I’m in the process of reworking my (now very old) website. It’s a great quarantine project, especially now @asiancwgrl is working in the evenings again.

As I work through it I’m discovering some awesome tools and services, so I thought I’d share a few links in no particular order.

• OctoberCMS is a PHP-based CMS based on the Laravel framework. I’ve tried it out before, but this time around I’ve been writing a few plugins of my own to really make it do what I want. I’d also shout out the Magic Forms third-party plugin.
• Bootstrap is the front-end framework I’m using. I’ve been aware of it for a while but I’ve never used it until now, and I don’t know I ever lived without it. The only downside is now that I know what a bootstrap-based site looks like I see them everywhere.
• Font Awesome is a service I only learned about today and is a really simple way to use icons on a website.
• ColorSpace for creating colour schemes

As much as I enjoy building my own hardware, especially stuff that makes my various dumb appliances smart, it’s sometimes the most frustrating experience. I find myself constantly troubleshooting something.

This, for example, is the microcontroller that connects up all the stuff in my garage – door sensors, ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensors, etc.

It stopped working a month or so ago, and I’ve been trying to figure it out. The problem is that it’s attached to the rafters in the garage, so I disconnected everything and took it down to work on it. As soon as I plugged it in at my desk it booted up, connected itself to the WiFi and started complaining that the garage door was gone – as expected when the sensors are disconnected.

This afternoon I put it back in its housing in the garage, plugged it in… and nothing.

It took me an hour of trial and error before it occurred to me to put a multi-meter on it to see if the sensors were getting the voltage they should be, and I discovered the problem. The USB power adapter that should have been supplying it with 5V was only putting out about a quarter of that.

Infuriating.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

C. S. Lewis

I read an article about customer obsession this week and it included this quote that resonated with me so strongly I went and dug up my WordPress password.

At work we’re reimagining how we do, well, everything.

We’ve moved our office software to the cloud, transitioned to an agile project management approach, and are expanding on and accelerating our cultural revolution. It’s little things that make a big difference, and the impact is exciting. The way I work is shifting, and one of the things that’s at risk of getting left behind if handwritten notes.

I like taking notes on a computer just fine, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for pen and ink. In a world where I can use my wristwatch to do work though, how does a paper notebook fit in?

This week I went looking for a 21st century solution, and I found Rocketbook.

They sell reusable notebooks (some of which you erase by microwaving them, which seems a bit gimmicky) and, crucially, an app that digitises the notes and automatically saves them to one of a number of predefined cloud destinations like my all new work Google Drive.

They’re $51.05 in Canada which is definitely expensive enough that I wanted to try the app first. You can do that with freely downloadable PDF versions of the notebook’s specially marked pages and grab the app from your app store of choice, and it works great. While I was at it I tried scanning the same page using the Google drive app and it was just as successful, cropping, deskewing and colour correcting without the need for any special page markings.

So I’m sticking to my regular old notebooks and the Google drive app that came on my phone. Fittingly, it turns out I had the tools I needed all along and I just needed a little adjustment to my approach to make the big difference I was looking for.

I’m planning a trip to the UK – where I’m from – later in the year.

Last time I went there I still had my SIM card from when I lived there. I’d changed it to a prepaid account before I moved, so I just added some credit and everything worked great. Since then Three have changed their terms of service and cancelled my account for no other reason than I haven’t topped up my phone in two and a half years.

I need an alternative, and the most cost effective solution for international travel is almost always to buy a SIM in the country you travel to, but is that something I want to deal with on vacation, in each and every country I visit? It is not. I’m prepared to pay (or at least not save as much) to not have to do that.

I found a company called OneSimCard that seemed to fit the bill, offering a SIM I could buy ahead of time and use to save me some money whenever I travelled. Unfortunately the fact that they have three products that all fulfil my need (but each with their own advantages and disadvantages) and I had to work to figure out which was best was a problem, and the checkout process that didn’t quite work correctly was the nail in the coffin.

We could debate whether “the customer is always right” all day long but one thing I hope we can all agree on is that the customer is always the customer: their role in all this is to give you their money in exchange for goods and/or services, and your job – your only job – is to make that process as smooth and simple as it can possibly be. Make sure they’re happy and they come back later to do it all again too, ideally.

Whether you work at a local grocery store or a large multinational, that’s something we’d all do well to keep top of our minds.