welou.net

Introducing Trackers

2026-02-09T09:41:00+02:00

I’m excited to introduce Trackers, a time tracking app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. You might find it useful if, like me, you want to keep track of time used on the various tasks during your workday. Or if your work time is flexible and you’d like to know exactly when you’ve reached your work requirement for the day.

Trackers is available on the App Store today.

Trackers on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Keeping It Simple

Trackers makes time tracking easy. There are no “projects” to configure, no “invoices” to generate and no projections of “today’s earnings”. It simply gives you a list of trackers and lets you know when you can wrap up your workday. Just create a tracker, give it a name and start it. Stop it when you’re done. Create a new tracker when starting a new task.

Main Features

While basic use is straightforward (and will always remain so), Trackers has a bunch of helpful features and a few ways you can customize it:

Track time spent on tasks with individual trackers. Each tracker can be quickly renamed or adjusted. Add a link or a note, or even review the entire activity history of the tracker.
Easily recreate a recent tracker when continuing with a task from previous days.
Define your workday’s length or set a schedule if your workdays differ in length.
See how long you’ve worked during the day and how much time remains. Tap the remaining time to see when your workday is going to end.
Get notified when your workday ends (or is about to) so you can avoid accidentally working overtime.
Stay up-to-date on the progress of your workday at a glance with widgets.
View past workdays and their trackers in the Archive.
Set Daily Trackers if you have tasks which repeat each day.
Trackers fully supports light and dark appearance. Let it be based on your device’s appearance or choose the appearance manually. Widget appearance can be set separately.
Data is synced via iCloud. Use Trackers on whichever device is most suitable.

Various views of Trackers in light and dark appearance. From left to right: the main view with menu open, naming a new tracker, adjusting a tracker, app settings.

Made by a Human

Trackers has been built by just me. No LLMs or “AI” have been used at any stage of development. Trackers also respects your privacy: all your data is stored on your own devices and in iCloud and your use of Trackers is not tracked in any way.

Trackers requires a subscription and comes with a one-month free trial. Yearly and monthly subscriptions are available. Yearly subscription at the time of release is $12.99 or 15.49€. Check the App Store for the exact price in your currency or region.

I’m proud of how the initial launch version of Trackers has shaped up and I have lots more planned. I hope you like it.

Recreating a macOS default wallpaper

2022-01-13T20:20:00+02:00

I quite enjoy the default abstract wallpaper of macOS Big Sur. It has a nice combination of bright colours with shapes that give it some structure. It also has a couple of details I unfortunately can’t unsee.

Unidentified Pixelated Objects, or UPOs.

The oddities look a bit like scaling artifacts resulting from fitting the larger image to the screen size. For whatever reason, this is the only wallpaper I’ve ever noticed this happening on. Perhaps the sharp edges separating the colours are making the issue more prominent. The original HEIF image can be found from within the system and looks to be just fine. The results may vary across different screen resolutions and macOS versions.

I’ve also come to find some of the shapes in the wallpaper slightly too wavy for my liking. The obvious solution for both of these problems was to recreate the image from scratch¹.

The process in Pixelmator Pro was fairly straightforward, as the image is mostly comprised of shapes and colour gradients with some strokes, inner shadows and strategically placed focus blurs thrown in. The main obstacle was the years I’ve put into Photoshop back in the day. Seems I’ll never really feel at home with any other image editor.

In comparison to the original I admit I took a couple of shortcuts and visually adept individuals will be able to spot these areas. Additionally the original image is in a square format, with not much happening outside the 16:9 center area, so I opted to omit the areas I never see anyway.

Meet the new wallpaper, same as the old wallpaper. Sans UPO sightings.

Download in 5K

Not entirely from scratch. ↩︎

Six hours per day

2021-11-11T19:12:00+02:00

Towards the end of 2019 I asked my manager if it would be possible for me to start working six-hour days. We didn’t have a precedent for this in our company so we decided to try it out starting the following January.

As the concepts of a workday and a workweek can differ depending on the region, line of work, contracts and so on, I should begin with a couple of definitions. We follow a common model in Finland of an eight-hour workday which includes a 30-minute unpaid lunch break. So 7,5 hours of work is expected during a day. A six-hour workday does not include a lunch break¹ so the expected amount of work is 80% of a 7,5-hour day. An alternative model of working four days a week instead of the usual five would deliver the same amount of work as six-hour days.

