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Dec 18, 2024: I enjoyed this video by Stewart Hicks on how the joining plate led to cheap trusses and ultimately the proliferation of McMansions in suburbia. So …
Dec 14, 2024: The first sunny day after two weeks of snow ❄️
Nov 26, 2024: You can’t tell your own stories if you’re too busy refuting the terrible stories told by others. You have to give yourself both the space—and the …
Nov 23, 2024: Watched Stay the Night with Andrea Bang. 🎬 We loved the thoughtful take on the rom com and coming of age genres. And perfect Toronto vibes.
Nov 10, 2024: My Old Ass 🎬 with Aubry Plaza and a Canadian cast surprised with the hard-hitting sentimentality of embracing the present and accepting the future …
Nov 8, 2024: Started reading Handmade by Gary Rogowski because, until yesterday, it was free on Audible. 📚 I struggled through the start where he proclaimed he …
Oct 16, 2024: Breakfast with Nikki
Oct 6, 2024: With great excitement we just started reading: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Tj Klune 📚 It’s a prequel to the classic The House in the Cerulean Sea.
Oct 6, 2024: Finished reading: I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue 📚 A lovely office rom-com about finding empathy for yourself and others. Set in Calgary. …
Oct 1, 2024: Currently reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 📚 🐈☕️
Sep 26, 2024: Finished reading: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick 📚 I thought this was a great primer on where we’re at with AI and what it can do for us. For the …
Sep 26, 2024: Jason Bent has a video tutorial on making a mortise and tenon with the Shaper Origin. I’m starting to think that (money aside) this isn’t a terrible …
Sep 25, 2024: I’m loving the upgrade from the 12 Pro camera to the iPhone 16 Pro. Portrait mode-ing all the things. I’ve been using the “Natural” photo styling a …
Sep 25, 2024: Quick update on the iPhone transfer saga. The iPhone 16 Pro still crashed and behaved oddly. I ended up doing a clean restore, this time transferring …
Sep 21, 2024: The camera control “button” is interesting. I don’t feel at all fast using it yet, like I do with the physical controls on a Canon, so I assume I need …
Sep 21, 2024: The initial upgrade process to the iPhone 16 was weirdly buggy. After iCloud transfer from the old phone, it’d freeze up randomly. It turns out there …
Sep 18, 2024: Finished reading: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚 It starts out nerdy, but grows into a profound message about the social role of public …
Sep 18, 2024: I’m starting to dig in on the new OS features. One peculiarity of Sonoma is that my cursor won’t be visible on wake or sometimes when …
Sep 13, 2024: Today’s a very expensive day. iPhone preorder, then off to Hunter Douglas to get better and safer blinds for the nursery. Adulting.
Sep 13, 2024: After some paper prototyping I chickened out and didn’t get the Max size as discussed. The size of the 12 Pro I’m used to is too good. And there’s a …
Sep 12, 2024: I think I’ll order an iPhone 16 Pro Max oddly enough after realizing that my 12 Pro does most of what I want except for the battery life. Go all-in on …
Sep 9, 2024: I’m kind of relieved that there’s no Air Pod Pro 3 or Apple Watch Ultra 3 in today’s event. I love that Apple made my existing ones better in software …
Sep 9, 2024: With a kid on the way, iPhone 16’s dedicated camera control button is perfect timing.
