Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Antonio

Espada Aqueduct, San Antonio

The Espada Mission, San Antonio

To dreep, perchance to sleam.

Look what just landed in the tree behind my apartment.

Given that I can get a URL link to pretty much any digital object I may be interested in, and can scan hard-copy documents and take pictures of real-world objects and then link to those, I’m wondering if I could generate a personal RSS feed to use as a universal One True Inbox. Has anyone tried this?

Hey @manton , you seem to do a lot of train travel. I’m thinking of heading out to the Big Bend for a long weekend this summer. Austin to Alpine is about a 6-hour drive. There’s a train but it’s a 16-hour trip. Worth it?

Any Canadians reading this? What do you put in your cars, “gasoline”/“gas” or “petrol”? (This is about word usage, not alternative fuels.) Thanks!

An insightful article about the current state of machine translation and what it suggests about the ways artificial intelligence may impact other domains. Key takeaway: AI is a tool that can change the way work is done and can even have a far-reaching impact on the structure of the market, but it still won’t be replacing human professionals just yet.

I’d rather be writing the software that will replace my job.

Trying to trim a 1.6 million TU translation memory down to 75,000 or so, to leave some room for growth before hitting the recommended maximum of 100k again.

☞ This season is about spinning the flywheel.

Kourosh Dini asks an important question: “What differentiates perfectionism from mastery?

Watching season 11 of The Walking Dead. Starting to root for the zombies.

I find myself trying to spin up three different mostly unrelated businesses plus hit fitness goals plus build a relationship, and maybe even steal a couple of hours now and then for friends, family, and community, all while still tied to a full-time job. I am a madman.

☞ Next week is about agency.

☞ Next week is about engineering.

☞ This week is about momentum.

☞ Next week is about unarchiving SPT.

None of my old Safari web archives from a few years ago will open any more.

Wordle 523 1/6

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

☞ Next week is about making it click.

A few weeks ago I finished Paul Hudson’s excellent 100 Days of SwiftUI course. The next step in getting hired as a developer and/or building an indie developer business while continuing to develop my skills is to start building an app or two.

Since I’m currently trying to lose some weight (so I can fit back into some really nice bespoke-tailored shirts that I’ve, ahem, outgrown), and I’ve only ever succeeded at that in the past via old-school calorie counting, I decided my first project would be an app I can use to log my weight against my food intake. I call it MetaboLog.

Motivation

Besides calories, I want to be able to track macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates) as well as, optionally, micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. To minimize friction, I also want the flexibility to be able both to log known meals with a click and to analyze previously unrecorded dishes from their ingredients.

I’ll be drawing the detailed nutritional data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s FoodData Central database. The data structure from its API — multiple APIs, actually — is quite a bit more complex than anything in a coding tutorial, but I suppose that’s the game I signed up to play.

As of right now I’m at a loss why the JSONDecoder can parse “lowercaseDescription”:“cheddar cheese” just fine, but fails to parse “servingSizeUnit”:“g” within the same chunk of JSON.

Update: the “servingSizeUnit” attribute doesn’t exist for every element in the JSON dataset, so it has to be decoded as an optional String? rather than a plain String. Ahhhhbviously!

In Big Bend Ranch State Park last week