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April 1, 2026 is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple, Inc. That’s a golden jubilee! I’m not quite that old, but for my birthday in 2001 ago my mother gave me a gold Apple logo pendant that she’d had a manufacturing jeweler make for me. My oldest brother, a staunch Windows user, gave me a copy of Mac OS X (back in those days, Apple still charged for operating systems.) A year earlier, my…

TL;DR: I made an app to derive a lot of ‘lucky’ numbers from any text. You can get it on the App Store now, for iOS and macOS. Many years ago I came across Uri Geller’s page about how he notices the number 11 a lot and it’s somehow a magic number. I didn’t read all of it, because it’s nonsense, but I was intrigued by the list of ‘Names, events and places that add up to 11 letters.’ It…

On our road trip across the USA, Joey Marianer and I stayed at many Holiday Inn Express hotels. I noticed that (at least for the Western side of the country) they had a lot of geometrical decor. In particular, some intriguing wallpaper, which I will analyse in the second hald of the post. But first, some other geometrical art. For instance, this art made of triangles, shown here with a copy of…

A while ago I added the possibility to configure Seddit (my text-to-speech-focused hands-free Reddit client for macOS and iOS) with multiple voices so that each user’s content could be read in a different voice. Of course, iOS and macOS come with voices that speak a huge variety of different languages, so you could theoretically select, say, a Japanese voice, a French voice, and three English…

In my last post I gave lyrics to a parody of an Arrogant Worms song about the James Webb Space Telescope, and an update to my text-to-speech focussed Reddit client Seddit. I also said two things that turned out to be false: Joey and I will probably sing this parody, but it will take more mixing and video editing than our usual songs. This completes all the major features I have planned the app…

This is to be sung to the tune of Big Fat Road Manager, by The Arrogant Worms: Giant rocket to the skyNot many people really know whyIt’s gotta stay cool as the stars paradeIt’s got a gold coat and some doped ass-shades It’s the James Webb Space TelescopeJames Webb Space TelescopeJames Webb Space TelescopeJames Webb Space Telescope! It beat a hurricane and lots of delays(James Webb Space…

Hey look, Joey Marianer sang the parody song lyrics from my last post! Check there for the lyrics and the aviation incidents referenced. There are some more song parody lyrics, but first, a word from my sponsor: me. Just like last time, I’ve released a new version of Seddit, my text-to-speech-focussed Reddit client for macOS and iOS. This has a feature I’ve wanted to add for a while — the…

Whoever else you believe is in the sky looking after you, you can be sure that the crew of any airliner you fly in are there to keep you safe. So here’s a parody of the hymn ‘The Galilee Song’ about surviving an emergency water landing. It’s based on the stories of Pan Am Flight 526A, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, and US Airways Flight 1549: Both the right wing engines glitched, when a plane…

This is a parody of Coasting Speed by Sam Bettens, because ever since I learnt the phrase ‘rotation speed’ from Mentour Pilot, I’ve had it in my head to the tune of Coasting Speed every time I’ve taken off (as a passenger) in an aeroplane. I’ve added a little to this parody with each flight. This is from the perspective of the flight crew and cabin crew, talking to the passengers. The takeoff’s…

A while ago my friend Brynn told me she’d love an app which would continuously read posts and comments from Reddit using text-to-speech, with minimal user interaction. This seemed like a fun project, so just after I released the macOS version of Lifetiler, I started working on it. It was indeed a fun project! And now it’s also on the App Store as a fun and useful app that you can use. It’s…

As mentioned previously, I have an idea for a music video I’d like to make about my move to the US. But before I make that, I wanted to publish some of the video I took on the trip, in a fairly raw and unedited way, just to get it out there. I already published hours of 4K video from the ship leaving Hamburg, leaving Southampton, and arriving in New York City, recorded with my Sony ZV1 camera on…

Having released new versions of Lifetiler, I’m back to making a lot of progress on another app, which I hope to tell you about soon. But I don’t want to give you the impression that all I do these days is code… I also watch and record concerts of songs about code! First of all, here’s the legendary James Dempsey performing some Swift-related songs at Deep Dish Swift, including a new one about…

TL; DR: Lifetiler now works on iOS and iPadOS as well as macOS, and is available on the App Store for macOS 15 and iOS 17 and above. In November, I released Lifetiler for macOS, an app I wrote to keep track of which days Joey and I were together in-person — like the contribution graph on GitHub, but with more information. It’s a SwiftUI multiplatform app, which means it could always, in theory,…

I started writing this post in 2020 (it was last edited in August that year) but at some point decided everybody knew this stuff and there was no point posting it. Well, Stewart Lynch’s talk at Deep Dish Swift reminded me that there’s always somebody who doesn’t know something. Besides that, I originally got the idea for this by noticing things that my co-workers were not doing. I am attending…

Last year on JoCo Cruise, Aimee Mann sang a song called The Ballad of Captain Quark — the song title having been suggested by ChatGPT as a typical Jonathan Coulton song title: This year, one of the theme days on the cruise was Captain Day, so obviously I had to dress as Captain Quark. I got a custom captain’s hat and some ‘Quark’s Bar‘ pyjama pants, and wore them with a ‘one quark, two quark,…

These lyrics are to be sung to the tune of ‘Circles’ by Soul Coughing. They refer to the proposition that we use tau (τ) defined as 2π, instead of pi (π), counterarguments to that, and neverending friendly rivalries about it. When you were younger you were taught a circle formulaThat its perimeter is πd, that is, 2πrπd gets you all round the circleAll around the circle, all around the circleAll…

Back in 2014 I recorded Hank Green talking about ‘picking the right addiction’ after a performance of his song ‘The Man Who Throws The Tetris Piece’. He said (with a few bits edited out so it makes more sense in text): I’ve spent a fair amount of time addicted to Tetris, growing up. And now I spend about the same amount of time addicted to Flappy Bird — I’m not saying I’ve grown up at all. I…