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The Old Icelandic Calendar, called Misseristal (translated as semester count), was started in the 10th century, continued until the 01700s, but its shadow lives on today. The calendar was designed to have exactly 12 months of 30 days. That’s 5.25 days short of a solar year. The other unique aspect of the Old Icelandic calendar is that the months always start on the same day of the week. Sólmanuður always starts on a Monday, Heyannir always starts on Sunday. To keep the months starting on the…

Week #803 On Tuesday, we got pulled into a cryptic meeting. No explanation, no obvious meeting invite title. We were told not everyone needed to be on the call and since it was the last day of the month, it felt like it could be trouble! It turns out, a new start-up needs our help. It is a crazy project, with a crazy deadline, but the end-customer is pretty interesting. Obviously, we can’t really talk about it, but maybe after September once it is in the clients hands, we can mention it? A few…

During the Neolithic Era, around 12,000 years ago, humans started to switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture and farming. As time passed and we moved into the Industrial Revolution through to the Anthropocene, we sort of assumed that hunter gatherer way of life is long gone. While for most people, we’re not actively hunting or gathering food, many of us are still in that mindset when it comes to work! Are you a Hunter Gatherer or an Agriculturalist? Maybe neither, but you work for one?…

Week #801 We offer UnOffice Hours. It’s a 30 minute slot for anyone to book and chat with us about anything. On Monday, we had a lovely chat. It’s been awhile since a random person reached out, and it was great to meet some new folks and hear what they’re up too and offer any advice we can. One of the by-products of a lot of experiments, investigations and tests is that we have a bunch of un-used ideas and artwork. This week we looked into Print On Demand services. Maybe we can breathe a little…

We’ve cleaned up the Worldmapper app and have released it for anyone to download. Download Worldmapper for the Vision Pro. Previously, we wrote about Wyld’s Great Globe and how we adapted that concept into an Apple Vision Pro app with the help of team from Worldmapper.org Just because the app is published doesn’t mean it is done. We will continue to evolve the app over time with new maps will be added and old ones updated. Outreach The goal of the project is to be part of the larger outreach…

Week #799 This week we got the green light on a project we’ve been hovering around for a while. We went down to Miami a few weeks ago to demo the prototype, but this week they finally decided to sign the contract with us to productize the software. We’re on the hook now for two years of support and production, but in reality we have a short deadline and then the long-tail of bug fixes, optimizations and more. As part of this project, we’ve move all the code for the app and website into GitHub.…

Introducing the Today I Learnt Database. Over the last few years, each day we’ve been collecting a few ‘interesting’ headlines. We dropped them into a text file and at the end of the year went through everything, converted it to HTML and added some tags. It was an interest, but long process. We always had the intentions of doing something with these headlines! We were fortunate enough to attend NewsFoo a few times. At one event, we met Ben Huh who was starting a new way to consume News called…

Week #797 We started the week off with a few meetings. All our surveys are done, so the team had a meeting to plan some summer projects and what needs improving for next school year. We also met with another friend about some microcontrollers to manage LED strips. Hopefully this will be useful for a potential upcoming project. We’ve been tinkering on our Split-fount camera app for a few weeks now and decided to just release it. For the rest of the summer it is free and you can download SF…

We continue to dabble in unique camera apps. After a bunch of code refactoring, we have a solid base to go from idea to prototype to new app quickly. That means we can experiment with new ideas and see if we like them. Getting into the field and snapping images tells you a lot more than just imaging the possibilities. TL;DR You can download the SF Camera on the iOS App Store for Free until the price goes up September 02026. We have a folder called “Inspiration” which we file away interesting…

Week #795 On Thursday we had an idea for camera filter. It has based partly on Hatch Show Prints and partly on Gradient overlay photos. It is a pretty easy effect to replicate in any image editing software. You have your base image, convert it to black and white, adjust the contrast/brightness to taste. Then on a second layer add a gradient and change the blend mode to “screen”. Even though this is easy to do in software, it is also fun to see it being applied in realtime with the colors you…

For a while now, we’ve been trying to both minimize and optimize our cable and power travel kit. Back in Jan-02025, we wrote Optimized Charging about our attempts to figure out what is the maximum power draw from various devices. Maybe those big power-bricks went over board for most devices. This time we’re back to the opposite direction. We’ve acquired several ‘fun’ bits of hardware that are certainly not premium Apple devices. As such, they are usually USB-C charging ports; thanks to the EU…

Week #793 This week we wrapped-up several surveys that were lingering from March and finished directly pestering high school students and now turned it over to the schools to get the minimum response rate. On Wednesday we started our trip home from Miami. We were there almost a week having meetings, checking-in with friends and quickly prototyping for more meetings. Overall, the meetings went well, it was fun to get out and see Miami, and we made a few new friends. On Thursday, it was a public…

Over the last year or so, we’ve been doing some experiments with spatial images. A spatial image is a single image file, but has a different picture for your left and right eye. These are commonly used in Virtual Reality, but we’re all probably much more familiar with them from the old View Master toys. The View Master was a plastic set of goggles that you inserted a paper disc into that would rotate around to see a set of seven 3D images! It appeared in 3D because the images for the left and…

A busy double weeknote that ends with a trip to Miami for meetings.

Hatena Burger boasts over 270,000 burger combinations. Using some combinatorics, let's see if that's true.

A double weeknote. The first half was stormy, the second half was Easter break.

Camelut is our third experimental iOS camera app - a bring your own filters camera. It takes industry standard LUT Cube files and applies them in real-time to your camera feed.

Another double weeknote. We're still deep in app and surveys, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.