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Designing, printing, binding, and trimming custom notebooks has been so much fun and so rewarding, from mistakes and problems to testing and refinement. Yes, it is all covered in pink glitter, because kids 💖

A leather notebook cover with an elastic band around it. A metal pen is clipped to the cover along with two binder clips.

The leather notebook cover open to the first notebook, a "13 Week Planner".

The notebook cover open to the "Standard Notebook".

The notebook cover open to the "World Building Journal".

About four weeks ago, I started working on a meditation app for iOS. Despite my background in front-end development and my general curiosity about tech that’s far above my pay grade, I don’t believe I ever so much as opened Xcode until then, and I’ve never written a line of Swift before.

I knew what I wanted to build, what I had searched the App Store so often trying to find: a simple, unguided meditation app that mostly just gets out of your way. It needed to support a basic meditation session (duration, lead-in, start sound, interval chimes, and end sound), continue working when backgrounded/locked, provide ambient audio during sessions, and write Mindfulness Minutes to Apple Health. To be frank, I thought I could do most of this in the Shortcuts app, if it weren’t for it’s tendency to background and lose tasks with longer timers, so I felt confident enough to start researching.

I have personally tried about 12 popular meditation apps, and further competitive research provided insights on user expectations, and what not to build. There’s a clear gap in the market for a solid tool without subscriptions, in-app purchases, “news”, or social media connections.

I started designing and building, following tutorials and example projects, getting a lot of help, and I slowly started to wrap my mind around Swift, UIKit, and iOS development in general. After a few weeks of work, I started beta testing with a few friends via TestFlight.

The journey from a simple idea to an app, working on my phone has been so enjoyable and challenging, filled with both delight and extreme frustration–all of the meditation sessions needed for testing certainly helped, and taught me so much about what made the app feel good to use.

I’ve launched a simple marketing site at bellmeditation.app. If you’d like to test it in its early stages, feel free to join the beta.

  • development
  • Bell
  • swift

I set up a new microblog section on my site. I added it to Jekyll’s collections, created the layout, index page, feed, include for other pages, and a simple posting page via PHP. if I’ve done it correctly, everything conforms to indieweb micropub standards, as well. I’m hoping this new system inspires me to write short updates regularly.

  • thoughts
  • microblog

Victor Mono is an open-source monospaced font with optional semi-connected cursive italics and programming symbol ligatures.

It’s also a very, very nice typeface. I’m always excited to see something this well made, and the logic behind it’s creation rings true: I always find myself moving to another programming typeface after a short while, but I have high hopes for this one.

Dr. Drang, on COBOL:

…while the age of a language certainly has some bearing on how cool it seems to young programmers, it has nothing to do with how well it works. It’s not as if COBOL has stiff knees and has to be careful when taking the stairs.

The Carina Nebula in infrared light

This spectacular image of the Carina nebula reveals the dynamic cloud of interstellar matter and thinly spread gas and dust as never before. The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that causes the surrounding gas to glow. By contrast, other regions of the nebula contain dark pillars of dust cloaking newborn stars.

140 megapixels containing about 1 million stars.

“Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

“The safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
—Alfred North Whitehead

“The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”
—Hegel

New Years “resolutions”: More fruit, less bread. More sleep, less TV. More exercise, less sitting. More appreciation, less worrying. More understanding, less complaining.

Small goals and modest changes. Have a great New Years everyone, and be safe out there.

“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Barns are painted red because red paint is cheap. Red paint is cheap because iron is plentiful. Iron is abundant on Earth because stellar fusion produces large amounts of it. So if anyone asks you to explain why barns are red using the properties of stars… there you go.

“The innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

“I’m not being rude but you’d be the first to admit that you’re not a very logical thinker.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You still don’t properly understand what happened in Ocean’s Eleven, do you?”
“It’s a complicated film.”
“It really isn’t.”