Acts of Volition

Best new feature in macOS 27 (Golden Gate): A handy icon in the menu bar to show you how much milk is left in your baby bottle.

I’m an adult and have been for several decades.

Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada at age 92 (the quote is around the 11min mark, but the relevant section begins around 8min30s): “Welcoming people from all over the world, [and] caring for each other, including the weakest in society, is a s…

The Modern Day Typographer is impressive.

If you enjoy some piece of media (a story, a song, an image), and then find out it was created with AI, is it reasonable to have your enjoyment impacted in retrospect?

There’s a tribute album of Smashing Pumpkins covers that has some gems.

I have invented a new rule for swimming at the beach: When swimming at the beach, you can never be the furthest from the shore.

I must have made some good choices in my life, because I have a duck reserved for the harbour run rubber duck race more than a week ahead of Naufrage Harbour Day.

CBC: Underwater images reveal 1st look at Quest, the final ship of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton You want ghosts?

The most difficult position in soccer must be the goalkeeper’s parent.

My friend and colleague at silverorange, Jacky, is a great designer and a great writer.

Saying “I always review what the AI gives me and I don’t let it write for me” is the new “yes, dentist, I do floss every day.”

When playing the New York Times Connections game, it occurred to me that it would be a good band name generator.

I endorse this Countdown Standard proposed by XKCD:

I was talking about sound design for user-interfaces with some colleagues today and remembered this gem.

I’ve been working with the web platform for years – and I was pretty blown-away to be able play my guitar through a website, and have it processed like a vintage amp.

My son is 10 years old and loves soccer.

Every web developer should enjoy this (and if you’re not a web develop, skip it):

We have a saying in our house that’s about our approach to cooking bacon, but it applies in many different aspects of life: Cook the bacon until the fat turns to meat.

I don’t like writing, or thinking, about Donald Trump and everything is presidency represents.

Environment Canada has a new color-based weather warning system.

When we create simulations, we seem to simulate passive consumption rather than active participation.

In our home we some times enjoy some prepared frozen breaded fish.

When you see video of a rocket launch, you hear them talk about “max q.”

You might think someone in their late-forties, like myself, is too set in their ways to change their life.

If you’re anything like me, when you can’t sleep and your phone is too nearby, you might find yourself going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

The further I get through life, the more I realize that most things in live can be seen as trade-offs.

My friend and co-chief-blogger-in-chief over at silverorange, Maureen Holland, has written again this year for the venerable (but evil) HTMhell Advent Calendar.

There’s no sense in making sweeping absolute statements about aesthetics.

My MacBook Pro froze the other day.

Resumability is not a word, but it’s an important concept to me.

Where I’m so fortunate to live, on Prince Edward Island, we have a Net-Metering system for electricity (see the legal act).

It turns out that if you start a stopwatch in the Clock app on macOS, it will keep counting through reboots and upgrades.

I have a pet peeve about people talking about the weather, particularly on the radio, which is where I hear most of my weather-talkin’.

In the world of CSS, there are two different types of spacing between elements: Margin is the space outside of an element Padding is the spacing inside of an element I’ve come to believe that scheduled meetings have MARGIN and PADDING too.

Everyone knows that if you have a truck, you have a social responsibility to help your friends and family move stuff.

The Heavyweight podcast from Jonathan Goldstein is back on a new network after being lost in the shuffle of Spotify acquiring Gimlet Media.

I work hard at my job, but nothing can compare to how hard I will work on redirecting a stream at the beach.

The first day of school each fall is challenging.

This week YouTube started showing me an ad with an obviously (to me) fake video of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney asking people to sign up for some AI program.

Did you know there was a super-group that released an album in 2009 that consisted of: Taylor from Hanson (the MMMbop dudes!)

I learned this week that the Annotations feature in Figma is not accessible for people with free accounts.

I feel that this six second clip of Jason Schwartzman reacting to someone taking too long a drink of orange juice in the movie Mountainhead will come in handy.

You know how in many design apps you can select an object and move it with the keyboard arrow keys?

As a self-declared upper-middle manager at a technology & design company, I have a mantra that I repeat slightly more often than is appropriate: The greatest risk to our company is falls.

My shower-thought today: ChatGPT can write a book for you, but it can’t make you a person who wrote a book.

If you’re still eating Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, you are a fool.

With more LLM-generated text floating around, and this thoughtful post about dealing with people’s AI-‘writing’ output, I’m noticing something about the point of writing.

As someone who helped create a conference called Zap Your PRAM, I’m either supremely qualified or completely unqualified to comment on how well conferences are named.

Naming this is hard.