Matthew Lang

I am liking the update for iOS and macOS.

Basic Apply Guy’s run of September gradients continues. A great collection of wallpapers, with the last two having a distinct Tokyo Night vibe.

🤧 This autumn’s cold has hit early.

I’m pretty happy not really knowing what Apple released yesterday. What products and information I need to know will eventually trickle down to me. It always does.

Tried Todoist again over the last few days. Still can’t get my head round why projects in Todoist don’t have start and end dates.

A small appreciation post to my wife, Jennifer, as we celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary today.

25 years ago, I stood with you at the altar of St Mirin’s Cathedral and said “I do”.

Little did I know that I’d be here 25 years later, wondering where the time has gone. We’ve had so many wonderful memories. Moving into our first home, the births of our two sons, and so many holidays to Canada that I have lost count. Seriously, I think we could be considered residents of Niagara Falls with the amount of time we have spent there! It really has been the most fantastic time.

We have built a wonderful family and home together, and I hope that the next 25 years are just as exciting and wonderful, and create even more memories for us.

Happy Anniversary, gorgeous ❤️

Nice to see Gina Trapani back to blogging again.

Just discovered that Firefox’s profiles editor now lets you use your own images instead of their range of icons.

I’ve been a bit of a die-hard Anker fan for the last few years. I’ve spent my fair share on chargers from them over the previous few years, and I can’t fault them one bit. The earliest ones we bought are still working and are used to power the LEDs for a few of our Lego Star Wars dioramas.

The same goes for their headphones. I got a pair of Anker Soundcore Life 2 headphones for my 40th birthday. It was only this summer that I finally had to retire them. I replaced the ear pads for them only once during the entire time I owned them. I couldn’t fault them. The long battery life, quick charging, and noise-cancelling feature were beneficial for my daily influx of calls and meetings at work.

With my headphones on the blip during the summer, I started borrowing my youngest’s headphones, Anker Q20i headphones, but I knew the day would come when I would need to get a set for myself.

Last week I purchased a pair of Sony WH-CH520 headphones. All the usual stuff. Bluetooth, multi-device function and over-the-ear style. I can’t wear an in-ear set like AirPods all day. It’s too uncomfortable.

Sound quality is good, and they’re easy to connect to different devices. The multi-device function was a bit finicky and required installing the app, but once set up, it was easy to switch between devices. I have noticed the audio stutters upon initial connection and for a few minutes after it.

I have reservations about the physical side of the headphones. They are very light and don’t feel as solid as my Soundcore headphones or even the Q20i headphones. Also, the ear pads are a lot smaller than Anker’s ear pads, which means they sit on my ears as opposed to over my ears like the Anker ones do. After a couple of hours of use, they are very uncomfortable to wear.

I’ve got mixed impressions about the headphones, so I have decided to return them. The stuttering audio is the main issue with the uncomfortable feeling when wearing them being the other. Yes, the Sony headphones were at the cheaper side of the scale and I do believe you get what you pay for, but the Anker headphones are on a similar price and I do find them more comfortable and the audio has always been faultless.

Just need to wait for the refund and then re-order the Anker ones, so for the moment, I’ll still be borrowing my youngest’s headphones.

Between The Morning Show, Slow Horses, Highest 2 Lowest and The Savant, Apple TV has our television viewing sorted for the next few months.

Started the weekend dropping the boy off at the golf this morning and then doing a CostCo run. Currently pondering my next move with a brew.

Used this JSON sorter to finally tame my rather large VS Code config for work. I can now find related settings once again.

I’m seriously considering getting a cheap laptop to give Omarchy a try.

I can’t see myself using anything else other than an iPhone as a smartphone. However, I’m open to seeking an alternative to the MacBook as my main web development laptop.

I think I’ve managed to get my note banners working so that you can invert them. Going to come back to the changes tomorrow and review them.

Basic Apple Guy’s doing another round of gradients for September. I’ve been using Basic Apply Guy’s wallpapers for a couple of years now. Couple that with the wallpapers posted on r/wallpaper and that’s pretty much my two sources for wallpaper.

