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May 20, 2025: I really appreciate that TRMNL allows you to bring your own server if you need or want to. I once had an air filter that bricked because the brand …
May 20, 2025: Just set up my first TRMNL e-ink display. We’re using it to show a family calendar on the wall, but I’ll admit I’ve been snooping in the custom plugin …
May 19, 2025: I finished reading: The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas 📚I finished the 2nd ed audiobook over the course of a long weekend of yard …
May 18, 2025: There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and …
May 17, 2025: I started reading: The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas 📚 The new second edition—I’d never read the first from 20 years ago.
May 17, 2025: Finished reading: Abundance by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson 📚It was useful for showing how the same rules liberals introduced in the mid-century to …
May 8, 2025: This gave me a chuckle: Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, asked by reporters if he had any tips for Alberta separatists, said for a nation …
Apr 24, 2025:
1Password in the shell
Today I was setting up the GitHub MCP server in VS Code and found another nice use for the op run command.
Mar 27, 2025: I’m not a vibe coder, but LLMs absolutely have changed my work for the better. Like yesterday I pointed Copilot/Claude 3.7 at my app’s SQLAlchemy …
Mar 27, 2025: Yesterday a red Coast Guard helicopter was flying low over Georgian Bay and even landed to talk to some folks ice fishing near Beausoleil. I couldn’t …
Mar 20, 2025: TIL you can concatenate highlights with Readwise.. What a clever feature for capturing the heart of a paragraph or two.
Mar 17, 2025: Today’s playlist brought to me by The Shins, The Constantines, The Weakerthans, John K. Sampson, Controller.Controller, and The Stills. The …
Mar 12, 2025: We installed the LSST Camera on the Simonyi Survey Telescope of @VRubinObs@astrodon.social last week! I joined this project in 2015 and I can’t …
Mar 8, 2025: Severance S2E8: turns out we ate at that diner! It’s called Neil’s Yard in Bonavista Newfoundland! Lovely soup. (Photo from June 2016.)
Mar 2, 2025: Currently reading: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik 📚Short stories from the Temeraire 🐉, Scholomance 🧙♀️(and more) universes!
Mar 2, 2025: Finished reading: We Solve Murders by Richard Osman 📚 Our nighttime read, stretched out over a couple months because of the little guy. It was a cozy …
Feb 24, 2025: I started kicking the tires on Hatch for a new personal Python project over the weekend. Not only does it supplant setuptools, but it also builds in …
Feb 23, 2025: Finished reading: Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland. 📚 It was a fascinating ride through the history of the 1%, how people have gotten rich, and what …
Feb 22, 2025: “Even in low-compute mode, a single prompt on ChatGPT’s o3 model costs $20 to perform,” writes Dan Rasmussen of Verdad Research. — Ian McGugan, Globe …
Feb 22, 2025: TIL Aeropress has a new glass/stainless steel/aluminum model. No more microplastics in my coffee! ☕️ Also there’s a matching drying rack.
Feb 17, 2025: If we can avoid flights to Florida because of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, why can’t we avoid flights to Florida to prevent global warming? — Kevin Yin, …
Feb 16, 2025: Our little house, cozy in a thick blanket of snow.
Feb 15, 2025: Currently reading: Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland 📚 — the next book in my Liberal leadership candidate book tour.
Feb 15, 2025: Values(s) is an especially interesting read in this the new US era. Many of the initiatives Carney wrote about in 2022 are now being rolled back. But …
Feb 15, 2025: Finished reading: Value(s) by Mark Carney. 📚 After a 20 hour read, I love this book. In fact, I bought the hardcover that I’m going to reread …
Feb 4, 2025: Judging from media, email fliers, and friends, it seems like we (Canadians) are just going ahead with a boycott of American brands — tariffs or not.
Feb 4, 2025: Apple’s new Invites app reminds me of the old iCards. Proof you can have a “social” app without the “media” part.
Feb 2, 2025: I’ve been wondering why Trump would make an own-goal with his trade war. This Globe & Mail piece by Turley-Ewart is the best lead yet by …
Feb 2, 2025: Started reading The you you are by Dr Ricken Lazlo Hale, PhD. 📚😉
Feb 1, 2025: I love my Patagonia Grade VII parka. I got it a few years back for half off in a spring sale, and I have no rights to own a belay parka, but man it’s …
Jan 31, 2025: What a time to be renewing a mortgage. Interest rates in Canada have been steadily going down with perhaps 50 to 75 basis points to go, making a …
Jan 28, 2025: Play version 2.4.1 added the ability to hide all shorts from its YouTube channels inbox. This is such a great feature because so many YouTube shorts …
Jan 27, 2025: I just finished my 50th Fitness+ session on the weekend (mostly rowing with my new bff Josh Crosby). I wish I got onboard earlier, but I’m so glad I’m …
Jan 25, 2025: For our respective birthdays we got each other a carpet cleaner and an electric snow shovel. We truly have become elder millennial parents.