I work in the field of software development where much of the work is of a creative nature and often involves a lot of problem-solving — for me usually an even mix of thinking about how to solve the problem and figuring out why my solution does not work. Sometimes meetings interrupt the development flow. Sometimes context switches throughout the day can’t be avoided. What I found was that the final stretch of the workday was often the most tiring and unproductive period. That part of the day was simply less enjoyable.

The amount of time we spend working also felt like quite a lot to me. It seemed like a nice solution if I could cut out the less productive part of the workday and get that time for myself instead. I was also considering that I might use some of that additional time and energy on my own projects.

At the end of 2019 and during the beginning of 2020 we knew very little of how the year was about to unfold. Unsurprisingly the additional time gained from shorter workdays did not amount to advancing my personal projects a whole lot. As 2020 was a bit of a crummy year I’m not stressing at all about not having been more productive.

When it comes to work it quickly became apparent that the six-hour model was a pretty good fit for me. As we expected, it effectively removed the less good part of the workday. I didn’t expect though that with a shorter day it would be easier to remain focused on the tasks at hand also throughout the day. Overall my days had less downtime than before.

During March 2020 I switched to working fully remotely and have been working remotely since then. This did affect the six-hour experiment somewhat. As I tend to now sleep a little longer in the mornings and sometimes have a slightly longer lunch break it turns out that my remote six-hour day doesn’t very often end any earlier than a 7,5-hour day at the office would have. I can’t see this as much of a downside as this is still much preferable to a 7,5-hour remote day.

In light of both the data and how I feel personally, the experiment was a success. We kept the shorter workdays through the entire year and I’ve continued with this model for 2021 as well. Mostly the saved time from the shortened workdays has converted into free time with a close to 1:1 ratio, which I’m OK with. Currently I see this as a permanent arrangement and can’t really see myself going back.

In our case the working hours are flexible and one can have a lunch break whenever it suits them. The distinction between ”a 30-minute unpaid lunch break” and ”no lunch break” therefore makes no practical difference for me. ↩︎

Summer of Anime

2020-09-12T18:27:00+03:00

Maybe it was the overall corona situation. Or maybe I just had a bunch of time on my hands. Perhaps the acute lack of series to watch played a part. Whatever the reason, I ended up watching quite a bit of anime during the summer. A partial inspiration might have been my work colleague who a while ago recommended Your name., praising it as one his favourite films. I also happened to come across Kaguya-sama: Love is War, which I was kind of interested in watching. My previous experiences with anime weren’t very recent, having watched Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin (or, Silver Fang) in my youth and its followup series Ginga Legend Weed years later, so I didn’t really know what to expect.

So, as the whole pandemic thing shows no signs of stopping, I’m sharing here what I’ve been watching recently. You can take these as recommendations if you’re looking for something new to watch. View with either the English titles, original titles¹ or both.

It turned out Kaguya-sama: Love is War, a romantic comedy, was hilarious. The premise is a bit outrageous but getting past that there’s an endless amount of humorous situations, as well as truly heartfelt moments, that come out of it. Ishigami best girl ❤️

I had a faint idea what Your name.Kimi no Na wa. was about but it still surprised me in a few ways. Often I’d expect the story to go into one direction or the characters to behave in a certain way, only to find the movie taking a different direction. Beautifully drawn and animated, with a wonderful soundtrack, I really liked this one.

ErasedBoku dake ga Inai Machi is my favourite anime series so far. As a time travel - mystery - thriller - drama it does not nicely fit into any one specific category of anime, as many other series tend to do. The time travel aspect is implemented in an interesting manner, and I’m always a sucker for a good time travel story. The anime goes into some darker places which was somewhat unexpected. 13 episodes is sufficient for wrapping everything up. Tip: Never skip the intro.

Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day is another drama with some mystery elements. It was interesting to follow where the story was going and how it would eventually resolve. With just eleven episodes this was nicely bingeable. Quite melodramatic though, especially towards the end.

It appears that many anime series fall into strictly defined genres, one of which is called isekai. In this genre the main character, usually from our reality, is transported into another (often fantasy) world. These series, or at least the ones I’ve seen, also seem to be more open-ended and despite seasons having an overall story arc the main story usually finds a way to continue into another season. While these series can feel a little bit formulaic and similar, they are excellent escapism. The series I’ve enjoyed the most have been Sword Art OnlineSōdo Āto Onrain, Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another WorldRi:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a SlimeTensei Shitara Suraimu Datta Ken, How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, Angel Beats! and The Rising of the Shield HeroTate no Yuusha no Nariagari. Fight scenes appear to be another aspect in common with the shows of this genre. I’m not too enthusiastic about this and I’ve tried to focus on series where fight scenes serve the plot and the characters and where they aren’t the focal point.

Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor was surprisingly funny. There’s only one season and while the story does leave an opening for another one, main plot points do get resolved. Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is similarly fantasy - themed and quite humorous.

Another common genre is slice of life and it’s the most fitting for describing Rent-A-GirlfriendKanojo, Okarishimasu and My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU which otherwise aren’t very similar. The former being a more straightforward romantic comedy with various mishaps and the latter having more complicated characters and focusing on their growth. Hachiman Hikigaya is the best.

I’m not really sure how to categorise Charlotte, Classroom of the Elite and The Fruit of GrisaiaGrisaia no Kajitsu. These were all entertaining with some mystery to them which kept me interested throughout.

Violet Evergarden tells the story of a girl slowly recovering from her experiences during a war and from being an orphan before that. Somehow there were so many odd elements to this story that it took me a while to really understand it. Overall this anime is quite sad, but there’s a lot of light-hearted moments as well, often arising from the main character’s social awkwardness.

There were a couple of highly recommended series which I could recommend only with some reservation. Death NoteDesu Nōto was quite brilliant, but the story takes a turn at a certain point. The show didn’t really recover from the change and ultimately the remainder of it could not live up to the earlier parts. Toradora!, a romantic comedy, was another generally praised anime, but I had issues with almost all of the main characters. One should be able to tell based on the first episode or two whether this is their cup of tea.

Well, not really the original (usually) Japanese titles, but rather the romanised versions. ↩︎

Demos, Lost Tapes and Outtakes: Assault Telecom!

2019-10-31T18:47:00+02:00

The other day as I was recording some guitar on my phone a familiar feeling struck me. As if I had been here before. Recording things. Hold on. Did we… Didn’t we have a band at one point? Didn’t we also record something?

What followed was a thorough investigation across my computers and various hard drives. Tucked away neatly within the Documents folder on my old desktop computer among the various university course assignments and past CVs, as if to guarantee I’d never find this material again, was a directory simply titled Assault Telecom. Miraculously the folder and its contents had survived two migrations from one computer to the next and at least one full system recovery from a backup. But nonetheless there it was.

Transmissions of an Unknown Origin7:38

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None of the material ever did see a release. I’ve collected here a sampling of what I found within that folder.

The Brief History of Assault Telecom!

I have to wind the tape backwards by more than a decade all the way to the tail end of 2007. The three of us, myself and the two Jaakkos, were studying in Oulu at the time. How the idea to make some music together came about I can no longer recall. Similarly lost are the details on how we came up with the band’s name and what it meant, if it indeed did signify anything at all. But in any event we had the basic building blocks in place for a well-balanced rock trio: a singer, a guitarist and another guitarist. What more could you possibly need?

Jaakko was our vocalist, primary songwriter, programmer, keyboardist, lyricist and recording engineer. Guitar parts, ideas and miscellaneus demos were contributed by me and the other Jaakko. Judging from the resulting material we don’t seem to have defined our genre very strictly as the recordings span from straightforward rock to synth landscapes. There’s even some ukulele in there. For some of the stuff we held our own recording sessions while other things were recorded on the fly utilising the time-tested directly-to-line-in - method for superior audio resolution.

For the conceptual backstory it was absolutely essential we had alternate identities. Instead of our regular selves we were Woakes, Ivan and Capa, a move which conveniently also resolved the issue of 66.67 percent of the band being Jaakkos. There was also some business about other worlds, mysterious signals and secret directives. And XLR cables. Basically pretty much what you could expect from one engineer, two programmers and three nerds who were into science fiction.

The concept probably made more sense to us at the time.

The Lost Tapes

During the recording sessions my cats were less than one year old. Now they’re almost twelve. Which is to say in cat years our recordings are already over 60 years old. Releasing the songs over a human decade after their creation totally has nothing to do with my chronic tendency for procrastination.

