I fell off the blogging bandwagon just as everyone else was hopping onto it.
…
I was just thinking the same! It felt like everybody and their dog did Bloganuary last month, meanwhile I went in the opposite direction!
Historically, there’s been an annual dip in my blogging around February/March (followed by a summer surge!), but in recent years it feels like
that hiatus has shifted to January (I haven’t run the numbers yet to be sure, though).
I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, for me at least. I write for myself first, others afterwards, and so it follows that if I blog when it feels right then an
ebb-and-flow to my frequency ought to be a natural consequence. But it still interests me that I have this regular dip, and I wonder if it affects the quality of my writing in any way.
I feel the pressure, for example, for post-hiatus blogging to have more impact the longer it’s been since I last posted! Like: “it’s been so long, the next thing I publish has to be
awesome, right?”, as if my half-dozen regular readers are under the assumption that I’m always cooking-up something and the longer it’s been, the better it’s going to be.
Take a look at the map below. I’m the pink pin here in Oxfordshire. The green pins are my immediate team – the people I work with on a
day-to-day basis – and the blue pins are people outside of my immediate team but in its parent team (Automattic’s org chart is a bit like a fractal).
I’m the pink pin; my immediate team are the green pins. People elsewhere in our parent team are the blue pins. Some pins represent multiple people.
Thinking about timezones, there are two big benefits to being where I am:
I’m in the median timezone, which makes times that are suitable-for-everybody pretty convenient for me (I have a lot of lunchtime/early-afternoon meetings where I get to
watch the sun rise and set, simultaneously, through my teammates’ windows).
I’m West of the mean timezone, which means that most of my immediate coworkers start their day before me so I’m unlikely to start my day blocked by anything I’m waiting on.
(Of course, this privilege is in itself a side-effect of living close to the meridian, whose arbitrary location owes a lot to British naval and political clout in the 19th century: had
France and Latin American countries gotten their way the prime median would have probably cut through the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
2. Language Privilege
English is Automattic’s first language (followed perhaps by PHP and Javascript!), not one of the 120 other languages spoken
by Automatticians. That’s somewhat a consequence of the first language of its founders and the language in which the keywords of most programming languages occur.
It’s also a side-effect of how widely English is spoken, which in comes from (a) British colonialism and (b) the USA using
Hollywood etc. to try to score a cultural victory.
Languages self-reportedly spoken by Automatticians, sized proportional to the number of speakers. No interpretation/filtering has been done, so you’ll see multiple dialects of the
same root language.
I’ve long been a fan of the concept of an international axillary language but I appreciate that’s an idealistic dream whose war
has probably already been lost.
For now, then, I benefit from being able to think, speak, and write in my first language all day, every day, and not have the experience of e.g. my two Indonesian colleagues who
routinely speak English to one another rather than their shared tongue, just for the benefit of the rest of us in the room!
3. Passport Privilege
Despite the efforts of my government these last few years to isolate us from the world stage, a British passport holds an incredible amount of power, ranking fifth or sixth in the world depending on whose passport index you
follow. Compared to many of my colleagues, I can enjoy visa-free and/or low-effort travel to a wider diversity of destinations.
Normally I might show you a map here, but everything’s a bit screwed by COVID-19, which still bars me from travelling to many
places around the globe, but as restrictions start to lift my team have begun talking about our next in-person meetup, something we haven’t done since I first started when I met up with my colleagues in Cape Town and got
assaulted by a penguin.
But even looking back to that trip, I recall the difficulties faced by colleagues who e.g. had to travel to a different country in order tom find an embassy just to apply for the visa
they’d eventually need to travel to the meetup destination. If you’re not a holder of a privileged passport, international travel can be a lot harder, and I’ve definitely taken that for
granted in the past.
I’m going to try to be more conscious of these privileges in my industry.
What happens when you give Gutenberg and Elementor to complete Beginners? In this challenge, Meg and Lily (two of my daughters) are tasked with re-creating a webpage. They’ve never
used Elementor or Gutenberg before, and I only gave them 30 minutes each.
…
Jamie of Pootlepress challenged his daughters – who are presumably both digital natives, but have no WordPress experience – to build a page to a specific design using both Gutenberg and Elementor. In 30 minutes.