Sep 7, 2024: I just wanted to know about the new feature in Unread It was a quiet overcast Saturday morning. As I sipped my coffee and perused the Globe and Mail, I noticed I had a weekly roundup email from …
Sep 6, 2024: No typing allowed after noon on a Friday. 😻
Sep 6, 2024: We finished All This and More by Peng Shepherd the other night.📚 Doing a choose-your-own-adventure was an interesting device that definitely worked …
Aug 23, 2024: GitHub’s . keyboard shortcut for launching into a web-based VS Code (with your own theme & settings if you sync them) of any repo is such a …
Aug 22, 2024: I’ve been kayaking this summer and dreaming of building my own light and nimble skin-on-frame kayak. A thousand hands ago, a lovely little documentary …
Aug 19, 2024: Ben Strano has a great video about parametric modelling in Fusion 360 and using a 3D printer to make mortise templates of different sizes. I’ve been …
Jul 29, 2024: After a long time away, I had my first kayak outing of 2024 in Georgian Bay this morning. First I spotted a little mink scurrying on the shore while …
May 14, 2024: Some of my shots of the weekend’s Aurora display and how it played off trees and the Georgian Bay. I took these with my hand-me-down Canon 5D …
Nov 6, 2023: I’m thoroughly impressed with the work at ESASky has done. Go to sky.esa.int/. Lots of smart features for getting data across multiple …
Nov 3, 2023: At Rubin Observatory, I’ve been building a documentation platform that has enabled hundreds of scientists and engineers to communicate their …
Sep 13, 2023: Here’s a great video primer on heat pumps. Using CO2 as a refrigerant and integrating a heat pump with a water heater as a thermal battery is …
Sep 1, 2023: My neighbours are about to imminently tear down and rebuild their house. Today I noticed that several big, beautiful, and healthy trees are marked for …
Jul 22, 2023: This is my life now.
Jul 22, 2023: So happy for Lewis Hamilton to snag that pole position today. Never give up!
Jul 9, 2023: Based on In the Lives of Puppets I named my Mac Studio “Rambo.”
Jul 9, 2023: Finished reading: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune 📚 TJ is a master of creating deeply moving stories that have adorable quirky characters.
Jul 7, 2023: No smoke; Sun’s out; light breeze and 22 degrees. It’s a miracle.
Jul 4, 2023: Never in my life would I imagine a Star Trek episode that involves shoplifting from a Roots in Eaton Centre, Toronto. ❤️🍁🖖 S2E3 Star Trek: Strange New …
Jun 29, 2023: This is what a snow day looks like if you’re a developer.
Jun 23, 2023: This is a cool dotfiles repo for Mac. I keep dotfiles for unix-y stuff, but hadn’t considered it for macOS settings and even a homebrew install …
Jun 22, 2023: My new Mac Studio arrived! This is my first desktop computer since the 2008-era Mac Pro I had in grad school. It’ll also be my second M-series …
Jun 22, 2023: Hacking push notifications for deliveries on the iPhone My Mac Studio is arriving soon 🎉 and I need to sign for it. The problem is I’m usually working in the basement with headphones. My house …
Jun 20, 2023: tree.nathanfriend.io is a little website/app that generates an ASCII file tree from indented text (like a mock of the tree CLI). I make these diagrams …
Jun 19, 2023: I ordered a shed today from a website. It’ll be built to my specifications and installed by skilled humans in a few weeks. We truly live in an age of …
Jun 19, 2023: The rainbow pride waffles from Planted in Hamilton Ontario are pretty awesome 🌈
Jun 14, 2023: A consistent problem I have with my development workflow is knowing that I did something before, but not exactly where. What repo did I do that in? …
Jun 13, 2023: Here’s what I’m going with: Mac Studio M2 Max (12 core, 38 core GPU) with 2TB storage and 96GB RAM. I hate closing windows and quitting …
Jun 12, 2023: Between going 100% indie with my software company, my MacBook Pro 2019’s fan’s screaming incessantly, and Apple dropping the M2 Mac …
Jun 5, 2023: I have visions of coding and taking Zoom calls from the lakeside. Sign me up!
Jun 2, 2023: Did anyone else get the Ulysses app newsletter on May 31st? I hope it’s a prank because yuck! gross! In the meantime, I’ve pulled my App …
Mar 28, 2023: I’m writing a technical note with GitHub Copilot enabled for the first time and it’ll suggest a fact about something and I’m like …
Mar 5, 2023: Thank goodness for Fernando Alonso who might just distract the Formula 1 2023 season from the monotony of another Verstappen / Red Bull sweep.