Now that Typepad is shutting down, I’m wondering if and where Nicholas Bate will relocate his blog. Nicholas Bate’s blog was one of the first blogs I remember following on Google Reader. It would be a shame to lose it.

Dave Winer, with a preference for ChatGPT, I would also love to see implemented.

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period.

I created some banner images of my own for Apple Notes and Bear this morning, like the ones you can use with the Forever Notes system. Unlike the ones you can download from the resources page, though, mine are a bit more customisable and generate a different set of mountains each time.

I quite like the end result of these.

The other nice thing about them is that the fill colour can be transparent. So in Bear, when you switch to a dark theme, the dark colour comes through the banner. It doesn’t look so great with the light themes, but I barely use them anyway.

Currently, I have two scripts, one for generating a transparent banner and one that generates a banner using a set of colours.

I plan on adding a few more over the next few months. Clouds, hills, snowflakes and skyscrapers could all be generated with random patterns and follow the same convention. I won’t be running a web server to allow others to generate these easily. Generating images consumes more energy than a typical web request, so in the meantime, you’ll need to download the scripts and generate them yourself.

Source code is available on SourceHut.

I’m definitely curious about Omarchy.

As part of my plan to learn React, I’ve been building single-page HTML applications that use local storage to persist any information between sessions. As a start, I built a roulette wheel for our team at work to determine who goes first during stand-up each morning.

I have since moved on and created applications for a technical log, a start page, and I have a few other ideas brewing. The persistence to local storage in the browser is common between all the applications, but I’m trying to build different ways to interact with these applications so that I can learn more about React.

Next week, I hope to develop a replacement for the Excel spreadsheet we use to track our OKR goals at work. The Excel spreadsheet is functional and certainly doesn’t win any prizes for looks. I thought this would be a good learning project to tackle in React, as the formulas we use would enable the page to be more dynamic.

Lots of family adjustments are being made this week.

Ethan’s been going through his inductions, student orientation, meeting team mates, and getting to know his way around campus this week. I’m glad to see he’s settling in nicely at McKendree. He’s got a spot of volunteering today. Classes begin on Monday, the gym opens on Tuesday, and the golf team start preparations and work on Thursday.

The hardest part for Ethan has been the lack of golf this week. He’s only played one round this week, but there’ll be plenty of golf ahead when the fall competition schedule begins.

At home, we’re slowly getting used to Ethan not being around, and I’m glad his brother is still optimistic about the whole situation. Drew has been kept busy with his golf and going back to school.

He’s also looking into a potential new hobby in the form of Warhammer. That may spill over to me as well. I am curious about it. I played D&D during high school, but I haven’t played it since. This might be a nice way back into some elements of D&D, but without having to endure a long-running campaign.

I’ve been trying to find a cheap way to host an HTML page with a bit of React on it that can be deployed just by uploading it with an existing service I use. The React didn’t play too well with Micro.blog’s single page feature. I have a DigitalOcean account, so I uploaded it there for the moment.

Said our goodbyes to Ethan this morning as he heads to McKendree University in Illinois to play as part of their golf team.

It’s been a weekend of ups and downs but mostly tears as our close family of four deals with the prospect of Ethan living abroad for most of the year.

The good thing is he’s back for Christmas for a few weeks and then he’s back in April / May for the start of the golf season.

It’s going to be a great opportunity for him and I’m sure he’ll be a better person and golfer for it once he finishes his four years.

Go Bearcats! 😄

A great night at the golf club tonight, giving Ethan a big send-off before he heads to the States on Monday morning. A fantastic night of food, drink, chat and music. A few tears at the end of the night, but that’s been the way of it the last few days as the big day arrives.

I have a collection of posts in my blog’s archives that mostly contain links with a single image and a comment. A lot of the links for these posts are now returning 404s. I’m tempted to just bring all the images together in a single Micro.blog collection and remove the posts.