Regardless of what you think about the products under test or the competitors in the challenge (Lily + Gutenberg clearly seems to be the fan favourite, which I’d sort-of expect because
IMO Gutenberg’s learning curve is much flatter that Elementor’s), this is a fantastic example of “thinking aloud” (“talkalong”)
UX testing. And with (only) a £20 prize on offer, it’s possibly the best-value testing of its type I’ve ever seen too! Both the
participants do an excellent job of expressing their praise of and frustration with different parts of the interface of their assigned editing platform, and the developers of both – and
other systems besides – could learn a lot from watching this video.
Specifically, this video shows how enormous the gulf is between how developers try to express concepts that are essential to web design and how beginner users assume things will work.
Concepts like thinking in terms of “blocks” that can resize or reposition dynamically, breakpoints, assets as cross-references rather than strictly embedded within documents, style as
an overarching concept by preference to something applied to individual elements, etc… some as second nature once you’re sixteen levels deep into the DOM and you’ve been doing it for years! But they’re rarely intuitive… or, perhaps, not expressed in a way that makes them intuitive… to new users.
Hashpoint looks like it’s close to the banks of Chill Brook, in the grounds of Twelve Acre Farm. There’s been a lot of changes to the land around here recently owing to the ongoing construction of a new solar
power plant on this land.
Based on planning documents I saw when visiting a presentation about the proposed construction at South Leigh Village Hall last year, I believe the hashpoint is probably
outside the new security fence that’s proposed. I’ve marked the anticipated location of the hashpoint on the diagram below:
Work-permitting, I plan to cycle out to the trailhead at 51.7774,
-1.41957, lock my bike to the “public footpath” sign, cross the footbridge to the East, and trek out to see if the hashpoint itself is accessible. Not sure when I’ll find time,
though: it’s a busy week for both work and home life!
Expedition
I was really sceptical that I’d be able to make it to this hashpoint: with so much construction going on near the GZ and the fact that it
seems pretty ambiguous whether the hashpoint would be inside or outside the fence. With no reliable maps yet existing of the area covered by this new power plant (the best I could find
were planning documents, which did not have accurate grid references but instead used field boundaries as markers), I knew from the outset that it could go either way.
After dropping the kids at school I cycled past my house and on, through South Leigh and up to the start of the footpath that runs closest to the new construction. I locked up my bike
and continued on foot, at least slightly awed by the scale of construction ahead of me: this new solar power plant feels pretty massive! Diverting along the edge of the new fence that’s
been erected to mark the boundary of the Northernmost part of the site, I was delighted to discover that the hashpoint was very-definitely outside the site itself: fantastic! I
reached the GZ at 09:20, then turned around to head back home to work.
I shot the whole expedition on video, which I’ve condensed to a 3 minute 19 second video you can watch below. Apologies for the wind noise.
The comprehensive @id3 v2 system for #MP3 metadata doesn’t seem to have an “explicit content” flag. I’m using an experimental XRAT frame (with a ‘1’ or ‘0’) for now, but I
wonder if anyone’s already “solved” this in a better way?
Of course, you don’t strictly need a digital wallet to use EGX. But as we’re in a culture where people invariably ask “is
there an app for it?”, I thought I’d make one.
You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet
connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?
Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:
Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features
unique to Emma Goldcoin include:
Using it doesn’t massively contribute to energy wastage and environmental damage.
It doesn’t increase the digital divide by helping early adopters at the expense of late adopters.
It’s entirely secure: it’s mathematically impossible to “steal”EGX.
Emma Goldcoin is so simple that you don’t even need a computer to use it: it “just works”.
Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what
those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!
EGX fixes all the problems with all the existing cryptocurrencies once and for all. In particular it fixes the problems around security, environmental impact and ease of use that
beset all other known blockchain-based cryptocurrency offerings.
Security
Due to the unique way in which the EGX blockchain is constructed, EGX cannot be hacked and will never be hacked. Period. There are and never will be any security issues with EGX. No
other cryptocurrency on or off the planet can claim this.
Environment
Whether based on Proof Of Work or Proof of Stake, all other blockchains have a non-negligible and non-zero environmental impact. EGX however is based on neither of these. Instead it
is based on Proof Of Existence, described below. PoE has a minimum environmental impact that is provably zero. Individual EGX implementations may have greater environmental impact
than this, but that is entirely on the implementor. EGX PoE can be as low as zero if you wish, and we can prove this.
Ease Of Implementation
Due to its unique properties, no other cryptocurrency is or ever will be easier to implement and work with as EGX. This is not an empty claim – again, we can prove this.
…
Now here’s a cryptocurrency I can get behind. Shut up and take my money!
