I used Claude Cowork for something silly, but I was curious to see if it could handle it. Dairy Queen has a customer feedback website, and a unique code is on each receipt. When you submit a survey, you get a code for a free Dilly Bar. 😋
I took a photo of the receipt, and gave Claude instructions to complete the online form based on my overall experience. Much to my surprise, it did this flawlessly: no interruptions, headless (no browser takeover), and I got the code I needed. Impressive! 🤯
While this was a somewhat silly example of what AI can do for us, there are many scenarios where completing online forms is a tedious exercise and an AI helper can spare us the hassle. Would I trust it yet to do something critical? No. But a feedback form? Perfect use case.
The vibe coding revolution is here. I’ve been stuck trying to write up my own thoughts on what it means for someone like me to be able to create software in a few minutes, but David Pierce did a great job on the topic in this article at The Verge.
The article crystallizes much of what’s been going around in my head for the past five months since I vibe-coded my first thing (a browser extension for work) in early January. The irony is not lost on me that those same type of tools, and the cost of them, are the reason AWS told me and 16K others we didn’t have jobs anymore. 🫠
Since then, I’ve vibe-coded five more software projects that solve specific challenges for me (yes, I need to write about them!). No developer would ever make these because it just isn’t economically viable for them to do so; the addressable market is just too small.
This is indeed a software revolution; that’s not hyperbole.
I’ve been around long enough to see similar shifts, though never quite of this magnitude. In the early ’90s, new desktop publishing software allowed anyone to create sophisticated page layouts and print them on laser printers. Previously, this was the purview of people who knew how to use QuarkXPress and ran print presses. Suddenly, regular users could create things that were “good enough”, no pros needed. Vibe coding is this, but 1000x.
Now that we live in a world run by software, the impact of regular users being able to create their own apps is massive, and I’m able to do things I never could before. I used to say that after I retired, I’d learn how to be a developer to create the tools I always had in my head.
Last summer, my family and I spent a few days in a house by the lake in Canal Flats, British Columbia. The weather wasn’t great, but it was a very scenic and beautiful place, so I of course had to go exploring with my drone. Here’s the best of the footage I captured.
It’s also one of the furthest distances I’ve flown my drone because the line of sight was so clear over the lake. It was also mildly nerve-wracking, hoping that an issue wouldn’t have my drone sink into the lake, but I’m really happy with how the footage turned out.
As a kid growing up, I always had a love of books. I did a lot of reading and pursued ownership of book series that I enjoyed, particularly in the fantasy and sci-fi realm. As a result, by the time I was in my 30s, I had many hundreds of books filling gigantic Ikea wall units. When my wife and I moved from Canada to the USA, we knew we had to get rid of a lot of the collection, and so hundreds of books went to the used bookstore, where of course we only got pennies on the dollar. But that’s how it goes.
We kept quite a few books though, especially ones that were small soft covers and some books that had sentimental value. As a parent, you always hold the hope (delusion? 😆) that your kids will be just like you, and they’ll want to read the books that shaped you in your childhood. That rarely turns out to be the case, but that’s a lot of parenting right there in a nutshell. 🫠
The journey to digital
It might seem surprising for someone like me — who has always been into technology — to be attached to the concept of paper books, but I really was. I enjoyed the feel of paper and the experience of holding a book in my hand. I can remember the moment that this changed and I decided that going digital was what I wanted to do: my wife, my son, and I met my parents in Mexico for a vacation and I brought with me a paperback copy of Stephen King’s The Stand. That book was ~1200 pages and weighed almost two pounds; it was big, bulky, and took up far too much room in my backpack. I regretted bringing it even though I loved the story.
When I got back from that vacation, I realized I loved reading, but I was over the need to carry around published words from an author in dead tree form. It was time to go digital.
Enter Kindle, stage right
Being the digital pack rat that I am, I still have the original email invoice for the very first Kindle that I ever purchased back in early 2011:
It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic difference a change like this makes when traveling; all of a sudden I could carry dozens (hundreds?) of books with me when I travel, and it would always weigh the same 6 ounces. For someone like me that likes to travel light, and be as optimized as possible, this was an amazing breakthrough; I haven’t carried a paper book with me while traveling for 15 years.
My wife, who also really loved paper books, was reluctant to join me in the digital world of reading. She became a convert though in 2013 when I bought her a Kindle so she could read in the dark when she was nursing my daughter. That changed everything for her, and now she reads on her Kindle even more than I do!
Exit books, stage left
I do the majority of my leisure reading in the evening before bed, and for many years, it’s only been on a Kindle (currently a 2021 Paperwhite). People have given me paper books as gifts, and I even bought a few hardcover books because I thought I wanted to continue the collection of certain series. Those books have sat in the bottom drawer of my nightstand, unread after 5+ years.
