Weekly Notes 17/2024

April 27, 2024

This week: Apple Watch finding the iPhone, IVF treatment, language learning, aging parents, and participation in India’s elections.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

The Apple Watch feature to find the iPhone from the watch is a lifesaver. I end up using it at least once a week, especially when I wear clothes that don’t have much pockets like boxers or a mundu. Nomophobia is real!

Autocorrect has gotten increasingly good over the last few months. I know people like to diss on it, but my experience—at least over the last few OS updates—have been that it’s undergone a remarkable improvement. It makes contextual corrections and fixes things like sentence structure and grammar as well. Perhaps learning spelling and grammar will go the way of the dodo as well soon.

Notice how it contextually corrects “corrects”.

We started our next round of IVF treatment this week. We’re doing this in CIMAR, Kochi, and it’s the best fertility-focused hospital we’ve visited yet. We’ve done 4 rounds now, and this is the fifth. Going through each one is a spiral up of expectations and down to disappointment and a sense of loss. While statistics help, it’s hard to stay in the world of equanimity and cautious hope, especially as we get further in to the process. Here’s to hoping it works this time ??

Reached the 175-day streak on Duolingo learning German. I seem to have climbed some sort of vocabulary or practice hump as I’m able to construct a lot of simple sentences now.

I’ve said before that one of the perks of living in my hometown is that I’m close to parents. It comes with its downsides though: you get to see your parents visibly age. I went with dad yesterday to an eye doctor and it seems he’s got problems in both his retina nerves. It’s a chronic age-related macular degeneration and while there are treatments, it’s never 100% effective. I cannot stress enough how important is to encourage parents to visit doctors early and do regular checkups. For both sets of our parents this is an uphill task.

And finally, I voted yesterday. India’s elections are a thing both of chaos and beauty. If you haven’t voted yet, do exercise your right to vote!

I’ve been playing around with Rayon to draw and edit plans for the new house. It doesn’t import from PDF plans that well, but the drawing features seem great for an amateur like me. I’m not planning to use this seriously and the builders will draw their own plans, but it’s great to explore ideas.
The Wild Robot seems like a great, fun ride. Definitely want to watch this when it gets out.
Taska seems like one of those apps I should like, even love, but it doesn’t seem to support Github projects yet, and that’s a deal breaker. And when you have a large repo, scrolling through issues is really janky. I would love a project and notification-centric fast native UI for Github.