Apple finally announced a thing: HomeView. Immediately I was surprised at the pricing, given that Apple is now charging the same for a streaming box. I have an old iPad in the kitchen, as well as a HomePod, so slamming them into each other makes sense. More space-efficient and better looking.

But then I thought about it. For us, the two primary uses for the old iPad in the kitchen are cooking and FaceTime.

Cooking primarily means a third-party app (Paprika in our case). HomeView certainly will not support Paprika anytime soon.

Two of our kids no longer live at home full time. When that FaceTime call comes, it’s awfully convenient to take the old iPad in the kitchen next to the stove over to the kitchen table. HomeView is tethered to its spot. Who is going to stand next to their stove for a thirty-minute FaceTime call?

On the surface HomeView feels like a perfect match. For now, though, it really doesn’t beat an old iPad in the kitchen.

Oh, and I’ve been delaying years to replace our Apple TVs. We’re still on the first-generation 4K. Yes, the one from 2017 with that remote. I just missed replacing them with 2022 third-generation versions under the old pricing. Now with a new, ‘spensive version out, you’d think I’d plug my nose and order one. But, no, since I could never imagine asking my Apple TV to “play that TV show Stephanie texted me,” and it’s quite unlikely that I’ll be gaming on an Apple TV, I instead plugged my nose and ordered the 2022 version.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is shutting down soon. I came up with an idea for a small project to say goodbye. I was getting pretty excited to build this, but I just discovered that Amazon has stopped allowing new Mechanical Turk (MTurk) requester signups. Since I don’t already have an account, I cannot execute this idea. So I’m going to offer it up to anyone who’d like to take it and run with it.

The idea is to use MTurk itself to help the people who worked on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to share their memories. I was thinking of starting with a small HIT asking folks to fill in the blank:

Mechanical Turk was                          .

I was going to test that HIT to see what actually happened, but I hoped to hear things like:

Mechanical Turk was how I paid for groceries when money was tight.

Mechanical Turk was weird little jobs at 2 a.m.

Mechanical Turk was the reason I could stay home with my kid.

Mechanical Turk was tedious and strangely addictive.

For this hit I planned to pay a few cents, collect 1,000 responses, and then put those answers onto a slowly scrolling page at onefinalhit.com (yes, the domain name is available). I was hoping it could be a real-time feed as answers came in.

I was considering a second HIT that asked a little more:

What is the most interesting or memorable HIT you ever worked on?

For this one I was hoping for some longer stories around these sorts of scenarios:

I transcribed an audio diary from someone describing the first months after losing their spouse, and I still think about the way they talked about ordinary mornings.

I reviewed handwritten postcards people had sent to their grandparents. It was repetitive work, but every once in a while one would feel like being allowed into a tiny part of someone’s life.

I labeled photos for a project and realized halfway through that they were family photos documenting someone’s childhood. By the end, I felt like I knew the people in them.

It would have been awesome to collect stories about especially weird, tedious, funny, meaningful, or unexpectedly lucrative work. I imagined these longer stories would live in a separate section. The interface in my head was a single story on the page and a swipe to go to the next story.

I know there are rules around anonymity on MTurk, but I hoped to credit the stories based on first name or something similar. The HITs would make clear that answers would be shared in a public archive designed to be a remembrance of the work real people did on the service.

Once MTurk shut down, I planned to convert the site into a static site that could be served indefinitely.

So if anyone out there has an existing requester account and a couple hundred dollars burning a hole in their pocket, please feel free to take this idea and run with it. And let me know when you put it online!

In the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to do some sort of goofy Amazon Mechanical Turk project. I guess it’s now or never. But I don’t have any ideas…

An astounding performance by Cory Wong, Joshua Redman, and more:

A friend let me know about Olly’s recent blog post. Olly owns and operates Pagecord, a very nice blogging service running in the same world as Pika. It sounds like another indie blogging developer accused Olly of plagiarism, and that makes me sad. I’ve had a couple conversations with Olly, and he sure seems like a nice guy who just wants to build the blogging software he wants to use. He offers it for a fair price for others to use if they have the same attitude toward blogging that he does. It’s a very familiar story to me!

Olly shared that he doesn’t read the blogs or socials of competitors. I’ll admit that I do check in on the blogs of other indie blogging services, as well as the blogs of their creators. The primary reason is that I’m a geek about blogging, so naturally I find it interesting. Reading the personal blogs of the creators also makes sense because we have something pretty big in common.

Olly also mentioned that the news from other blog builders doesn’t make him feel good, and I’ll also admit that at times I feel that way. If someone else builds something cool, after the cool wears off, of course I’m a bit disappointed in myself.

I was having an email conversation with Tom recently, and he brought up the subtle difference between when a group/network/piece of writing is more aspirational than inspirational. Keeping up with competition feels like something that should inspire me to build my own cool stuff. Yet it seems pretty self-evident that reading about the things competitors have built is much more likely to make me feel like I need to keep up with them, or, worse, disappointed in myself. Perhaps I should limit myself to the creators’ personal blogs?

At the end of Olly’s post (go read it before reading this!), he says:

The more people who want to blog, the better it is for all of us! We need to support each other’s work and focus on the greater goal of getting people blogging again.

I’ve most certainly written this sort of thing before as well. I’m not saying that Olly is copying me, though! This is a very natural conclusion. WordPress powers like 40% of the internet. I’m sure there’s some stupid-high percent of people that use social media. The more people know that there are alternatives to these options for self-expression, the more likely it is that they’ll learn about each of our indie blogging services. And that’s a very good thing!

It’s our 26th anniversary today. We had a nice lunch at Jesse's favorite restaurant. Very nice meal.

I've never had a banana split and have been trying to get Jesse to share one with me for a couple of years. So we walked to the ice cream shop and they had it on the menu.

We were too deep into it when we discovered that no one working had ever made a banana split before, so we got what you see in the picture complete with bruised banana, no whipped cream, and no cherry.

We went outside to eat at the sidewalk seating. Then construction workers started jack hammering the decorative rock the city installed just a couple years ago. We have no idea why.

Thankfully the wasps in the wasp nest that was at eye level about 18 inches from our faces didn't sting us. And the ice cream part of the banana split was good! 🤣

Since building Pika I’ve wanted to incorporate a “now and then” sort of now page with dynamic history. With the recent flurry of updates to Pika variables, I realized that my dream could now be made reality. It turns out that my recent habit of writing Friday posts is effectively me writing what I’m doing/seeing/thinking, well, now(ish).

So now my now page is no longer chronically stale! If you happen to write a “general state of things” post every week or month, you can do the same thing on your own Pika site.

The page is pretty simple. First I wrote “Now” as my title. Then in the page body:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: “Friday” with_excerpts: no limit: 1 }}

### Then

Here’s to now pages past:

{{ posts tag: “Friday” skip: 1 }}

I put the body text above in a code block and wrote it as Markdown to avoid variables rendering on this post here. You may or may not be able to copy-paste the above variables into your Pika editor.

And that’s it. You may notice that my “Then” pages are linked dates without any titles. AI helped me with some wild CSS to modify Pika’s default output to what you see there. If you want something similar, you’re welcome to look at the CSS in my now page’s source to get started. Just look for .post-link in the page source.