Background
I’ve never felt that I have been great when it comes to writing, and to be quite honest, I’ve never really had the urge to sit down and write. Recently however I have found that I really wanted another creative outlet, nothing too crazy, and nothing that will become overwhelming and take up too much of my time, but will allow me to share interesting and useful things.
In this blog, I’ll aim to keep things short and sweet, with a variety of topics that I hope will capture your interest. I’ll share my thoughts on things that interest me, offer some tips and tricks that I’ve found helpful, or simply highlight something that made me smile during the week. Whatever the topic, I hope that you’ll find something of value in these posts.
As I embark on scratching this creative itch, I welcome all feedback and suggestions. Please feel free to share your thoughts with myself, as I’ll be looking for ways to improve and make this blog more engaging. Thank you for joining me on this adventure!
To start with, here’s a roundup of some of the things that have caught my attention recently.
Exploring Reading Fiction
I regrettably have not picked up a fiction book since high school, always finding myself constantly reading or listening to non-fiction books or audiobooks. Part of me has subconsciously found reading non-fiction a lot more accessible and allows for a more flexible reading schedule. Since almost all of the non-fiction I read is not story based, the content lends itself to act as more or a guide where the order of chapters isn’t necessarily crucial, and swapping between multiple books often seems reasonable.
Okay, so I am not going to give up reading non-fiction that easily but I have recently been inspired to start introducing fiction into my readings. At the start of the year this idea was brought to my attention by Lex Fridman where he is reading a fiction book every week this year. I am not planning on adopting the same schedule but to go at my own pace and choose titles which I feel best align with my interests. He is also trying to read almost exclusively well respected classics, I feel I will try to do the same.
I’m going in blind and starting off with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I have heard bits and pieces about this book, but don’t really know much about it other than it’s considered to be a love letter to science fiction. Another reason for the pick was that it’s quite a short read and if I want this to eventually become a habit, it needs to start off being a reasonably achievable goal (my personal approach to new things).
Quote I’m Pondering
At a certain point you stop being judged on your technical skills, and start being judged on how you work with people.
I was listening to a podcast episode featuring the creator of ESLint (a software dev tool 😴), and towards the end they were discussing career progression for developers. The quote was pulled by the interviewer from the creator’s personal website.
I felt this quote resonated with me and I paused to think it through for a second. For those that are in technical roles it’s important to try and constantly remind ourselves that as we desire to excel in our careers, there is usually a significant interpersonal expectation also.
A link to the podcast can be found here for those interested, just keep in mind that the context is quite technical.
An Okay Weather App
I have never felt more lost than when I was recently looking for an acceptable weather app. I would not be surprised if the ‘weather app’ genre is the most saturated app genre there is (other than maybe Flappy Bird clones). My search started because I recently moved phones and the existing one I had was OS specific. I had to find a new alternative.
This may sound controversial, but there are no good mobile weather apps! Okay, now I’m sure that there are a few that exist, but with how many terrible ones that are in your way when trying to find a good one, you almost feel lost and stuck with the ones presented to you. Simply searching for weather apps in the Play Store will leave you with thousands of results, 99% of which have ads, are paid, have in-app purchases, require an account, or are likely riddled with malware. And they are just the ones that happen to have decent reviews.
I just wanted a simple weather app that gave me at least a week’s forecast and had a home screen widget to replace the old one that I used to use. Nothing more, nothing less.
After about half an hour of trying various options, I finally decided upon OpenWeather. So is it a fantastic app with all the bells and whistles, nope. It does just enough for what I want from an unpaid ad free app, and that’s plenty good for me.
They have an app for both Android and iOS.
Imposter MP3s
Recently I have been going through my personal music library and cleaning it up quite a bit. Over the years I have amassed quite the collection. Most of this cleaning has been renaming and re-tagging audio files with correct metadata, as well as organising the files into an appropriate folder structure.
Throughout this process I have come across a number of files that were lying about their actual bitrate. The most common scenario are files claiming to be 320kbps when they are actually much lower, usually 256 or 192. This isn’t really a big problem but it does hurt a bit knowing that I’m being lied to.
After doing some research I found that there are many tools used to identify the correct bitrates of files. A good tool I found is Spek, free and open source. The only downside is that you have to do a manual inspection of each file and determine its bitrate from the Spectrogram. More info here. Usually okay if you have a general suspicion and want a quick and easy way to inspect the file, but not really suitable for a large library.
Being able to do a bulk scan of my library and tag the files in question would have been much more appropriate. After a bit more searching I came across Fakin’ The Funk which is able to do just that. It’s paid software but also has a free tier which can detect up to 100 fake files within a library. It was pretty simple to use which was a plus and suitable enough for my needs.
So, what did I do with these bad files? Most of them I ended up deleting, however some others are not readily available online. With these files, I ended up just inserting a comment tag with the real bitrates for the moment. I will likely re-export these files so they have their correct bitrates, but that’s a job for another day.
I only really went to all this effort for some piece of mind I guess. It was pretty fun to learn about as well. Majority of the time I spend listening with YT Music anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