Featured Articles
2019’s Reading Log
At the beginning of last year, I set myself a relatively arbitrary goal of how much I wanted to read. I then created some artificial constraints as to how I spent my free time, in order to encourage making reading a higher priority. It was a success, and after a couple adjustments to the system of how I do things, and an increase in the goal, I’ve now finished a second year in a similar fashion.
A Better Version of Apple’s Find My Friends
Apple’s Find My Friends (now combined with Find My iPhone as a single app called Find My), Snapchat’s location-sharing functionality, and other similar products all have one major issue: they are focused on sharing your exact location either all the time, or at least whenever you are using the app. This presents two problems in my mind.
Is “Brass and Bass” Music a Thing?
I was recently talking with my friend and fellow web-dev, Ryan about music. He’s got a thing for drum and bass music, and I have a thing for brass-band jazz and its variants. He had come across a song that seemed to fit both of our interests.
A Better Way to Do Tap Pay
Currently, in North America, our credit and debit cards have the ability to do “tap pay”, which is when you old the card up next to or against a receiver device (usually a hybrid that also handles chip and swipe payments) for a brief moment until a notification sounds, and your payment is processed. This is very convenient and finally makes going cashless simpler than handing over a twenty. (I do not wish to promote the idea of a cash-free ecosystem, but this sure is a solid step in that direction.) The simplicity and speed come at a cost, however: what happens if your card gets into the wrong hands?
Encrypted Messenger Showdown
For the longest time, my parents, siblings, wife, and I had a group conversation in iMessage, which helped bridge the hundreds of kilometers between us. It was great. We could arrange times for video calls, share 20 pictures of a random event, brag about how one's weather was better than the other's, and other similarly family-like things that are normal to talk about. It was great because it was a simple process to set up, a platform we were already using, and was decently secure for those of us who care about that sort of thing.
But then my sister went and got a Samsung phone.