While we never did technically disband, at some point other things came in the way and the project was forgotten. Looking back at the recordings now there is still a lot I like. From the various samples used across the songs, the unrelenting Terminator-ish drumbeat interlude in Cyberspace Cowboy, the Amiga speech synthesizer of Sound of a Dying System, the entirety of the ukulele-led instrumental track to the climactic industrial metal outro of After Life Lost. But mostly I just feel a certain sense of accomplishment. We created something out of nothing and it certainly does not sound like anything else out there.

If you’re so inclined, here’s the newly discovered tapes, or in other words our most complete demos.

Assault Telecom!

Transmissions of an Unknown Origin
1.After Life Lost5:06
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2.Untitled2:28
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3.Sound of a Dying System4:29
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4.Exomoon LV-4261:35
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Click the file links if your browser has issues playing the audio. Yes, the kerning on the album cover does bother me as well.

Mad Max and the Lost Saves

2019-09-28T19:38:00+03:00

Mad Max wandering the desolate wasteland searching for the lost savegames of lore.

I recently started playing Mad Max but noticed that it corrupts the settings and savegame files on exit. I found some mentions about this around the internet and in the Steam community but none of the suggestions permanently resolved the issue for me.

The problem presents itself in the following way. As the game is starting up it attempts to verify the internal files, sees them as corrupted and proceeds to delete them. From there the game continues as if it was the first launch and plays the intro video. In my testing it was always able to resume from the previous game once I got to the main menu but it wasn’t able to recover the game settings.

Technically what seems to happen is that the settings and savegame files stored by WB Games are replaced with empty versions. The actual files stored by Steam are OK. I noticed that simply copying the Steam files to the WB Games location corrects the issue. I guess this could be a situation where the game is not fully compatible with Steam.

In order to have the game remember my settings and to skip the intro video I wrote a small batch script that automates this process and also makes a new backup of the files every time just in case one time the files truly are corrupted and I need to refer to an earlier copy. For now I simply run the script every time I exit the game. It is safe to run it also afterwards, when I accidentally start the game without having remembered to run the script since the last game (but I would recommend to always close the game first before running the script).

In case you have ecountered this issue as well and no solution has helped, I’ll leave the script here. I’m running the game on Windows 10 on a 2019 iMac 27”, YMMV. Copy the file locally, locate and fill in the file locations so that the script knows what to copy and to where, and finally rename the file suffix to “.bat”. I’ve created a shortcut to the script and pinned that shortcut to the Start menu so that it is a bit easier to run the script.

Rethinking my use of social media

2018-10-31T15:12:00+02:00

I’ve been giving some thought to social media for a while now and recently a bit more. In general I think I agree with the sentiment that social media, at least as currently implemented by various platforms, might not have been the right direction. At the very least I quite strongly disagree with how companies such as Facebook and Twitter go about their business.

I noticed I had developed habits to periodically check for updates on the various platforms. A new browser tab here and there, a quick glance to my phone. Most of the time the updates were not important and certainly not time-sensitive. This reminded me of earlier when I removed all unnecessary or high volume blogs from my RSS reader and when I deleted my Reddit account. The habits were starting to feel familiar. Wasted time that could be better spent elsewhere. Or even by doing nothing at all.

In order to distance myself from these platforms I’ve long ago disabled their notifications. I don’t think anyone should have unrestricted access to your attention and I feel allowing notifications for social media platforms is overall a bad idea. To take another small step further I’ve relocated their apps into a folder that is not on the primary home screen of my phone.

Facebook is the service I disagree with the most and the one I use the least. I had deleted their iOS app years ago, back when its software quality was declining sharply, and I never installed it back. To further limit my use of their service I’ve had a habit of always logging out of Facebook on my computers so that there is a small barrier for accessing it. I’ve also never started using their messaging app. Therefore deleting my account wasn’t a big deal.

If some services require Facebook authentication I guess I will just feel sorry for their poor decision on that regard and will not be using them. Similarly I would find it difficult to use any service that requires me to have an account on any social media platform, regardless of whether I have the account or not.

I’m tempted to also remove my Instagram account, as they are owned by Facebook, and my Twitter account too, but I like the people I follow on both and I want to continue seeing their posts. While I am annoyed by the current situation I’ll need to think further what my approach would be. I’d like to own my own content, but that is a separate discussion. I already know that I wouldn’t like to post too much into different services if that content will simply be lost when I eventually leave those platforms.

Facebook has its 30-day period during which one can change their mind and still recover their account. I can’t see that I would.