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Why can’t you show AM/PM time on an iPhone?

So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue.

My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well for his age. The only thing he’s having trouble with is short-term memory. This usually isn’t a big enough problem to cause any major concern at the moment. Although he lives on his own, it’s in an apartment that is equipped for his needs within an assisted living building, and my parents aren’t too far from him.

The thing that is causing problems, pretty major problems, is when he takes a nap and then wakes up and thinks it’s the wrong time of day. This causes him to miss meals because he doesn’t go down to the dining room in time. And when older folks start to regularly miss meals, they get pretty weak pretty fast.

He doesn’t want to cause a fuss, so we don’t know exactly how often this happens. I imagine with other folks, it also might be a bit embarrassing (maybe it is for him as well, I’m not sure). He naps a lot, which is fair enough considering his age, so I suspect it might be more often than we think.

I was talking about this with my mom, asking him if he has a big digital clock in his apartment or something. He does have a clock, but he usually looks at his watch or his phone for the time. I don’t want to suggest that he wear a digital watch, because his watch came from my grandma. So we were looking at our phones, and she pointed out that there’s no AM/PM.

There’s no way of changing it! That seems ludicrous.

I know he could change it to 24-hr time. But I doubt he would do that, because he would probably convince himself that it’s fine and he doesn’t need it. It would be a heck of a lot easier if you could just show AM/PM via the iOS Date & Time settings, as one would expect.

If any Apple folks happen to read this, I’d love if you could take this feedback onboard in some way. Or if you happen to know anyone at Apple, I’d really appreciate if you shared this with them.

In the meantime… I guess we get him a bigger digital clock for his apartment? I’m really not sure.

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The serial (“Oxford”) comma and screen readers

People think that serial / “Oxford” commas should be an optional style thing. But if you’re writing for the web, please use it.

Here’s an example of a sentence without a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother and your uncle to the party

And an example of a sentence with a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother, and your uncle to the party

First point: the second sentence makes it much clearer that Jack isn’t some questionable relative and that you’re meant to bring three people to the party.

Second point, and more the point of this post: the sentence with the serial comma is much more intelligibly read by screen readers, particularly when content is being read quickly.

Use the serial comma!

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NOW v7: More of the same

Updated my Now page, contents below for posterity. View past presents.

Since the last update in April 2022:

In broader, non-personal news, for posterity’s sake: 🌻 the terrible war in Ukraine continues, 💔 Roe v. Wade was repealed, 🐦 Twitter was bought by a megalomaniac and is subsequently imploding (who saw that coming?!?!?!?), 🇧🇷 Brazil finally got rid of their Trump (swiftly followed by a January 6th-esque attack on Brasília), 🇬🇧👑 the UK saw three prime ministers and two monarchs (all before B was 18 months old!).

We continue to see major tragic events being caused or exacerbated by climate change: flooding devastation in Pakistan, heat waves shrank the Po and Rhine rivers in Europe as well as the Mississippi in the US, Europe experienced its hottest summer on record, Category 4 Hurricane Ian left destruction from the Caribbean up through Florida and the Carolinas.

AI technology and use is accelerating rapidly. It really scares me. Worsening problems with misinformation is part of it, but honestly, deepfaked sexual content and its implications (made-to-order revenge porn, teens using AI to generate idealized images that are even more divorced from reality than IRL porn, etc.) scares me the most right now.

As with the last update, it feels a bit dark right now. But there have been some brighter points. Scientists seem to have made a breakthrough with ☢️ fusion technology. 🏳️‍🌈 Conversion therapy was officially banned in Canada. In Europe, ☀️ solar and wind power overtook gas for the first time. Both sides of the civil war in Ethiopia have signed a disarmament plan. Germany returned 22 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, as did The National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, and the RISD Museum (you listening, British Museum?). In terms of US politics, the midterms weren’t as hard-right-heavy as had been expected. (Probably because the majority of American citizens aren’t nuts and think that abortion should be legal in most cases? IDK, call it a hunch.)

***

In more personal news: It looks like I’ve made progress on most of the things I’ve wanted to do, which is a nice feeling.