Mar 1, 2023: GitHub is killing it with the new new code view and search. The confluence of GitHub and VS Code is amazing. Colour me surprised, but Microsoft buying …
Jan 23, 2023: I finally used Python’s Walrus := operator to clean up a hacky situation. Maybe I could be more proactively finding uses, but it was fun to have an …
Jan 6, 2023: Last eggnog of the season 😢
Jan 6, 2023: Finished reading: Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik 📚It’s kind of an old-school adventure novel. But with dragons that have the temperament of cats.
Jan 6, 2023: We finished watching Orphan Black 📺 last week and I just gotta proclaim: wow. Tatiana Maslany played 14 different characters, sometimes in the same …
Dec 20, 2022: Apparently storm chips are a Newfie thing but they work great for Ontario snow storms too.
Dec 20, 2022: Here’s a maple plywood feature wall I made for my workshop. 🪚 This will be the future home of my tool chest, some shelves for things like saws …
Dec 15, 2022: I created a widget with Up Ahead for the latest Rubin Observatory milestones. It’s happening folks!
Dec 13, 2022: I just got into the beta for Reader by the Readwise folks and just a few minutes in I’m already astounded. It’s your read-later, but also …
Dec 8, 2022: The timeline isn’t settled. The @-mention isn’t settled. Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again! Robin Sloan’s A Year of New Avenues speaks to the …
Dec 8, 2022: Inspired by @rosemaryorchard and @heyscottyj on Unnested Folders #90, I figured out how to create a “Personal Automation” in the Shortcuts app that …
Dec 7, 2022: I’m kind of surprised about Amazon Prime’s redesign with black on blue. I’m sure they ran a contrast checker but I feel a white on blue is the …
Dec 5, 2022: Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 3) by Naomi Novik 📚 We really enjoyed the series, and I loved how the third book …
Dec 1, 2022: Via Mac Power Users #668 I found out you can follow YouTube channels in most RSS services. I’ve always wanted a distraction-free way to follow …
Dec 1, 2022: November 2022 in review I missed the review for October, but I’m getting back on track. I’m finding these reviews, even if I’m the only person who interacts …
Nov 30, 2022: So why do my colleagues often pray whenever I answer their question on Slack? 🙏
Nov 27, 2022: People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use — Andy Matuschak via Maggie Appleton. 💬 i.e. what works for …
Nov 26, 2022: On the PKM beat, it seems like Apple Books in iOS 16 doesn’t permit exporting a book’s notes and highlights anymore (you can only share one …
Nov 25, 2022: This new Interactive guide to flexbox by Josh Comeau is so good. Hopefully it’ll click in my head now… I’ve been using flexbox for …
Nov 24, 2022: Currently reading: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte 📚 I’ve slowly been adopting DEVONthink for project notes and reference material for work, …
Nov 9, 2022: It’s really cool to see how GitHub Codespaces and science platforms like Rubin’s are all working towards the same goals of reducing set up …
Nov 7, 2022: One of the surprising things I’ve learned after moving back to Canada is brokerage fees when buying things online from the US. The brokerage …
Nov 4, 2022: Another new-ish gem in the Sphinx ecosystem, sphinxcontrib-mermaid makes it easy to drop Mermaid diagrams-as-code into docs, even Python docstrings.
Nov 4, 2022: The Sphinx documentation ecosystem is getting better and better. Latest example: autodoc_pydantic drops in for documenting Pydantic schemas. 🥳
Oct 27, 2022: Can I admit something? I haven’t yet given Taylor Swift Midnights a proper spin yet. The whole week has been Carly Rae Jepsen The Loneliest Time on …
Oct 5, 2022: September 2022 in review Doing the work September was all about shipping the new system for Rubin Observatory user guides in Documenteer. When I first started working on …
Sep 30, 2022: Embracing the last bits of summer up here.