Jan 25, 2025: I started reading Value(s) by Mark Carney 📚 My goal is to read Carney’s and Freeland’s books over the Canadian Liberal leadership race. Both are …
Jan 24, 2025: The snow banks are starting to get out of hand.
Jan 24, 2025: -21˚C and the furnace gave up last night. Thankfully we have some redundant forms of heating and some friends dropped off extra space heaters so we …
Jan 20, 2025: Speaking of Krugman going indie, I find it curious that even established writers are offloading platform ownership to Substack in return for the …
Jan 20, 2025: I was let down when I heard that Paul Krugman was retiring from the New York Times — this is until I found that he’s got a new home on Substack …
Jan 19, 2025: We watched Wild Robot last night 🍿 As new parents, the story line hit hard in a good way. I appreciated the dystopian undertones of the movie — like …
Jan 19, 2025: Finished reading: Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber 📚 The book’s idea is that useful bubbles — characterized by irrational exuberance, shared …
Jan 13, 2025: Finished reading: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Tj Klune 📚 This was our night time read for a while because we kept falling asleep early as new parents. …
Jan 13, 2025: Finished reading: The Comeback by Lily Chu 📚A book about accidentally getting into a relationship with a K-pop idol and becoming a hashtag. I like the …
Jan 13, 2025: Finished reading: The Stand-In by Lily Chu 📚 A rom-com where the main character finds her life’s work in becoming a productivity app developer/mogul? …
Jan 13, 2025: Finished reading: The Takedown by Lily Chu. 📚 Lovely characters and I loved how the book poked at the cult of blind positivity. I also nerded out over …
Jan 13, 2025: Finished reading: Drop Dead by Lily Chu. 📚 A cute rom-com with a delightful narration duet from Phillipa Soo and John Cho. I wonder if Chu had …
Jan 13, 2025: Over paternity leave I crushed through the whole catalogue of Lily Chu audiobooks and I loved her whole mood board of Toronto / lady takes on the …
Jan 2, 2025: My podcast listening stats for 2024 show just how much I have @macsparky in my ear! I’m sad to see Automators go (the second @rosemaryorchard podcast …
Dec 22, 2024: This wonk podcast episode is primarily about whether passive investing is good for markets (and investors), but an idea that caught my ear is that we …
Dec 22, 2024: And just like that, a night dipping to -20°, and Penetanguishene is iced in by Georgian Bay.
Dec 21, 2024: The first big ice formations of the season.
Dec 18, 2024: I enjoyed this video by Stewart Hicks on how the joining plate led to cheap trusses and ultimately the proliferation of McMansions in suburbia. So …
Dec 14, 2024: The first sunny day after two weeks of snow ❄️
Nov 26, 2024: You can’t tell your own stories if you’re too busy refuting the terrible stories told by others. You have to give yourself both the space—and the …
Nov 23, 2024: Watched Stay the Night with Andrea Bang. 🎬 We loved the thoughtful take on the rom com and coming of age genres. And perfect Toronto vibes.
Nov 10, 2024: My Old Ass 🎬 with Aubry Plaza and a Canadian cast surprised with the hard-hitting sentimentality of embracing the present and accepting the future …
Nov 8, 2024: Started reading Handmade by Gary Rogowski because, until yesterday, it was free on Audible. 📚 I struggled through the start where he proclaimed he …
Oct 16, 2024: Breakfast with Nikki
Oct 6, 2024: With great excitement we just started reading: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Tj Klune 📚 It’s a prequel to the classic The House in the Cerulean Sea.