We’re still in Brooklyn, and loving our neighborhood. But honestly, it’s probably too expensive for us long-term, and our apartment is definitely too small. So sad, because we love it in every other regard. Do we find a slightly larger apartment in a slightly less ideal location in this neighborhood? Do we find a much larger apartment in a different Brooklyn neighborhood? Do we try Queens? Do we look at a suburb? I really don’t know. Meanwhile, if you know of any 3 bed places coming available, give me a shout. We’d really like to stay where we are.

I’ve been working at SuperHi for a little over seven months now. Early on I was feeling very impostor-y, but I feel a lot more settled in now and have been loving it. My team is great, our projects are exciting, I’m learning so much. In particular, I’ve come up with a system for accessibility auditing that I’m really happy with. I’m hoping to write about that soon.

The day-to-day home routine has just been getting better over time, as long as you ignore the frequent days when it gets thrown off completely by daycare colds… Anyways, it’s pretty much the same as before, only I’m trying to get up a little earlier in order to do at least 15 minutes of exercise per day. I’ve been doing this routine plus some abs stuff, but I really need to branch out a bit. I’ve started running 💨 to daycare pickup which is a super new thing for me, I’ve never been a runner because of my knee. But it isn’t a long distance and it gets my heart rate up, which is good. I’ll keep doing it until the knee thing seems unbearable.

I have been meeting up with people more often, which does wonders for my mental health. Finally went to visit SJB and get the boys together, what a gorgeous house. And the daycare moms meet up for drinks 🍷 about once a month, they can tip it back. RIP Lizzie King’s, hopefully you’ll find a new home. Haven’t found a choir yet… but I’ve only recently felt like it might be a sensible thing to do, both because of Covid and because of time constraints.

Speaking of Covid 🦠, it feels like it’s… gone? Not gone, but we’ve reached some sort of uneasy equilibrium. To be honest, it may be less of an equilibrium and more of a shifting of priorities. Flu, RSV, and just general cold season is so unbelievably bad right now. B got RSV very early in the season, which was awful at the time (Sam was just getting over Covid but still testing positive, so I had to take B to the hospital alone). But looking back, I’m sort of thankful he got it back then? At least we had OTC meds and the hospital wasn’t too busy. There has been zero infant ibuprofen or acetaminophen on the shelves for weeks now, I check basically every store I pass. And hospitals have been packed.

Spring 🌷 can’t come fast enough. I said to Sam the other day that spring is going to come quick, and he gave me a very skeptical look. I think he may be right, but maybe not… time seems to be moving so fast.

B has changed SO MUCH over the past 9 months. First words (“hello” 👋, “ALL DONE” 🙅, “apple” 🍎, “ball” 🔵, “Stu”), animal noises (snake 🐍, lion 🦁, cow 🐮), pointing to body parts (belly button, nose 👃, eye 👁️, ear 👂, feet 🦶), walking then almost immediately running, lots of soccer ⚽️, absolute obsessions (and meltdowns) over anything hand-held with wheels 🛞, so many teeth 🦷. He still loves being startled, and cuddly things. He just started saying “please” (“eeethzzzz”), on command only. On the whole, he’s pretty “easy”. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop…

Nah!

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Winter cherry tree

Went to an HTML Energy gathering last weekend, got to see some great old faces and meet lovely new ones. I tried to hand-draw a leafless cherry tree ASCII-style but got the grid wrong. Here’s a re-attempt.

A teensy, tiny bit of snow stuck to the ground overnight and there was a light dusting when we woke up. First of the season.

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Balance brushing

I read somewhere that poor balance is heavily tied to memory loss later in life. Wish I could remember where…

Now I stand on one foot while brushing my teeth. The right foot and right side of my mouth for the first minute timed by my electric toothbrush, and the left foot / side of mouth for the second minute. It’s more challenging than you might think! Who knows if it would help long term, at least it makes B laugh.

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Mainly female mice in space

BTG “got looped in on a project that’s trying to understand how microgravity impacts bone healing by comparing earth and space station mice”. (My friends are much cooler than me.) She said that most of the mice that go to space are female since the male mice usually kill each other.

