www.youtube.com/watch

Twenty Two Years of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May. Sure, Jeremy might be a total jerk, but Top Gear is the reason I have been so interested in cars. Can’t believe it is almost over.

Did I get forget to post about my first app?

For years I have wanted to learn Swift and build an app… and I finally did it!

Introducing ClockBar. A Clock for Vision Pro inspired by Mac menu bar apps.

⏰ Check the time & date

🌥️ Peek at the daily weather

🗓️ Flip through the months

🔋Keep an eye on battery level

I’ve got more features in the pipeline but I couldn’t wait to get this out. Thanks to everyone for helping out and especially to @twostraws for making Hacking With SwiftUI.

$3.99 and out now!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clockbar/id6478404834

This year I’ve been working on improving our camp setup, which I guess mostly means spending money on new things… For the past few years we’ve been camping in a 4 person tent with our 2 ​kids and dog. Our gear takes up LOTS of space in the car (with a roof box) and our tent was way too small for all of us.

At the beginning of the season we decided to replace our tent. We got a Big Agnes Bunk House 8 (8!!!) from Out and Back Outdoors. I hadn’t heard of this website before, but it basically resells returned products and for all we could tell the tent was never used or opened and we got it for 50% off. Good deal. The tent has a divider “wall” (sheet) in the center that basically splits it up into two tents that are the size of our older 4 person tent. This is great for giving us our own space.​

Then I focused on consolidating space. We had 4 tote bags of gear that I dug through and reduced down to 2. One of these contains our kitchen supplies​ - plates, pots, utensils, etc… The other bag has everything else - hammock, camp fuel, lights, matches, a battery pack, etc… I’d still like to find a good bin to replace the tote bags with, but this is working well for now.

Then we did some more shopping.​ Our camp stove took up a lot of space and is quite old, so we picked up a Jetboil Genesis. This is a two burner stove that folds in half. It’s got way more control over the burners than our old stove and takes up much less space. We also have a Yeti Tundra 50 cooler which is also…. big. Our dog shares the trunk with it and I don’t think he appreciates that it fills half the trunk. I just ordered an Oyster cooler. It’s pretty pricey but is basically a thermos with thinner vacuum walls compared to the foam insulated Yeti. It has a smaller overall capacity, but claims that you don’t need to add additional ice (apart from the ice packs). Ice takes up about half the space of our Yeti and adds a ton of weight - so I’m looking forward to testing this out.

So that’s that. As I mentioned, we still want to find a new bin for our supplies​ to replace the 2 tote bags, but we’re really happy with the current setup. It’s about as minimal as we can get and everything has its place.

Since our house was finished up in the winter we didn’t get the opportunity to do any landscaping. Now, 6 months later, we are hard at work. In front of the house we cleaned up the yard and planted a Hydrangea tree to the right of our front door, then we build a flower bed on the other side. Our grass is slowly growing in as well but the clay in our yard is making that quite difficult!

Around back, we’ve been working on build a patio. We decided to keep it simple for now and are putting together a larger pea gravel patio, about 30 x 12 feet! We started digging it over the weekend but then our neighbor felt bad and brought over his Dingo (stand behind skid steer) to help out. Our stone should be arriving soon and we hope to finish building the patio this weekend! Really looking forward to having a nice place to sit and work outside. We also have had an old picnic table with a steel frame and finally bought some work and rebuild the table top. It pretty much looks brand new now.

Plenty more to do, but it has been a lot of fun to make some pretty dramatic improvements around the exterior of our house.

Last month Delta launched on the app store. I have an Analogue Pocket that I use for playing Game Boy games and the launch of Delta has made more more interested in the emulation of other systems. Part of this might just be that I’m getting “old” but I feel like the games that I played in the early 00’s had the perfect amount of content. Games today are too long and bloated and are continually fighting for our attention (and wallets!). I want some simple single player content that I can play through in a few hours!\

I started by looking into other handheld emulators. I love handheld systems (back to the Pocket, my first console was a Game Boy Color) and the idea that I can play my favorite Game Cube, PS2, and even Wii games in a portable system is very cool. After some research I picked up a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. It’s a very tiny Android based system that supports everything up to the PS2 and Wii.\

At the moment, I’ve been mainly playing some of my favorite PS2, PSP, Wii and Game Cube games on the system. I already finished Sly Cooper and I’m working my way through Super Paper Mario and GTA Chinatown Wars. It’s been perfect to pick up and play these anytime I want (but mainly when I’m sitting in my toddlers room trying to get him to fall asleep…).