Not the first place I looked! Came out this way, this morning, to find the nearby 2021-12-22 51 -2 geohashpoint (it’s
about two kilometres West of this GZ) and, during my return journey, noticed that this cache was close by. TFTC.
I’m going to be going half way here anyway on an errand. Might as well enjoy a morning hike and expand my Minesweeper grid, if I can.
Expedition
Given that I was driving half way from home to this hashpoint to run an errand anyway, I figured I might as well push the battery on the EV a little further. Coming over the
graticule line would, if successful, expand my Minesweeper score, and as it’s such a
beautiful frosty morning it seemed like great conditions for a bit of an explore.
I’d hoped to drive most of the way to the hashpoint and only walk a short distance, but I soon discovered that the nearest road is signposted as being for access to Syde Farm only (and
is narrow enough that passing a vehicle coming the other way would be extremely awkward), so I parked up near geocache GC1WXE1 and hiked along a frozen bridleway to get closer to the hashpoint.
Reached the hashpoint around 10:15, turned around, and headed back, nabbing the geocache on the way. By the time I reached the car my hands were freezing and it was only as I returned my GPSr to my coat pocket that I remembered that I’d
been carrying my gloves all along.
A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job
Job, Trivia MurderParty, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find
my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.
There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a
few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared
digital party master.
1. Use two computers!
You can use more than two, but two should be considered the minimum for the host.
Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful
for several reasons:
You can keep your video chat full-screen without the game window getting in the way, letting you spend more time focussed on your friends.
Your view of the main screen can be through the same screen-share that everybody else sees, helping you diagnose problems. It also means you experience similar video lag to
everybody else, keeping things fair!
You can shunt the second computer into a breakout room, giving your guests the freedom to hop in and out of a “social” space and a “gaming” space at will. (You can even set up
further computers and have multiple different “game rooms” running at the same time!)
2. Check the volume
Plugging an adapter into the headphone port tricks the computer into thinking some headphones are plugged in without actually needing the headphones quietly buzzing away on your desk.
Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game
play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.
That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear
it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.
3. Optimise the game settings
Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.
Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party
starts.
Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the
game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications
(see below).
Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the
video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.
It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is
worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they
missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.
Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content
switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.
By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.
4. Optimise Zoom’s settings
A few quick tweaks to your settings can make all the difference to how great the game looks.
Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:
Make sure you’ve ticked “Share sound” or a similar setting that broadcasts the game’s audio: in some games, this is crucial; in others, it’s nice-to-have. Use your other computer to
test how it sounds and tweak the volume accordingly.
Check “Optimize for video clip”; this hints to your videoconferencing software that all parts of the content could be moving at once so it can use the same kind of codec it would
for sending video of your face. The alternative assumes that most of the screen will stay static (because it’s the desktop, the background of your slides, or whatever), which works
better with a different kind of codec.
Use “Portion of Screen” sharing rather than selecting the application. This ensures that you can select just the parts of the application that have content in, and not “black bars”,
window chrome and the like, which looks more-professional as well as sending less data over the connection.
If your platform allows it, consider making the mouse cursor invisible in the shared content: this means that you won’t end up with an annoying cursor sitting in the middle of the
screen and getting in the way of text, and makes menu operation look slicker if you end up using the mouse instead of the keyboard for some reason.
Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture
over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!
I first tried to find this cache back in 2018, but the cache container had been destroyed leaving only a
fragment of it left. Today, as I was out on a lunchtime cycle nearby anyway, I decided to come and give it another go. I’d left my primary GPSr at home so I had to use my phone, which for some reason was declaring my position to be about 22m off target (and well into the
fields, based on local aerial photography!) but my memory of the hiding place – coupled with a quick check of the clue – confirmed I was looking in the right place. I don’t know if it’s
hidden higher up now or if I’ve just gotten shorter but it was a bit of a stretch to reach! SL, TFTC.
Saw the notification pop up and thought this was an obvious FTF opportunity, so me and a geokid zipped out and mounted a search. After
about 20 minutes of hunting we double checked hint cache details – only a D2/T1: maybe we’re not on form today. Or maybe something else is amiss: a brand new cache by a cacher with no finds and no (other) hides, with no
description and no hint? Did this perhaps get published prematurely? We’ll come back later in the week for another go, but for now this one’s a sad-face for us.
Geosense sent me straight to this one during a short visit to Stratford. Some fellow volunteers and I stayed at the hotel last night for our AGM and Christmas party and I couldn’t
resist coming out to find this before heading back to Oxfordshire. TFTC.