It’s past time to embrace the reality that I am simply no longer someone that reads paper books. A few weeks back, I took two boxes of books down to a local used bookstore and got a meager amount for them, but it’s better than them taking up space and not being read by anyone at all. Those were the first of many boxes of books that will be going to the same place.
Farewell, paper books. I have loved you for a long time, but it’s time to move on to the words of authors in a different format. I’ll never forget you. 📚
Coda: our vision gets worse as we get older, and some people stop reading because paperback books have too small of a font, and the large format print books are difficult to get. Digital e-readers solve that problem by allowing for easy adjustment of font size. When my parents each got an e-reader a few years back, they started reading more than they ever had before. Long live the e-reader!
I was creating an online account for the Canadian government website recently, so I wasn’t surprised when I was asked a series of security questions; that’s normal. What surprised me was the validation that they seemed to be doing on the questions. 🤔
One of my preferred methods for maximizing security is to use nonsensical answers to security questions. A security question is only as strong as its answer. Due to data mining and phishing, someone could easily learn the name of your first pet, for example.
So what I do with these security questions is use answers that are essentially passwords unto themselves. Something that is unique, doesn’t exist anywhere online, and has no way to be reverse engineered through any kind of interaction with me (phishing proof). A true one of one answer.
Imagine my surprise then when I tried using this approach on the registration site for the My Services Canada account. It provided standard options to select from a variety of questions — note that the questions in the screenshot below are not the ones I selected — and rules to follow for the answers. Seems straightforward, right?
It was anything but. My first attempts at using nonsensical answers that met their character requirements were all rejected. Puzzled, I re-checked them all to confirm I was following their requirements and I was. I began changing one answer at a time, simplifying it into something close to a real answer — and that’s when it was accepted. There was a question involving a location, for example, and it wouldn’t accept any answer I gave until I entered the name of a real country. 😲 They also blocked anything with a number in the answer even though they don’t specify that numbers aren’t allowed.
This leads me to believe they are doing some kind of validation on a per-question basis that forces the answer to be a certain type of answer, such as having a real country name if the question involves a location. This stuns me, as it dramatically decreases the security of the questions by forcing the customer to use real answers. I’m not a security expert, but the best answer to a challenge question is one that no one can possibly know, not even the user without them looking it up in a password manager.
I managed to find a middle ground by creating answers that are rooted in their requirements, but as a nonsense mish-mash of near-gibberish that no one could possibly guess, which is just the way I like it. 🙃
In July I went to see a band called Daring Greatly. My friend Chris was doing sound at the event, and he was able to secure a photo pass for me. I hadn’t heard of the band before, but leading up to the event I listened to quite a bit of their music and was impressed. Live, they’re excellent, and put on a great show; flawless musicianship, powerful vocals, and on-point harmonies. I might not be a musician any more, but I can still recognize excellence when I hear it. 👂
It had been years since I did a live concert photo shoot, but it’s something I’ve always enjoyed. And so I got to work with my then month-old Nikon Z6 III, shooting about 1600 shots (and quite a few 6K videos, which I chose not to edit). After culling the photos down to 105 shots… ⬇️
I’m proud of a few of these shots; the frame rate of the Z6 III is incredible and it allowed me to capture moments that might have otherwise slipped by. The low-light performance is excellent, and when coupled with Lightroom Classic’s AI noise reduction, high ISO shots can be made to look like low ISO shots (mostly).
I also stretched my photographer persona by taking some crowd shots; sometimes that can go sideways if someone objects to having their picture taken. Obviously it helps having a badge around your next that shows you’re not just some random guy with a camera. 😜
This is a drone flight over the community of Mahogany, a large residential suburb in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The community has been under construction for years, and it was interesting to explore that from the air in July 2024.
They’ve completed a great deal of construction over the past two years, but there’s still so much to go. I don’t see construction like this where I live — pretty much everything is already built out — so I find it fascinating to watch the growth of new construction like this over time.
Maybe I’ll do another flight like this in 2030 and see how different it is.
Every year my family and I do a road trip back to Canada to visit our family and friends in the province of Alberta. We fly in the winter, but drive in the summer, as not only is a road trip a lot less expensive, I believe my children shouldn’t grow up not having experienced being stuck in a car for many hours at a time. 😆
The trip east, then north, takes about 12 hours with a couple of EV charging stops along the way. As we drive from our home city of Renton, Washington, we drive east on the I90. Once we come over the pass, the terrain starts to change.
It switches from lush forests to flat plains where farming occurs. And along that route is an area that I can only describe as “the badlands”: little to no vegetation, dry, arid land that is starkly beautiful. Last summer I finally stopped on the way back home to fly my drone around the area to capture some of that beauty after two years of saying “You know, this would make a great drone video”.
It reminds me a great deal of Drumheller, Alberta, a badlands area and the site of many dinosaur fossil finds.
I had the pleasure of experiencing my first Cirque du Soleil show in the state of Washington: Kooza! And I managed to take a few decent photos (and some video clips) with my Fujifilm X100VI.