My BirdNET installed and monitoring

Now that we live in the woods I’m suddenly more interested in learning about what birds are around (maybe this is a natural step in the aging process?). Yesterday I put together a quick little BirdNet monitor that processes audio from a microphone to determine what bird calls it hears. There were a couple instructions that I followed, but it took a few tries to get something functioning.

This is the installation guide I followed
But with the modifications found here
And the Birdnet build here

I used a Pi Zero 2W. Since this has very little RAM you need to manually increase the SWAP before doing anything. Once you get to step 18 (before you start the Birdnet installation). Enter the following commands to increase the Swap.

sudo sed -i 's/CONF_SWAPSIZE=100/CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048/g' /etc/dphys-swapfile &&
sudo sed -i 's/#CONF_MAXSWAP=2048/CONF_MAXSWAP=4096/g' /etc/dphys-swapfile &&
sudo sed -i '/^exit 0/i sudo iw wlan0 set power_save off' /etc/rc.local &&
sudo reboot

Instead of copying the command in step 19 to install Birdnet, use following command:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi/main/newinstaller.sh | bash

The script will take a long time to run, but once it is complete the Raspberry Pi will reboot and you can access the GUI from a web browser. There are a few suggestions for settings to change if using a Zero 2W. I verified the latitude and longitude (they were a little off) in Tools > Settings (the default username is “birdnet” with no password). I also went over to Tools > Services and disabled Live Audio Steaming and Streamlit Statistics. There is quite a delay when clicking around the GUI, so just be patient…

I haven’t received my enclosure yet - so right now it’s just sitting in a box with the microphone at an open window.

Parts List (Total ~$95)

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
• Micro USB to USB Adaptor
• Microphone
• SD Card
• Enclosure
• Audio Adaptor (Plug in the included TRS adaptor too)
• Grommets for the Enclosure
• Raspberry Pi Power Supply

It has been a busy year, but I’m still around. We finished construction of our house last November and are pretty much settled in. There is still some work to do in the basement - and we’ll probably be spending the summer wrapping that up.

In other news, I’ve been learning SwiftUI and have been working on my first app for Apple Vision Pro! It has been a fun, challenging, experience and I can’t wait to release it soon.

I guess Twitter is my main topic here, or X I mean, since that’s definitely what it is maybe called now? Honestly I should probably just stop giving Elon and his antics any attention.

2024 Ferrari Purosangue Review: A Worthy Supercar, Now in Family Size

🎶 “If I had a million dollars” 🎶

Some people might hate this thing. But…. I just love it. It looks great, it’s practical, and it’s fast.

GM’s Ultium Plant Workers Refused to Work Over Battery Safety Fears - Bloomberg

If this equipment is anything like the stuff I worked on while I was at a battery plant I definitely understand the concerns. Operators would need to run equipment with doors open and safety locks removed in order to keep things running as fast as the company needed. The machines were also built overseas and never really met the safety requirements of OSHA. Now I’m grateful to work for an automation builder and would never ship anything like what I saw at my previous job.

Porsche expands Apple CarPlay connectivity that includes climate controls - The Verge

While I'm waiting for the "future" of CarPlay that Apple teased ages ago (ok, I guess it was late year), Porsche is adding some really cool shortcuts to their CarPlay app to control the car without leaving CarPlay. Great to see some automakers embrace CarPlay while GM is abandoning it...

A South Park meme may have inspired Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Polygon

It’s not clear why the developers would decide to call back the old joke now, nor has the team confirmed the connection between the new game and South Park

Incredible

With the recent launch of Threads I thought this would be a good time to go over the social apps that I’m currently using along with what my current Home Screen looks like.

Social Apps

I use two messaging apps, iMessage for most chats (of course) and Telegram for a few group messages between friends without iPhones (of course…).

Similarly, I use two photo apps. Instagram is where I post iPhone and “real” camera photos for friends and family and anyone else who feels like following me. Those posts also forward to Facebook which I don’t really use for anything else. I’m also on Glass where I look for inspiration from other photographers and share a smaller selection of my favorite shots.

Next up is Discord. I initially joined a weird variety of discord servers as part of a few Patreon perks but I primarily spend time on a private server of people that met elsewhere before forming their own community. It’s a great space and everyone is very comfortable discussing pretty much any topic - and it’s where I’ve developed some of my closest friendships online.

Finally, the one that started this train of thought… Threads. Before Threads I was on Twitter for 16 years. From high school to post-college. Twitter Jack was definitely the weirdest Jack most likely due to the time periods that I was there for. Once that started falling apart I jumped ship for Mastodon in late 2022. Mastodon is a cool concept with a lot of great intentions but I struggled to find people to follow and missed a lot of groups and individuals that I had followed on Twitter. Threads definitely solved that problem with the sheer quantity of users that immediately flocked there and it was almost too easy to follow people since it imports directly from Instagram and immediately started suggesting a lot of the same people that I had on Mastodon and Twitter. It’s definitely the popular place now, we’ll just see if it lasts.

Home Screen

So what’s on my Home Screen? I’ve got two widget locations. A stack with Weather and Box Box (a Formula 1 app) on top and Fantastical off to the side. From there I have a lot of the standard apps and all of the ones I mentioned above. Safari, Photos, Maps, Telegram, Discord, Drafts (where I’m typing this), Instagram, Glass, Reeder, and Matter. My dock currently consists of Music, Messages, Mail, and Threads.

Meta unspools Threads - by Casey Newton - Platformer

An excellent interview going over the purpose and status of Threads. I’ll be keeping a close eye on how this evolves.

A month later and I’m still left in awe and with many questions about Apple Vision Pro. It feels like a new type of computing and it could be the next big thing, but it could also be a total flop. The technology looks incredible, but it also seems like it’ll be isolating and not something I’d want to use around other poeple. The EyeSight display looks creepy, but it could feel natural in real use. The price is absolutely ridiculous, but they’ll make it more affordable eventually. I’m skeptical, but I am very very excited to try it out. This might be the future.

Today I’ve been playing around with Threads a lot. I have a lot of concerns about it - primarily the fact that it’s run by Meta and uses an algorithmic timeline, but I’m enjoying it quite a bit. I had many thoughts when Twitter started to fall apart and I’ve been exclusively using Mastodon (Ivory) this year but Mastodon still lacked a lot of the journalists, “influencers”, and other people that I liked to follow. Threads has gotten these people to join instantly and it makes it a much more interesting place to visit. This feels much more like a true Twitter replacement and I’m curious to see how it evolves over the next few months. I’m hopeful that they’ll add a chronological view or at least a followers-only view (I keep getting #brands shoved in my face on the algorithmic timeline) and I’m curious to see if they actually integrate with ActivityPub and let me follow people that might stick to Mastodon (or let me follow people on Threads if I abandon in for Mastodon). We’ll just have to wait and see.

We stop by the lot two times a day and it’s easy to forget to appreciate how much progress has been made in the last two months.

I’m still here, but sometimes life gets in the way. We’re settling into our new life in Massachusetts and our house construction is coming along nicely (targeting moving in ~August or September). Lots of stuff has happened that I wish I spent some more time blogging about. We’ve been exploring New England, I’m still playing plenty of video games, I bought a new camera, and there’s been lots of exciting tech news (Vision Pro!). I’ll be setting a new personal goals once we’re moved in including continuing to learn Swift in order to write my first app and actually posting here in a more reliable manner.

DPReview.com to close

I can't believe that Amazon is shutting down (and deleting) DPReview. It's the best website for anything related to digital photography and I don't even know where else I would go whenever anyone asks for a camera recommendation. I've been considering getting a new camera and even today I've been reading their reviews.

At least some good news, Chris and Jordan are heading to PetaPixel to run their [YouTube channel](https://youtu.be/f6T3qWI2c-Y)

Miniot Wheel 2 review: a unique vertical turntable worth waiting for - The Verge

This is an interesting story about a Kickstarter for a very cool looking record player. I'm not sure I would call it a success yet, but it's definitely a good reminder that Kickstarters are for helping fund creators to build something they're passionate about and not a place to buy finished products.

We’re officially (well, pending a trip to the RMV) Massachusetts residents. Temporarily moved in and now paying close attention to our house progress. 😃

Playdate Catalog

Panic launched their new catalog for Playdate this week. It's great to see this little handheld system grow. I bought a couple of games and so far my favorite is Grand Tour Legends - a simple cycling game with some excellent visual design. The Catalog works on Playdate and web and the interfaces of both are wonderful (you even "crank to buy" on Playdate!). Looking forward to the Stereo Dock next.

I haven’t posted a house update in a bit. Right now the basement walkout is framed and the floor deck is on. Hoping to see the upstairs framed up in the next month!

Tetris Trailer - YouTube

This looks very good and I had no idea Tetris had such a backstory. I love it when things like this come up as a surprise and get released fairly immediately (March 31!).