From the Archive. I dug out and finished off some work I started in February. It involved implementing a streaming base64 encoder, and, even doing some maths to figure out the number of bytes to read in order to output N bytes of base64 (i.e. the reverse of base64.StdEncoding.EncodedLen).
Frances. Looking further back, the care staff at my grandmother's care home have working on stories about the lives of some of their resident's. Granny was one of the first women in the UK to be ordained and they've done a little write up of the event, now almost 30 years ago. The 'Book a Tour' form is rather revealing of the post's not-so-hidden role but it's still a fun page with some photos.
Granny being ordained at Hereford Cathedral (1994)
MIFARE. I still have the luxury of being aged under 30. This means that I get discounted off-peak public transport in London under the National Railcard discounts programme - a feature still unavailable on contactless cards. After recently adding a hotel room key to Apple Wallet I found myself considering the feasibility of adding my Oyster Card too. Turns out that it's not that simple, but it was an interesting thing to research.
MVVM Wat...? I spent my day off this week working on an iPhone app for a personal, public transport related itch. It has felt a bit like jumping in at the deep end. Coming from Golang, the Swift language feels big - there are many options to do any one thing and I don't have the experience to know which is best, nor how to organise my project. I found the MVVM topic something of a rabbit hole too. On top of that, I ran into this 6 year old issue with the TfL API. These are minor hurdles on the road to my inevitable App Store success.
Stamps. As mentioned last week, I've been enjoying taking breaks in the local park. More regular trips to GAIL's, coupled with their very slow app set me down a path that started with learning about .pkpass files - looking to add 'My Loyalty ID' to Apple Wallet too. I found MakePass, an app for creating custom wallet passes by an independent developer. It worked, and was the main prompt I needed to have a play with making an iOS app again.
My counterfeit GAIL's stampcard even pops up at the right time based on my location
Choo Choo. We closed out the week with an embarkation, first stop: North Yorkshire, next stop Inverness! (It's half term)
Andor. 1 week later, we are about 5 episodes into the show. It's about space and it's good!