English
- One million seconds ā 12 days
- One billion seconds ā 31 years
š± Wallpapers for Home.app
Here’s a remake of backgrounds from this thread that I made since the links were dead. These were inspired by u/rzalexander and made with free illustrations from illustrations.co. I’ve tried to adapt the illustrations to iOS 16’s new home app, so that the text and icons are visible.
I’ve also made companion backgrounds for use with iPad and Mac. Since those windows resize all the time, using two tone and illustrations was a no-go. So they are just one colour backgrounds (I have one using the dark colour and one using the light one. I’ve used the latter).
The Worldās Best Sneakers?
Adidas has made their Stan Smiths since the 70s, and you can see them everywhere all summer. They are good-looking shoes, but where the earlier versions were made in France and had high quality, you canāt quite say the same about the newer ones made in India. They canāt be fixed, uses synthetic materials and someone would prefer a bit more modern design.
Common Projects
In later years, Common Projects, with their golden lettering, has taken the sneaker world by storm. With a more modern, minimalistic design, Italian leather and good Margom rubber soles, they arenāt cheap.
But when you pay well over Ā£300 for a pair of Italian designer shoes, you can expect excellent quality, right? Well, itās superior to the Stan Smiths, but for the price you could do so much better. The YouTube channel Rose Anvil goes into detail in this video, but the short version is that, while the shoes have some premium features, both the material and construction is pretty mediocre. In this article, Iād like to point at a brand that gives you a more premium sneaker, at a (slightly) lower price.
But in the end I will also share why I still understand why someone would opt for the Common Projects!
Great Baseball Cap From Poten
This is my favourite cap (and headgear in general) of all time. And this is also a good example of something I love in general: Simple products, made extremely well.
These caps are made at the same factroy that does caps for the Japanese baseball league. Several brands have tried to get the factory to produce caps from them, but without success. According to Self Edge, Hiro (the man behind Poten, who also has a huge baseball card collection) had to visit the factory several times, over three years, to show them that he cares enough about baseball to have them produce caps for him. Lucky for those of us who don’t play in the NPB! But what’s so good about these caps then?
Machines, AI, and the Most Important Question in the World
Message from 2024: I wrote this post in the spring of 2023, as AI tools were pretty new. Iāve since landed on the principle of not using AI generated images on my blog. This post has two images like this, but as itās critical of the models (and explains a bit of why I currently donāt want to use them), Iāve let them be.
First, a very simplified history lesson:
For a large portion of the human existence, technology (often in the shape of machines or tools) has replaced manual labour, and led to increased productivity. The printing press replaced monks writing books by hand, looms evolved to include less and less manual laber per unit of fabric, the telegraph reduced the need for mail carriers, and photography really hurt Big Portrait Painting. Usually, the technology doesnāt completely replace the professions it affects. For instance, you can still get a tailored suit ā but itās a minor part of the clothing industry, and mostly reserved for the wealthy. The old turns into niches, hobbies, crafts and/or art.
Here are some of the positives from this:
The problem with teachers being tired of change
Iām going to try something that I know is impossible ā talking about a profession as one entity. In Norway, there are 77,000 teachers, and of course, all of us are individuals. Still, there are some things Iām pretty sure many teachers agree on: We are tired of people with little expertise telling us how to do our jobs. The pendulum swings from one side to another, so what was in vogue 30 years ago is now considered the newest hotness. Be it politicians, parents, or others ā many teachers want to be left alone, and be free to do a job theyāve many years of education and experience in.
But many have written about this before.
I would like to point at a problem this has led to. It has, in my view, created a sort of hardness in the profession thatās made us impervious to change.
š± Why 4k ā 5k
And what Apple means when they say Ā«RetinaĀ»
Iām pretty sure the Apple Studio Display is overpriced. Still, the discourse after its announcement has been plagued by people not quite understanding the difference between 4k and 5k on a 27-inch display. Itās just one kay difference ā why canāt you just buy a 4k screen thatās cheaper, brighter and/or has a higher refresh rate? Why do some Apple fans crave this extra kay so much??
Marc Edwards, of Bjango, wrote an excellent piece on this, and I especially like the visual examples of 4k vs. 5k on macOS. **Ā As a maths teacher, I find this problem interesting, and here I will bring some light to this issue the way I would to a high school class.** Perhaps this makes it easier to understand why the issues Edwards highlight appear.
Whatās in a kay?
To narrow things down, Iām mostly going to look at 27-inch screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio (so no super-wides here!). Letās compare the three most normal resolutions at this size: 1440p, 4k and 5k.
Humans are notoriously bad at comparing large numbers. Every day, thereās a new tweet trying to help us understand the difference between a million and a billion, by reminding us that:
So, itās forgiven that people think 4k and 5k are pretty close. However, 5k resolution has _a lotĀ _more pixels:
