I often see a lot of hate in #languagelearning discussions about Duolingo. People saying things like “just delete it”. I’ve been thinking of it as fast food language learning. Sure that trip to McDonald’s isn’t the healthiest, but it’s food & sometimes it’s all you can do.

I found over the last year using micro.blog for the small amount of posting I do that while it’s great using it as a mastodon connection was a bit of an impedance mismatch. So I broke the connection and am going to try both separately this year. I’m @jnjosh@mastodon.social too now.

I started a sourdough starter to make bread but really it now exists for fresh crackers every day. So good.

Back in ~2004, I got sucked into the build-a-depth-of-field-adapter for your camcorder excitement. I still remember spending hours making a ground glass. Anyway, now you can buy one for your phone: kck.st/46687QJ

Driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway might be one of my favorite adventures.

I made a quick menu for our summer van trip. I originally planned for a specific food for a day but had to make a few changes due to weather so… now it’s a menu.

New favorite italian phrase!

Tonight? Caprese Sliders!

Tonight I cooked Lasagna rolls. Basically instead of stacking the lasagna you roll it up in a noodle.

Today’s dinner, Pasta alla Zozzona.

From the first recipe here:

youtube.com/watch

I feel like my Italian language learning just got a little more complete because of this video. I can now occasionally roll my Rs after trying this for a bit. www.youtube.com/watch

Really struggling with this whole HOA thing. On one hand, the tree branches are cut, you can’t unring that bell. On the other hand every time I’m in my back yard I see the result of it and just get reminded of it all. HOA has offered to better communicate in the future, but that’s almost nothing. 😡

If you were following along with our HOA fun from yesterday, grab some 🍿. So after talking to my neighbor and HOA, this was a huge mistake—that the HOA seemingly didn’t want to admit. My neighbor (he’s also a J. Johnson) requested this service for his yard, they incorrectly did my yard.

Living with an HOA is so frustrating. I’ve heard worse stories than this, but they just showed up and trimmed all the trees in our backyard without any say in what we wanted. So our backyard that had some really nice flowering tree branches that we enjoyed—all gone.

Walking around my suburban neighborhood in Raleigh isn’t quite the Italian passegiata, at least not until I can convince my neighbors to open a gelateria.

I’ve been listening to this Radio Italia playlist called “Indie” on Apple Music. It’s really good and with lyrics on it helps my Italian learning!

music.apple.com/us/playli…

Some guy was coming for my first place spot in the Amethyst league so I just spent an hour getting ~900 xp ahead of him. I use my weekend time wisely!!

One thing I don’t miss from WWDC is the lines. This was 2015.

I went to a zoom-based Italian conversation meetup this morning. They all seemed to be in various levels of learning and I feel like I understood most of what everyone said or asked. The weird thing is how Spanish words I learned 20+ years ago will just jump out as I try to say something in Italian

I just downloaded the Xcode beta, unarchived, and installed it all in less than 10 minutes. We’re living in the future now.

This has probably already been talked about but it looks like visionOS was a late decision. WWDC video about web inspectors explicitly calls it xrOS.

I woke up still feeling a bit skeptical about this Vision Pro thing. However, I feel like I have an idea for an app too now so… I guess that’s forward progress?

The whole Swift to C++ interop that’s now available is really interesting. This will be much better than what we built at Highrise, bridging through Objective-C++. I wonder if the Android side is any better now, bridging through JNI C was much more painful.

Wait… “Mergeable Libraries” what was that? Like a new framework type that is an aggregate? #WWDC

Wow, I’m super excited about SwiftData. Can’t wait to play with this API.