Oct 6, 2024: Finished reading: I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue 📚 A lovely office rom-com about finding empathy for yourself and others. Set in Calgary. …
Oct 1, 2024: Currently reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 📚 🐈☕️
Sep 26, 2024: Finished reading: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick 📚 I thought this was a great primer on where we’re at with AI and what it can do for us. For the …
Sep 26, 2024: Jason Bent has a video tutorial on making a mortise and tenon with the Shaper Origin. I’m starting to think that (money aside) this isn’t a terrible …
Sep 25, 2024: I’m loving the upgrade from the 12 Pro camera to the iPhone 16 Pro. Portrait mode-ing all the things. I’ve been using the “Natural” photo styling a …
Sep 25, 2024: Quick update on the iPhone transfer saga. The iPhone 16 Pro still crashed and behaved oddly. I ended up doing a clean restore, this time transferring …
Sep 21, 2024: The camera control “button” is interesting. I don’t feel at all fast using it yet, like I do with the physical controls on a Canon, so I assume I need …
Sep 21, 2024: The initial upgrade process to the iPhone 16 was weirdly buggy. After iCloud transfer from the old phone, it’d freeze up randomly. It turns out there …
Sep 18, 2024: Finished reading: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚 It starts out nerdy, but grows into a profound message about the social role of public …
Sep 18, 2024: I’m starting to dig in on the new OS features. One peculiarity of Sonoma is that my cursor won’t be visible on wake or sometimes when …
Sep 13, 2024: Today’s a very expensive day. iPhone preorder, then off to Hunter Douglas to get better and safer blinds for the nursery. Adulting.
Sep 13, 2024: After some paper prototyping I chickened out and didn’t get the Max size as discussed. The size of the 12 Pro I’m used to is too good. And there’s a …
Sep 12, 2024: I think I’ll order an iPhone 16 Pro Max oddly enough after realizing that my 12 Pro does most of what I want except for the battery life. Go all-in on …
Sep 9, 2024: I’m kind of relieved that there’s no Air Pod Pro 3 or Apple Watch Ultra 3 in today’s event. I love that Apple made my existing ones better in software …
Sep 9, 2024: With a kid on the way, iPhone 16’s dedicated camera control button is perfect timing.
Sep 7, 2024: I just wanted to know about the new feature in Unread It was a quiet overcast Saturday morning. As I sipped my coffee and perused the Globe and Mail, I noticed I had a weekly roundup email from …
Sep 6, 2024: No typing allowed after noon on a Friday. 😻
Sep 6, 2024: We finished All This and More by Peng Shepherd the other night.📚 Doing a choose-your-own-adventure was an interesting device that definitely worked …
Aug 23, 2024: GitHub’s . keyboard shortcut for launching into a web-based VS Code (with your own theme & settings if you sync them) of any repo is such a …
Aug 22, 2024: I’ve been kayaking this summer and dreaming of building my own light and nimble skin-on-frame kayak. A thousand hands ago, a lovely little documentary …
Aug 19, 2024: Ben Strano has a great video about parametric modelling in Fusion 360 and using a 3D printer to make mortise templates of different sizes. I’ve been …
Jul 29, 2024: After a long time away, I had my first kayak outing of 2024 in Georgian Bay this morning. First I spotted a little mink scurrying on the shore while …
May 14, 2024: Some of my shots of the weekend’s Aurora display and how it played off trees and the Georgian Bay. I took these with my hand-me-down Canon 5D …
Nov 6, 2023: I’m thoroughly impressed with the work at ESASky has done. Go to sky.esa.int/. Lots of smart features for getting data across multiple …
Nov 3, 2023: At Rubin Observatory, I’ve been building a documentation platform that has enabled hundreds of scientists and engineers to communicate their …
Sep 13, 2023: Here’s a great video primer on heat pumps. Using CO2 as a refrigerant and integrating a heat pump with a water heater as a thermal battery is …
Sep 1, 2023: My neighbours are about to imminently tear down and rebuild their house. Today I noticed that several big, beautiful, and healthy trees are marked for …
Jul 22, 2023: This is my life now.
Jul 22, 2023: So happy for Lewis Hamilton to snag that pole position today. Never give up!
Jul 9, 2023: Based on In the Lives of Puppets I named my Mac Studio “Rambo.”
Jul 9, 2023: Finished reading: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune 📚 TJ is a master of creating deeply moving stories that have adorable quirky characters.
Jul 7, 2023: No smoke; Sun’s out; light breeze and 22 degrees. It’s a miracle.
Jul 4, 2023: Never in my life would I imagine a Star Trek episode that involves shoplifting from a Roots in Eaton Centre, Toronto. ❤️🍁🖖 S2E3 Star Trek: Strange New …
Jun 29, 2023: This is what a snow day looks like if you’re a developer.
