienced a couple having to roll back to older versions because they won’t run.
As a result the Apple website has become a place I visit often. The new M2 MacBook Air looks very appealing, but it’s not cheap, and given the current climate, out of reach at the moment. So I find myself eyeing my iPad Pro again. Then I get frustrated that I can’t do what I want to on it, which, when you think about the fact it has been around for over a decade, is kind of crazy that the device is still so hamstrung.
I know that bemoaning the state of the iPad a common theme at the moment, but I’m genuinely frustrated that the device continues to be held back by software deficiencies and design. It’s more than capable of doing all the things I can do on my old MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, but it remains shackled with one hand behind its back. For now I will continue to tinker with my site on my Mac, and then find ways to write and post to this site from my iPad. While I do that I’ll sit in hope that Apple eventually takes off the chains of iPadOS.
Cameron Moll’s problem solving process is very similar to mine. Start with a basic understanding of the problem, and iterate on the problem and the solution.
I wish Sonos would make a proper Mac app.