Author: Steven Garrity

Do I need insurance when I rent a car

by Steven Garrity

Any time I’ve rented a car in my life there’s been a question I didn’t know how to answer: Do you need insurance?

I’ve had a vague notion that my credit card may provide insurance for cars I rent, or maybe my own personal car insurance may cover cars I rent. I didn’t really know though.

Sometimes I waived the rental company insurance, sometimes I paid for it.

With an upcoming rental with the Turo car rental app (think Airbnb for cars but hopefully without fuelling a housing crisis), I was asked again if I needed my own insurance, or if I should pay for Turo’s insurance.

I finally decided to figure out the real answer: do I already have insurance on cars that aren’t my own? I called The Personal Insurance Company, who insures our beloved minivan, and got a real answer.

After some confusion about coverage for when I’m driving a rental car, and coverage to pay for a rental car when my own car is damaged, I got my answer: No, I don’t have coverage for cars I rent.

How much would it cost to get insurance for cars I’m renting? They called it “endorsement PE-SEF 27” and it is $8. A year. Done.

It took me decades, but I can finally waive rental car insurance with confidence.

 

Great Tweets

by Steven Garrity

As part of their story about the downfall of Twitter, The Verge has compiled an archive of Great Tweets. I might just be tired, but I’ve been laughing for 15 minutes at these.

Not on the list, but a couple of favourites of mine:

“There’s still so much we don’t know about HTML. Even now, scientists are discovering new tags almost every day”

@Orteil42

“Stepping down from my job to devote myself full time to reading the emails from my kids schools”

Joseph Birbiglia @joebirbigs (deleted)
 

Uncovering differences in images with the Web

by Steven Garrity

This video (that I found via Waxy, who found it via the Tom Scott newsletter) does a great job of illustrating how you can visualize subtle or hidden change over time in video:

Thumbnail image from video showing clouds of mixes of bright colors and a YouTube style play button in the middle

In a much less sophisticated example of a similar principle, I sometimes use the ‘Difference’ filter mode in Photoshop (or other image tools) to catch small changes between two images.

As a simple example, these first two images (screenshots of the WordPress settings screen) are almost identical. The third image uses a ‘difference’ blend mode to make this small change obvious.

Screenshot of wordpress settings screen.
Screenshot of wordpress settings screen with tiny text difference from the previous image.
Mostly black image with small area of distorted text highlighting the difference between the two previous images.

The differences between the first two images are: a checkbox was moved down a few pixels, and the word “register” was replaced with “join”. If you open the first two images (A & B) in two browser tabs, you can also switch quickly between them and your brain will do the work to highlight the change (just like the T-Rex did in Jurassic Park before it ate that lawyer off the toilet).

As a bonus, the Web has native support for this ‘difference’ blend mode via the CSS mix-blend-mode property. I was able to put together a quick example with some simple HTML/CSS that shows the difference mode without a tool like Photoshop.

See the Pen Blend Mode by Steven Garrity (@sgarrity) on CodePen.

 

What do you call the children of your work -friends?

by Steven Garrity

I asked my coworkers today: We have terms for the children of your siblings, or the children of your children. What do you call the children of your work -friends?

I was satisfied with one colleague’s suggestion of “Coworker once removed.”

Then, many hours later, it dawned on me: Businiece (or the slightly less perfect, Businephew).

All in a day’s work.

 

Trivial Tragedy #8: The coconut

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

When I was a child, our family bought a coconut from the grocery store. It was a rare and exotic novelty.

We all gathered to try and access the strange and nourishing coconut milk trapped inside the huge hairy stone.

In a time before YouTube, we had to resort to our own ingenuity to open the coconut. We moved the operation out into our garage where we tried a hammer and nails. We tried a drill and screwdriver.

Eventually, we smashed the coconut open and watched as a tiny splash of coconut milk trickled out onto the dirty garage floor.

 

“AI outputs can be misleading or wrong”

by Steven Garrity

AI features keep popping up in all of the digital products I use. Figma, Photoshop, Notion, Zoom. These products tend to prompt acceptance of vague privacy terms that may or may not feed your private/company data into the AI slurry.

Figma added some AI generation tools into their FigJam product under a “Beta” caveat. I’m both impressed at how candid they are and troubled at how they are comfortable shipping a feature that requires such a warning:

“AI outputs can be misleading or wrong”

— FigJam product, which uses AI…
Screenshot of software interface with text input to generate material with AI and a warning that reads 'AI outputs can be misleading or wrong'

Also, if you ask the Photoshop’s AI-powered “Generative Fill” feature to draw something “with a transparent background”, it renders a messy checker-board background that is sometimes used to illustrate transparency.

Two images of trees with an uneven checker-board pattern in the background.

Lots of power, lots of potential, lots of problems.