Jun 23, 2023: This is a cool dotfiles repo for Mac. I keep dotfiles for unix-y stuff, but hadn’t considered it for macOS settings and even a homebrew install …
Jun 22, 2023: My new Mac Studio arrived! This is my first desktop computer since the 2008-era Mac Pro I had in grad school. It’ll also be my second M-series …
Jun 22, 2023: Hacking push notifications for deliveries on the iPhone My Mac Studio is arriving soon 🎉 and I need to sign for it. The problem is I’m usually working in the basement with headphones. My house …
Jun 20, 2023: tree.nathanfriend.io is a little website/app that generates an ASCII file tree from indented text (like a mock of the tree CLI). I make these diagrams …
Jun 19, 2023: I ordered a shed today from a website. It’ll be built to my specifications and installed by skilled humans in a few weeks. We truly live in an age of …
Jun 19, 2023: The rainbow pride waffles from Planted in Hamilton Ontario are pretty awesome 🌈
Jun 14, 2023: A consistent problem I have with my development workflow is knowing that I did something before, but not exactly where. What repo did I do that in? …
Jun 13, 2023: Here’s what I’m going with: Mac Studio M2 Max (12 core, 38 core GPU) with 2TB storage and 96GB RAM. I hate closing windows and quitting …
Jun 12, 2023: Between going 100% indie with my software company, my MacBook Pro 2019’s fan’s screaming incessantly, and Apple dropping the M2 Mac …
Jun 5, 2023: I have visions of coding and taking Zoom calls from the lakeside. Sign me up!
Jun 2, 2023: Did anyone else get the Ulysses app newsletter on May 31st? I hope it’s a prank because yuck! gross! In the meantime, I’ve pulled my App …
Mar 28, 2023: I’m writing a technical note with GitHub Copilot enabled for the first time and it’ll suggest a fact about something and I’m like …
Mar 5, 2023: Thank goodness for Fernando Alonso who might just distract the Formula 1 2023 season from the monotony of another Verstappen / Red Bull sweep.
Mar 1, 2023: GitHub is killing it with the new new code view and search. The confluence of GitHub and VS Code is amazing. Colour me surprised, but Microsoft buying …
Jan 23, 2023: I finally used Python’s Walrus := operator to clean up a hacky situation. Maybe I could be more proactively finding uses, but it was fun to have an …
Jan 6, 2023: Last eggnog of the season 😢
Jan 6, 2023: Finished reading: Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik 📚It’s kind of an old-school adventure novel. But with dragons that have the temperament of cats.
Jan 6, 2023: We finished watching Orphan Black 📺 last week and I just gotta proclaim: wow. Tatiana Maslany played 14 different characters, sometimes in the same …
Dec 20, 2022: Apparently storm chips are a Newfie thing but they work great for Ontario snow storms too.
Dec 20, 2022: Here’s a maple plywood feature wall I made for my workshop. 🪚 This will be the future home of my tool chest, some shelves for things like saws …
Dec 15, 2022: I created a widget with Up Ahead for the latest Rubin Observatory milestones. It’s happening folks!
Dec 13, 2022: I just got into the beta for Reader by the Readwise folks and just a few minutes in I’m already astounded. It’s your read-later, but also …
Dec 8, 2022: The timeline isn’t settled. The @-mention isn’t settled. Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again! Robin Sloan’s A Year of New Avenues speaks to the …
Dec 8, 2022: Inspired by @rosemaryorchard and @heyscottyj on Unnested Folders #90, I figured out how to create a “Personal Automation” in the Shortcuts app that …
Dec 7, 2022: I’m kind of surprised about Amazon Prime’s redesign with black on blue. I’m sure they ran a contrast checker but I feel a white on blue is the …
Dec 5, 2022: Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 3) by Naomi Novik 📚 We really enjoyed the series, and I loved how the third book …
Dec 1, 2022: Via Mac Power Users #668 I found out you can follow YouTube channels in most RSS services. I’ve always wanted a distraction-free way to follow …
Dec 1, 2022: November 2022 in review I missed the review for October, but I’m getting back on track. I’m finding these reviews, even if I’m the only person who interacts …
Nov 30, 2022: So why do my colleagues often pray whenever I answer their question on Slack? 🙏
Nov 27, 2022: People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use — Andy Matuschak via Maggie Appleton. 💬 i.e. what works for …
Nov 26, 2022: On the PKM beat, it seems like Apple Books in iOS 16 doesn’t permit exporting a book’s notes and highlights anymore (you can only share one …
Nov 25, 2022: This new Interactive guide to flexbox by Josh Comeau is so good. Hopefully it’ll click in my head now… I’ve been using flexbox for …
Nov 24, 2022: Currently reading: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte 📚 I’ve slowly been adopting DEVONthink for project notes and reference material for work, …
Nov 9, 2022: It’s really cool to see how GitHub Codespaces and science platforms like Rubin’s are all working towards the same goals of reducing set up …
Nov 7, 2022: One of the surprising things I’ve learned after moving back to Canada is brokerage fees when buying things online from the US. The brokerage …
Nov 4, 2022: Another new-ish gem in the Sphinx ecosystem, sphinxcontrib-mermaid makes it easy to drop Mermaid diagrams-as-code into docs, even Python docstrings.
