Notes from the Laboratory: October 2022 (and September too)

I am trying this new “thing” of “reporting” what I was up to in a certain time period this year, and monthly reviews just sound like something normal people would do. So bear with me while I am typing up this report.

First of all: PSYCH!!!!111One. There was no September report. You probably totally realise that and knew it and were wondering throughout the month of October what might have been wrong. On the other side, I know you didn’t ;) Talking to a non-existent audience has it’s perks.

Anyway… I had a slight health scare in September and decided in the aftermath that it might be a good idea to re-align some priorities, move some weight (mostly my own) and concentrate on making sure I will be still alive in some years time.

This whole process also lead to me acquiring an unhealthy bunch of gadgets to control, monitor and obsess over my bodily KPIs. I am a proud owner of a Galaxy Watch 4 that keeps me moving, a Withings Body Cardio scale that tells me how fat of a slob I am, and a Withings BPM Core blood pressure measurement thingy that keeps a log of my unhealthy heart. I also did help to kickstart the Ultrahuman Ring on Kickstarter. Lets see what this whole monitoring will bring. I’ll report more about this all in a bit ;]

• kollitsch.de: I reworked the theme a little bit and did much of under-the-hood fixes to the stylesheet (SCSS) setup of the site. I also moved the theme into its own repository, which might be interpreted as a first step to publish it in some form.
• All the other stuff: As always there was a lot of things that I just ignored or let slide. That’s life. I guess.

Shortcuts

A rundown of unread, undone, unlost tabs with useful links and a short note.

First came the bookmarks into the todo-folder, then with the advent of tabs came read later tabs that were left open to be read later by the user™ – at least until the browser crashed the next time to be lost into the data nirvana. Then came “tab groups” that eased the forgetting and loosing even more. What’s left are pages that were bookmarked, tabbed, grouped, and kept with good intentions, but forgotten and which went unread.

Long story short, there is no better time than now to actually read all these maybe useful pages and get the todo-list done.

• Adobe bought Figma, which makes some people nervous. Fret not though, because there are enough alternatives to develop and design websites in a team. One of the contentors to replace Figma as an open source alternative is Penpot. Check it out.

  Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). For all and empowered by the community.

• Dan Hollick wrote a much-linked summary of how QR - codes work. QR is short for Quick Response code and was invented by Toyota to track car parts over the course of their production, did you know that? There is a lot to learn about the code, how it works in general and around missing parts and its great way to cover this with its integrated error correction. Geek out. And if you want to create your own quick QR codes have a look at QR-Code Monkey, which I often use to create quick stylish codes for my customers.