Matthew Kennard

Listening to Bach & Busoni: Goldberg Variations & Other Works by Chiyan Wong 🎵

It felt as though everything was back to normal this morning (even though it most definitely isn’t and won’t be for months) as the traffic taking my son to school was horrendous. The local government must have decided its roadworks season.

We received some very belated Christmas vouchers for chocolate last week. I insisted on something marzipan being added to the order. They’re here!

Just finished listening to “Emacs, Doom, Vim, Lisp & Games - with Henrik Lissner, Emacs Doom Creator”. I say listen as I used Castro’s side loading feature to transform the YouTube video into audio that I could listen to from my podcast player app. youtu.be/LKegZI9vW…

I’ve just used this to help shave 10MB of the size of an app I’m submitting to Google Play by tracking done any large images that my client has snuck through into some bundled resources.

du -ah . | grep -v "/$" | sort -rh | less

Get a list of larges sorted by size on macOS

Listening to Schubert: Winterreise, Op. 89, D. 911 by Roderick Williams 🎵

I’m often testing apps which make use of your location. Whilst I have various scripts to make this less frustrating sometimes it is less effort to just enter the location directly into the simulator. There is no keyboard shortcut assigned by default to setting a custom location. So I’m giving Paletro a try. This gives you a command palette for pretty much any application based off of the apps menu.

So far it is speeding up what I’m doing no end - fantastic! Great to see apps like this regularly appearing on my Setapp subscription.

Regardless of whether this particular device is actually going to make it to market, this is the type of innovation that we should be encouraging via public investment. I can’t see how technologies such as heat pumps are going to be suitable for the house I live in (terraced and 120 years old) which is common across Birmingham and other cities in the UK.

First microwave-powered home boiler could help cut emissions | The Guardian

Listening to Rebirth by Sonya Yoncheva 🎵

On occasion I come across what I can only describe as a lovely surprise - and this album fits that description.

Our children were not cooperative sleepers when babies and toddlers. Whilst my wife bore the brunt of years of our disturbed sleep patterns I don’t miss the early starts and fuzzy days coding on a poor nights sleep. Today has felt like a gentle reminder of those years through a combination of my own early waking over the past few days and unusually premature waking of both little ones. I’m looking forward to being more alert tomorrow.

After a little research this seems to be the only reliable method in CSS of applying a style only to Safari (iOS and desktop browsers):

@supports (background: -webkit-canvas(squares)) {
}

Sunday afternoon maths game - Möbi

The Favourite 🍿 Surreal and compelling

Census completed. Our household is very static in normal times, in what is still a national lockdown even more so. My six year old answered his questions very accurately, my three year old was a little confused by some of them!

I’ve did my first 30 minute Apple Fitness+ yoga session. Around the 22 minute mark it started getting a bit much so I rested in child’s pose until it started looking as little easier. Regardless a good way to start off a Saturday morning.

Continuing our exploration of things not eaten/drunk over Christmas - chocolate sprouts.

My wife and I had COVID over Christmas so only just getting around to opening this.

Listening to Jolas: Ventosum Vocant by Ensemble Accroche Note 🎵

I’ve dusted off my mbtiles optimisation script and updated it to save tiles in either PNG or JPEG format depending on whether or not they have transparency. The result is a reduction from 140MB to 38MB!

Listening to Con-ri-sonanza: Works by Thomas Simaku by Joseph Houston 🎵

The children are asleep, time to return to a Christmas present I’m taking my time over.

Listening to Vivaldi - Paganini - Tartini by Nils Mönkemeyer 🎵

The default method of generating a .mbtiles database in QGIS (generate XYZ tiles) is showing gaps at certain zoom levels. Thankfully the QMetaTiles plugin seems to produce a working database for an offline mapping code. I’m using a historical map supplied as a JPEG rather than another tile source so never come across this issue before.

Useful website with breakdown of users on iOS 14 and 13 App Store - Support - Apple Developer