Nov 4, 2022: The Sphinx documentation ecosystem is getting better and better. Latest example: autodoc_pydantic drops in for documenting Pydantic schemas. 🥳
Oct 27, 2022: Can I admit something? I haven’t yet given Taylor Swift Midnights a proper spin yet. The whole week has been Carly Rae Jepsen The Loneliest Time on …
Oct 5, 2022: September 2022 in review Doing the work September was all about shipping the new system for Rubin Observatory user guides in Documenteer. When I first started working on …
Sep 30, 2022: Embracing the last bits of summer up here.
Sep 28, 2022: I’ve been working on my tool chest this week and installed these two tier tray runners in white oak.
Sep 2, 2022: In retrospect I should have paid more attention to knots when I was roughing out the feet for these saw horses 🙃 The Wood Owl bits didn’t care though, …
Sep 1, 2022: I’ve started to use the pydata-sphinx-theme for our next generation of Rubin Observatory documentation sites. Still needs more tweaks, but …
Sep 1, 2022: August 2022 in review August is an odd month. It’s both the height of summer while also feeling like the end of summer up here. Doing the work This month, I got back …
Aug 26, 2022: Seven bees in this one sneeze weed. Our rewilding is working!
Aug 23, 2022: Finished reading: The Book Of M by Peng Shepherd 📚 It felt coincidental to read this right after The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, …
Aug 16, 2022: A sunrise from a couple weeks ago that I got around to HDR stacking.
Aug 15, 2022: I’m kicking the tires on VS Code for web dev (vim+tmux user since… gosh, when did TextMate start to fall apart?). This tip for navigating …
Aug 14, 2022: Penetanguishene
Aug 11, 2022: I nailed together the sides of my tool chest. Used 6d (2 inch) cut nails with 2 mm pilot holes. Lots of clamping helped keep things aligned and …
Aug 9, 2022: Finished reading: Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall 📚 I sped-read this over the weekend on Amanda’s recommendation. Devestatingly adorable and …
Aug 6, 2022: Amanda’s purple coneflowers are a hit with the bees.
Aug 5, 2022: Shopping in the lettuce aisle.
Aug 5, 2022: Finished reading: The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Penguin International Writers) by Haruki Murakami. Found this book from a Carly …
Aug 1, 2022: July 2022 in review This is the first edition of what I intend to be a monthly round-up of the month. I’m doing this a bit for you — to keep tabs on what I’m …
Jul 29, 2022: Strimzi Registry Operator 0.5.0 released for Kafka We just released version 0.5.0 of the Strimzi Registry Operator (see release notes). Strimzi Registry Operator helps you run a Confluent Schema …
Jul 27, 2022: A little father-daughter woodworking moment. 🐱🪚 Emma likes shavings… especially the long stringy ones from rounding off edges.
Jul 26, 2022: TIL you can create Note and warning admonitions in GitHub Flavored Markdown github.com/community…
Jul 25, 2022: httpie and GitHub Actions I love httpie as an alternative to curl. It feels fresher, and is built for working with today’s HTTP APIs. Anyways, I was using httpie’s …
Jul 19, 2022: The fact is that one of America’s two major political parties appears to be viscerally opposed to any policy that seems to serve the public good. Paul …
Jul 18, 2022: Embracing the pyproject.toml future of packaging Python projects with setuptools Last week I worked on a new template for PyPI python projects for SQuaRE, my team at Rubin Observatory.1 One of the banner features in this new …
Jul 18, 2022: The Penetanguishene outer harbour last night, dressed up in the setting light.
Jul 14, 2022: Onboarding into a public cloud project: enter your email and credit card info (or have your team lead click an invite button). Onboarding into a gov …
Jul 13, 2022: Finished reading: The Cartographers: A Novel by Peng Shepherd 📚 I loved this book so much, and am glad I learned about it by chance from …
Jul 5, 2022: Jira can be rough compared to GitHub issues; but it’s the backbone of Rubin work tracking. I’ve discovered how to use @draftsapp for Mac/iPad/iOS to …
Aug 2, 2021: I’ve been reading Architecture Patterns with Python. Every chapter they introduce a new issue, and I’m like “yes, that’s an architectural problem I’ve …
Jul 22, 2021: I’ve been using Pydantic and FastAPI a lot lately and I’m struck at their lack of API docs (compared to most Python package docs). Its as …
Jul 20, 2021: Rethinking the social web in 2021 Facebook was fantastic as a college kid: it was just an exclusive club for your an your dorm mates. Then everyone got on Facebook and the content …