Posts from December 2024

  • Reminder that Breaking Bad was a TV show about the U.S. healthcare system. – via Melanie D’Arrigo (threads / bluesky)
  • I’m confused by the many complaints I’ve seen online recently about the streaming quality of NFL games on Amazon Prime. I have AT&T Gigabit fiber at home and for regular TV use the DirecTVStream app embedded in my Samsung TV. If I want to watch something on Amazon Prime, I use their app instead, also baked into the TV software. I honestly think the image quality of the Amazon NFL games beats what I see on NBC, CBS, FOX, and ESPN on DirecTVStream most of the time, which seems crazy to me. You’d think AT&T would either boost DirecTVStream bandwidth (since they own them) or somehow hamstring the Prime bandwidth. But that’s not the case at all.
  • A post about berry packagingAnyway. This joke about berry packaging made me laugh out loud. – via Matt Margolis (threads / bluesky)
  • I am a big fan of Wyze and have their front door deadbolt, doorbell camera, several security cameras, two outdoor plugs (for controlling Christmas lights), a bathroom scale, and at least a half dozen WiFi outlets around the house. They’re great.
  • For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
  • Threes is the iOS game I’ve played most frequently over the last decade. According to its lovely Statistics page, I’ve played it 7,838 times and my high score is 90,147.
  • “Learning from other people’s mistakes is a lot less painful than learning from your own.” – via Tim Harford
  • Feel-good story of the day? Giant Spoon Taken From Arizona Dairy Queen Found Thanks To Pokemon Go – via @pourmecoffee
  • I’ve returned to this article a dozen times since he published it. If you’re working with iOS widget development, check out Launching iOS Apps with a Custom URL Scheme

If you want to add a “Share on Bluesky” hyperlink to your WordPress theme, this is the snippet I’m using. Also note that my theme requires FontAwesome for the bluesky icon.

<span class="label label-primary nobreak me-3"><a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=<?php echo urlencode( get_the_title() ); ?>%0A%0A<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Share on Bluesky" rel="noreferrer"><i class="fa-brands fa-bluesky"></i></a></span>

  • Everyone should be following Nike Running Coach Bennett on Threads and/or Bluesky.
  • bartender.liveDespite some choad that’s selling a nearly-identical knock-off of my app (that is somehow ranked #1 in the Food & Drink category in the App Store), the 48 hours surrounding Thanksgiving was a banner sales day for bartender.live, which was nice to see. If you haven’t yet, please rate and review my little side project. It really helps!
  • We have several lighted Christmas decorations that burn through AA batteries. I’ve been buying rechargeable batteries for years and love them, but it still bugs me and I kept thinking there must be a way to convert these things to use AC power. I was ready to start researching amps and volts and power adapters and break out my soldering iron, but then found these cool dummy battery plugs that appear to do exactly what I need!
  • Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke are national treasures that should be on money. This scene is incredible.
  • Did you like Agatha All Along enough to listen to a ten-hour lo-fi remix of The Witches Road? – via @agentm
  • Most of us are famously terrible at comprehending very large numbers, but I find it much easier to wrap my head around the idea that around two and a half billion T. Rex roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous Period than the fact that their reign lasted nearly two and a half million years. That is a long, long, long time to rule the planet. (Humans have been around, at most, for only about 300,000 years. Sharks have been around for something like 400 million years, by the way, which means they’ve been around just a bit longer than trees and probably twice as long as Saturn has had rings.)
  • Tania Rascia just redesigned her blog (again) and added light/dark theming, which is something I’ve been meaning to do here for a long time. She also created a nice web developer starter pack on Bluesky.
  • I’m a big fan of moo.com’s mini business cards, and they’re having a significant sale through Dec 5: 30% off and free shipping with promo code CYBERYAY
  • Bryson DeChambeau’s Viral Golf Challenge: A Marketing Masterclass, How a Simple Idea Captivated Millions and Delivered Big Results – via Culture of Sport

Everything Is Relative

Where does the time go?

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.