Hello hello! Today is April Cools, which is like April Fools but for posting stuff outside what you normally write about instead of unfunny jokes. Hope you enjoy!
I want to eat more salads, but:
- Viral and bacterial outbreaks come up pretty regularly in the US food system. I don't feel super paranoid about produce where you can wash or avoid eating the skin, but I feel worse in cases where usually you eat the whole plant.
- Large-scale farming techniques sometimes seem pretty dubious, even in products labeled as organic.
- Because of how our food system is set up, produce is regularly transported hundreds of miles before being consumed.
Luckily for me, doung hydroponic gardening at home in my basement is a way around this:
Keep Reading (9 minutes) →The second thing-a-month project is a "random time tracker" I'm calling tinyping.
It works a bit like TagTime and is good for getting a better awareness of moods and how I (and others) spend our time.
There are two big challenges here for me:
- Understanding enough of the statistics to get useful results. I think I've already go an OK understanding, but this will test that assumption. However, it looks like the underlying math is actually fairly simple! (1, 2)
- Building something that can ask for discreet updates in enough places to be useful. This probably means making a native app of some kind eventually to use the right notifications APIs.
I started this in March and continued into April with the goal of getting something usable by the end of the month.
This and 11 other projects →latest micropost: elm-duet
Just a little update on tinyping: I have a system that mostly works! Yay! It doesn't do reporting, but it'll alert you about new pings correctly.
This actually doesn't feel like a huge win to me because it's so, so messy. I'm still using Automerge for this, and I think it's a solid decision, but taking the distributed nature of the system into account while building this has been both tricky and instructive.
Keep Reading (3 minutes) →