Other notes

I found out that Slack shows a "So happy you're here!", "Welcome to the team!", or similar banner on your profile if you set a start date within the last month. I appreciate that there was probably a meeting or two and a combined UI/UX/graphics effort just to make this happen.

Spent ~1 hour figuring out what a hotkey was triggering on macOS: Settings just said it was in use, the only dedicated app I found was outdated, and even disabling SIP to use opensnoop didn't help. Turns out it was in a nested menu all along. Could this please be made more transparent in the future?

I was mildly excited that it was a postal van that slowed down and flashed its headlights to let me cross when I wasn’t even at a crossing. Two things I like in one scene.

A glimpse of my walk yesterday, when I realized DC could be beautiful even while close-ish to a metro station and major streets.

If you don't want to commit to another platform or manually post on multiple sites, this is a quick reminder that cross-posting tools exist, e.g. Buffer.

It doesn't address content engagement, but making content more widely available feels like a good start.

I'm impressed that my grocery delivery, which due to my mistake was left outside on a commercial street with plenty of foot traffic for over an hour (in an open shopping bag!), was completely untouched. +1 faith in humanity.

I appreciate the near lack of advertisements on platform walls of the DC Metro, with a few escalator walls featuring poetry instead. While limited in other ways, this and the lower fares compared to e.g. London make it feel a bit more like a public service than a business to me.

A great take on the promises being delivered (or not) by this Indian government's economic reforms, and favouritism alongside protectionism diverging from the East Asian model.
buff.ly/3Ckdt1s

Apparently Siri does not do bigrams…
(I wasn’t able to reproduce this, to be fair)

Some opponents of direct democracy claim voters may not understand what they're voting on, perhaps true at times, e.g. given the scale and specificity in California (esp. SF) or Switzerland less so. But how well do voters understand how elected legislators would vote on similarly specific laws?

Good start @tfl, although this may be even more useful on trains rather than at bus stops. How does one make this the new ‘Mind the Gap’?

Trying an accountability system with a friend for some life habits with minimal overhead by using a dedicated group chat in which the two of us can each log our activities, hopefully avoiding the trap I’ve fallen into previously of using a spreadsheet which can be endlessly optimized.

A work-in-progress for me: shifting my response to someone describing a situation from suggesting or projecting emotions onto them (“that must have been great/difficult/…”) to just being curious (“how was that?” or “how did you feel about that?”).

Google Maps still displays many ghost Tube trains, at least at unusual hours, despite the TfL app and public API being far more accurate. The ghost trains may exist on the timetable, but you would think Maps could verify with live data considering I wrote a (very minimal) app to do so in a few days.

Now that I’m reviving my blog, I decided to change up the theme and settled on one that seems to tick most of the boxes I was looking for (credit to Tufte). I got it to a perfect score on PageSpeed Insights just by tweaking a few HTML attributes mostly for accessibility. The joys of a static site!

Less than half serious: with the number of cameras on public transport in London, I sometimes feel like TfL is operating a city-wide panopticon alongside transportation.

Underground station in London with several CCTV cameras in foreground

TIL you can enable multiple language versions, such as English (US) and English (UK), for the macOS spell checker. I like this for editing shared documents but also for the more arcane spelling differences where my preferences don’t always line up cleanly with one language region dictionary.

There’s a public herb garden at Kilburn tube station! Unexpectedly cute things and trains are a great combo.

Before and after… the pumpkin axe murderer of Hackney Wick?

Pro tip: It’s a bit surprising how much retail customers can save (50% or more over retail) on most courier shipping services just by buying a label through an online shipping platform, which I guess takes advantage of negotiated prices? The web interfaces tend to be easier to use for non-business customers as well.