ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Brass & Bass, Strava, FFVPN – The greatest things of all time… This Week…

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    B-Complex – Beautiful Lies (Riot Jazz Brass Band Cover)

    Yeah, yeah, I know jazz band covers are one of those things that high school band nerds get all obsessed with, but whatever! Riot Jazz Brass Band’s cover of this Drum & Bass track is a real earworm (I’m calling this Brass & Bass).

    I’ve also become a little obsessed with Brass Bands in general. Honourable mention to Too Many Zooz for starting me down this path.

    Strava!

    Two cycling related posts in a row? You bet!
    I started using Strava when I bought a decent bike in August, I’ve always liked the idea of tracking my day-to-day. I hope that one day this data could be used in the same way that handwritten diaries of the past were used.

    The way that Strava adds a gamification level on top of fitness tracking is really working well for me. For example, I signed up for “The Escape Plan” challenge, which gives you a little digital badge for exercising at least 5 times every week for the Month of September. It’s essentially a video game achievement system IRL. I’ve been able to keep it up for 2 week and all the extra exercise is actually having a positive effect on my mental health. It’s incredible.

    Strava also tracks your personal best times, broken up by segments. I know that I’m never going to be as fast as some guy who bikes 100km per day on his $5000 bike. But I can always improve my time. So today on my way home from work I tried hard to beat my own records and wouldn’t you know it, I gained 7 achievements! Feels good.

    One other kinda “web 2.0” feature worth mentioning is “flybys.” Strava will show you other Strava users you’ve passed on your ride (or run). Kinda neat. Kinda creepy. It’s opt-out.

    FireFox VPN

    FireFox release their “VPN” (it’s actually a proxy, I don’t fully understand the difference) this week on testpilot.firefox.com. Ironically, it’s only downloable from the US, so I used a free tunnelbear account to download it.

    Speed test looks good, this is slightly lower than my ISP’s max but totally acceptable for web browsing.

    Also, it looks FireFox is just cobranding Cloudflare Warp, which hopefully means the Warp VPN is launching soon.

  • Cycling, Javascript and Saving the Planet

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    A few weeks ago I bought a basic road bike with the intention of cycling to work. And I’m totally hooked! Addicted maybe? I think I finally get it.

    My primary reason for biking to work is to level up the amount of exercise I get in every week, but I’m aware that leaving the car at home has some obvious side effects. By burning less gasoline I’m obviously saving some money and I’m keeping some amount of carbon out of the air.

    Meanwhile, I’ve been looking for a good practical way to level up my vue.js skills. So I challenged myself to build a simple tool in vue.js to help me quantify just how much CO2 I’m leaving in the tank and how much money I’m leaving in my wallet.

    The result biketoworkcalculator.com

    It’s a dead simple tool that allows you to roughly calculate CO2 and dollars you save by riding a bike. Check it out for yourself.

    I was actually quite surprised that biking only one day per week would save me around $10 in gasoline over the course of a month.

    If you’d like to look at the code or correct my math or whatever, it’s up on github: https://github.com/ohryan/biketoworkcalculator

    Oh and if you’re in to cycling, follow me on Strava.

  • Three of the greatest things of all time… this week…

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    This past week I’ve made three minor tech-adjacent discoveries that have the potential to change my life in small but important ways.

    None of these are groundbreaking on their own, but together they’re actually making me a little excited about “tech” again. In sort of a strange way.

    Stoop

    I’ve always had two related problems with email newsletters. They clutter up my inbox and I never end up reading any of them. Because of this I actively avoid subscribing to newsletters and often unsubscribe to newsletters randomly. Stoop solves this problem in the best way possible.

    Stoop in an app for reading newsletter. Like a podcatcher but for text.

    Stoop gives you an @stoopinbox.com email address, which you’ll use to sign up for newsletters. It then receives in them like any other email services, except with a UI tailor to newsletter consumption.

    It goes a long way to de-clutter your inbox and gives you a distraction free newsletter reading experience.

    Get it here →

    Kindle Fire Tablet 7th Edition

    A couple of years ago my two boys each received Kindle fire tablets as Christmas gifts. As kids do, they promptly forgot them and abandoned them in a pile of clutter.

    I’ve been meaning to read more, for years and year. I’ve only been meaning to read more books proper; but also all those Pocket links I stow away and forget about; and those cool newletters everyone is always recommending 😉

    Digital reading has always been a bit of a Goldilocks problem for me. Desktop computer screens are too big; iPads are a little big (great for magazines though) and too heavy to hold up in bed for an hour; phone screens are too small and distracting.

    Then I remembered the Fire Tablets.

    They’re prefect! Roughly the same height, width and most importantly weight as a paperback novel. Battery life is great and screen resolution is acceptable. You can side-load the Google play store and get most apps. But I’m keeping mine limited to reading apps to maintain a distraction free, reading-focused environment.

    I’ve been making a conscious effort to pick up the Fire instead of my phone whenever I want to read Google News or that sort of thing.

    Its only (minor) shortcoming is speed. The hardware is old and sluggish. Web browsing is a pain, changing context is slow. But flipping and scroll pages is fast enough. And you could almost spin the sluggishness as a positive, since it discourages you from change contexts and helps focus on what you’re currently reading.

    Apparently you can still but the Fire 7 →

    KOHO

    I can assure you this is not an ad! But I do have a referral code ZL5RTDVQ if you end up using this.

    I feel a little weird talking about a financial product, so I’m going to keep this a short as possible.

    I was chatting with Internet Good Guy Levisan around the time the Apple Card “unboxing” videos started popping out, commenting on how r/latestagecapitalism they were. He mentioned KOHO, on account of it also having a metal card.

    KOHO is an app-based prepaid VISA that offers 0.05% cashback on all purchases (2% on some purchases if you pay for “premium”) and has none of the lame fees that you’d expect from a one time used pre-paid visa you might buy as a “gift card.”

    It also offers a “virtual” card in the app for online payments. One that you can turn off if your accounts get pwn’d. AFAIK virtual cards have been rare in the Canadian market before now.

    Also you can feed the card with Interac E-transfers.

    KOHO feels like it might be a way to get some of the benefits of Apple’s Credit card, without burring yourself even deeper into Apple’s ecosystem.

    It’s early days but I’m optimistic that this will improve my financial health. Especially since it’s pre-paid only and there is no way to carry a negative balance.

    Get it here →

    There you have it. Three things that are blowing my mind this week. 🤯🤯🤯

    What’s exciting you right now?