Sep 28, 2022: I’ve been working on my tool chest this week and installed these two tier tray runners in white oak.
Sep 2, 2022: In retrospect I should have paid more attention to knots when I was roughing out the feet for these saw horses 🙃 The Wood Owl bits didn’t care though, …
Sep 1, 2022: I’ve started to use the pydata-sphinx-theme for our next generation of Rubin Observatory documentation sites. Still needs more tweaks, but …
Sep 1, 2022: August 2022 in review August is an odd month. It’s both the height of summer while also feeling like the end of summer up here. Doing the work This month, I got back …
Aug 26, 2022: Seven bees in this one sneeze weed. Our rewilding is working!
Aug 23, 2022: Finished reading: The Book Of M by Peng Shepherd 📚 It felt coincidental to read this right after The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, …
Aug 16, 2022: A sunrise from a couple weeks ago that I got around to HDR stacking.
Aug 15, 2022: I’m kicking the tires on VS Code for web dev (vim+tmux user since… gosh, when did TextMate start to fall apart?). This tip for navigating …
Aug 14, 2022: Penetanguishene
Aug 11, 2022: I nailed together the sides of my tool chest. Used 6d (2 inch) cut nails with 2 mm pilot holes. Lots of clamping helped keep things aligned and …
Aug 9, 2022: Finished reading: Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall 📚 I sped-read this over the weekend on Amanda’s recommendation. Devestatingly adorable and …
Aug 6, 2022: Amanda’s purple coneflowers are a hit with the bees.
Aug 5, 2022: Shopping in the lettuce aisle.
Aug 5, 2022: Finished reading: The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Penguin International Writers) by Haruki Murakami. Found this book from a Carly …
Aug 1, 2022: July 2022 in review This is the first edition of what I intend to be a monthly round-up of the month. I’m doing this a bit for you — to keep tabs on what I’m …
Jul 29, 2022: Strimzi Registry Operator 0.5.0 released for Kafka We just released version 0.5.0 of the Strimzi Registry Operator (see release notes). Strimzi Registry Operator helps you run a Confluent Schema …
Jul 27, 2022: A little father-daughter woodworking moment. 🐱🪚 Emma likes shavings… especially the long stringy ones from rounding off edges.
Jul 26, 2022: TIL you can create Note and warning admonitions in GitHub Flavored Markdown github.com/community…
Jul 25, 2022: httpie and GitHub Actions I love httpie as an alternative to curl. It feels fresher, and is built for working with today’s HTTP APIs. Anyways, I was using httpie’s …
Jul 19, 2022: The fact is that one of America’s two major political parties appears to be viscerally opposed to any policy that seems to serve the public good. …
Jul 18, 2022: Embracing the pyproject.toml future of packaging Python projects with setuptools Last week I worked on a new template for PyPI python projects for SQuaRE, my team at Rubin Observatory.1 One of the banner features in this new …
Jul 18, 2022: The Penetanguishene outer harbour last night, dressed up in the setting light.
Jul 14, 2022: Onboarding into a public cloud project: enter your email and credit card info (or have your team lead click an invite button). Onboarding into a gov …
Jul 13, 2022: Finished reading: The Cartographers: A Novel by Peng Shepherd 📚 I loved this book so much, and am glad I learned about it by chance from …
Jul 5, 2022: Jira can be rough compared to GitHub issues; but it’s the backbone of Rubin work tracking. I’ve discovered how to use @draftsapp for Mac/iPad/iOS to …
Aug 2, 2021: I’ve been reading Architecture Patterns with Python. Every chapter they introduce a new issue, and I’m like “yes, that’s an architectural problem I’ve …
Jul 22, 2021: I’ve been using Pydantic and FastAPI a lot lately and I’m struck at their lack of API docs (compared to most Python package docs). Its as …
Jul 20, 2021: Rethinking the social web in 2021 Facebook was fantastic as a college kid: it was just an exclusive club for your an your dorm mates. Then everyone got on Facebook and the content …