E-Transfer List Purge Day

Proposal: A new national holiday where we all take some time to clean up our list of Interac e-Transfer recipients.

You probably aren’t going to do more business with that person from Facebook Marketplace who sold you a pair of kids snow-pants and claimed they lived “in town”, but took 25 minutes to get to their house.

 

Zoom video conferencing audio stereo chorus effect with CalDigit TS3 dock

This post is only for the one person searching for this issue – it’s probably not for you:

I’ve got an issue that started recently (possibly when updating my M1 MacBook Pro to macOS 15 (Sequoia).

The issue only happens with this particular combination of hardware/software: SM57 into my UB802 Behringer mixer, into my CalDigit TS3, dock into Zoom videoconferencing software.

With this combination, I get an odd stereo effect that sounds like (and I think is) the same mono signal slightly out of time in the left vs. right stereo channels.

This is a recording from a Zoom call showing how my voice sounds odd when panned to the center, but fine when panned left or right.
  • If I use the same mic/dock into any other audio app, it sounds fine.
  • If I use any other mic, or even the same mic/mixer into the headphone jack on the MacBook, it sounds fine.

Today, I discovered a “fix”: The issue only appears if I pan the left/right mix on my mixer to the center. If I pan hard left or hard right, it sounds fine (even though it all gets mixed down to mono). Since it’s a mono signal from the mic (I guess getting split into stereo in the mixer), it sounds identical in Zoom regardless of the panning.

I don’t know if the ‘fault’ lies with Zoom, CalDigit, or macOS.

 

What color was your blue bucket?

When I was growing up, when I or one of my four siblings was sick and there was a risk of vomit, someone would be sent to fetch the “Blue Bucket”.

Even if the bucket wasn’t blue, or wasn’t an actual bucket, it was still the Blue Bucket.

What color was your blue bucket?

 

Apple small print

The Apple.com home page has over 3,400 words of small-print footnotes.

Screen recording scrolling through the apple.com home page showing multiple screens full of legalese small print.
 

The Quiet Middle (I don’t hate Justin Trudeau)

People who hate Justin Trudeau really like other people to know that they hate him. They put stickers on their trucks.

People who don’t feel too strongly either way about Justin Trudeau don’t shout about it, or reply in online conversations about it, or wear shirts about it.

There is no sticker for your car that says: “I don’t love or hate Justin Trudeau — I like some of what he’s done and dislike other parts. On the whole, he is not a disaster.”

 

Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws

Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws states that:

One should name laws after one’s self.

See:

 

Garrity’s Law of Corporate Typefaces

Just as “every program attempts to expand until it can read mail”, I believe that:

Every organization expands until it commissions its own bespoke typeface.

Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc. have all done it. Mozilla did it. Now, Figma has done it too.

 

Standard Jibbitz

Which ISO standard determines how Jibbitz can work across the greater Crocs ecosystem?

 

Grouping rows in Google Sheets

I learned about the row/column grouping feature in Google Sheets. If you’re anything like me, can’t believe you didn’t already know about this.

Screen recording showing the row Group feature in Google Sheets.
 

25 years of silverorange (so far)

The company I helped start, silverorange, is now 25 years old. I wrote a bit about how it feels 25 years in (it feels good!).

When we got started in 1999, we were 7 people in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

In 2024 we are 38 people spread across 8 provinces (and one Canadian working abroad in the US):

  • 12 on Prince Edward Island
  • 9 in British Columbia
  • 7 in Ontario
  • 3 in Alberta
  • 2 in Quebec
  • 2 in Nova Scotia
  • 1 in New Brunswick
  • 1 in Manitoba
  • and one Canadian working in the US

(read the rest)