I had never heard of that before, but it kind of makes sense along these lines.

That got me searching online and I came across this UCSF article from 2018, Female Mice are Immune to Cognitive Damage from Space Radiation. Which seems even more unexpected and interesting.

HP had two critical followup questions:

  1. If we’re sending mainly female mice in to space, does this mean that we could end up with a preponderance of female-specific scientific data since male mice don’t tolerate space well? Sort of the opposite of the current problem, that most of our earthbound research is heavily male-oriented?
  2. Do mice wear little space diapers? Probably not, but how do they control / contain mice excrement since it’s so tiny? You don’t want little droplets and pellets floating around in microgravity.

Answers unclear, input welcome.

(Every time someone in the group chat said “mice in space”, my brain said it like “MICE. IN. SPAAAAAACCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEE.” Where is that opening credits cliché from? I can’t figure it out.)

Edit 25/01/23: Multiple lovely people have been in touch via Mastodon and email suggesting that it’s the Muppets’ Pigs In Space that I’m thinking of. It’s definitely spot on!

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Norovirus postmortem

We all caught norovirus. About 24 hrs of it was probably the worst time we’ve had since B was born, and the rest of the time wasn’t much better.

I won’t go in to the gory details, but here’s a few tips for future me who will inevitably catch it again (because daycare). Apparently noro rips through you so fast that your body doesn’t even have time to build any meaningful immunity. Fun.

  • Have the necessary meds on hand at all times. Once you are sick, there is zero chance you will want to or be able to go get supplies. Even if you could, you should avoid it for the sake of not spreading it any further. A friend or family member could pick stuff up for you, but this is so contagious that I’d be nervous to ask someone. We found that the most useful stuff was Pedialyte for rehydration and acetaminophen (paracetamol) for when the fever and aches kick in. Ibuprofen is way too hard on the stomach when you’re already feeling delicate. If you’re in a tough spot and don’t have the supplies, there are a lot of homemade rehydration fluid recipes online. Here are a few from the UVA Health System, and one from the NHS. Note that nausea suppressants are to be avoided apparently, the whole point is to get whatever is in there out or you’ll keep feeling bad.
  • This thing hits fast. We were first exposed to B’s symptoms in the morning, and we started our bouts in a spectacular fashion almost exactly one and a half days later. It can hit sooner or later, I would imagine that depends on the exact strain, but it’s usually 1-2 days. If you suspect that one of you has norovirus and you don’t have it yet, maybe avoid being far from home. I was at dinner with a friend 45 minutes away. I made it home just barely, but I went from feeling 100% fine and ready for some poke to “oh… OH no…” in about a split second. (Side note: I thought B had just eaten something weird. Would never have gone out if I had any inkling otherwise, both for my and my friend’s sake! Thankfully she seems to be fine, so I’m assuming (hoping) I wasn’t just blindly spreading noro that evening.)
  • Norovirus moves fast. The “active” stage (ew) was basically over after 12 hours. We both felt really bad, like bedridden-bad, for 2 days in total and then had a bit of weakness and rough appetites for maybe two days after that. It doesn’t make the worst of it any better, but at least it doesn’t last that long. They don’t really know concretely how long you can be contagious for, but the advice I’ve seen on the CDC and NHS sites seems to be that you should self-quarantine until you have been symptom-free for 2 days.
  • Totally anecdotal, but it seemed a lot worse for us than it was for B… Which I’m thankful for, but it’s not what I would expect. I asked friends about it and they had similar experiences. Make of that what you will.

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Reading recs from Gem

Reading recs from Gem:

  • 📕 The “living autobiography” series by Deborah Levy
  • 📖 Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  • 📖 Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (though she did say I might find this tough, I have a hair-trigger emotional core since B was born)
  • 📖 The Overstory by Richard Powers (“wasn’t amazing the whole time, but there were a lot of beautiful moments”, “sort of about trees”)
  • 📕 Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (yet another Biss book on my list, I really need to get going)

Going to keep track of my reading this year à la Lucy Bellwood, emojis and all. Need to get rid of this WordPress emoji conversion script though, yuck.