I build things.

YouTube Playback Speed on iOS

Access the playback speed controls (and other settings) on iOS in Safari

I watch a lot of video content on my iPad/iPhone. Mainly in the form of presentations from conferences, or courses from online sources like PluralSight. I try and extract more value from my time by integrating these with other less mentally demanding tasks, like long low-intensity workouts, travel, and household busy work. One of my recent frustrations has been the inability to play content at a faster speed on YouTube vs other sources.

Posted by Mike Apted Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Dropbox WTF

Is Dropbox behaving badly on your Mac?

This is a somewhat complex issue but the TL;DR here seems to be: Dropbox is using deceptive and ethically questionable means of obtaining broad permissions on your Mac without being clear to you why they need them and what they are doing with them. That is certainly worthy of a closer look and some consideration of how that makes you feel re: using their products. I first saw this referenced today by @bitfield and the main issues here are that:

Posted by Mike Apted Friday, September 9, 2016

Empirical evidence of short term 'momentum' in the NHL?

Comebacks vs. blown leads in overtime games.

My exploration of SDQL continues, and as before I’ve just been working to pick up the basics of the query language. ‘Momentum’ is an oft debated concept in sports. The question this time is: Do teams that blow leads typically also lose the game in overtime? In other words, does a team charging through a comeback carry that ‘momentum’ into overtime? Using KillerSports.com as my source (the data goes back to 2006) and filtering for regular season only I decided to look at teams winning percentages in overtime when holding a given lead after one or two periods of play.

Posted by Mike Apted Saturday, January 16, 2016

Q: How safe is a lead after each period in the NHL?

A: Reasonably to very.

After discovering SDQL I’ve been working to pick up the basics of the query language. Best to start with something easy and work up from there I figure, so the first question I wondered was: How safe is a lead after each period in the NHL? Using KillerSports.com as my source (the data goes back to 2006) and filtering for regular season only that answer seems to be: Pretty safe.

Posted by Mike Apted Thursday, January 7, 2016

Normalizing deviance

Why bad decisions become accepted convention.

During the break I read an interesting article (?) by Dan Luu on normalizing deviance, which is the process of culturally accepting small things we know instinctively to be wrong in pursuit of some short term trade off. Over time that exerts pressure on new members of the culture to accept those mistakes, as it becomes prohibitive to spend political capital in combating them. Eventually, these cut corners become foundational and wind up manifesting as the root cause of some catastrophe that (hopefully) spurs the needed cultural change.

Posted by Mike Apted Monday, January 4, 2016

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Principal Solutions Architect @AWSCloud. Technologist. Founder. Helping startups live their best cloud life. 🐶🏊🏼‍♂️🚴🏽‍♂️🏃🏽‍♂️⛷🏒 Opinions mine.