Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in the specific case of Basecamp’s Hey app, or the broader questions of what, if anything, ought to change in Apple’s App Store policies, an undeniable and important undercurrent to this story is that the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s peers or near-peers.
It sounds like a good and easy enough experiment, getting your own simple e-book out in the market. My eye fell first on Reinier Ladan’s Dutch language video on making zines (everything old is new again), via Frank’s newsletter. Today Robin Rendle’s post Volume A popped up in my feeds as an experiment to learn how to publish an e-book in a way that just gets something out there. Those two small nudges coalesce into the idea that it should be very doable to collect a few connected blogposts and turn them into a slightly more coherent whole, for publication as a separate artefact. A decade ago I already reworked my closing SHiFT keynote Maker Households into something of an e-book draft at the suggestion and with advice of Henriette, and my Networked Agency or information strategies material would lend itself to it as well. The second nudge was the realisation that the e-book Elmine and I created in 2011(!) on How To Unconference Your Birthday (get the PDF in the sidebar on the right) is already zine like, and has both digital and physical form. An update after a decade makes sense as we already concluded after visiting Peter’s unconference and doing a short video session at Lane’s, and could be part of such an experiment in publishing e-books.
Everything old is new again. I think I should pick up some of the things where I left off decade ago. But this time not as some big scheme, my grand theory of everything all at once, but just as a small thing. As then it might actually happen.
A new project led by the University of Guelph (UofG) hopes to fine-tune and improve the accuracy of smartphone contact tracing apps.
In an email press release sent to MobileSyrup, UofG engineers said their newly developed contact tracing app is more secure and accurate than other available systems. Called the Smart Contact Tracing app, UofG developed it using wireless communication and machine learning. Not only does it alert people if they’ve been in contact with someone who has been infected with COVID-19, it also warns users if they get too close to another person.
“The application we developed could be very useful as an upgrade to any contact tracing application available, including the one recently approved for use by the provincial government,” said Professor Petros Spachos. Spachos worked on the project alongside lead author Pai Chet Ng, a student visiting UofG from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, UofG engineering professor Stefano Gregori and University of Toronto professor Konstantinos Plataniotis.
For those unfamiliar with contact tracing, it’s a system used by public health authorities to track the spread of a disease among people. Typically, public health workers perform contact tracing by interviewing people infected with a disease to learn who they were in contact with while infectious. Contact tracing can be crucial in following the spread of disease and preventing further infections.
Some of the important benefits of Apple and Google’s system is that it is interoperable, not just between iPhone and Android phones, but also between apps. Any apps that rely on the same underlying Exposure Notification API should be able to communicate data with each other. While it appears Canada will offer one national contact tracing app powered by the Apple/Google system, in other areas where apps are handled at a state or province level, that interoperability is important.
At a basic level, Apple and Google’s system works by trading anonymous, secure keys between phones over Bluetooth. Coupled with some other data, such as transmission strength and time spent nearby, public health authorities can use the data to narrow down results and look at actual potential transmissions versus people who were too far apart or passed by too quickly. The system keeps a record of the last two weeks of contacts.
If someone receives a positive COVID-19 test, they can upload the contact list stored on their phone. That list of keys can then be checked by every other phone, which compares the keys to its list for matches. If there are matching keys, it likely means that the user was in contact with someone while they were infected. The public health authority can then recommend next steps through their app, whether that’s a temporary quarantine or going to get tested themselves.
Small differences make for more accurate tracing
As for UofG’s platform, it seems to work similarly to the Apple/Google system. Using wireless technology like Bluetooth, it alerts users if they were near someone who was infected or if they got too close to another person. However, some key differences set it apart.
For example, machine learning was key in making the app more accurate than other contact tracing systems, according to Spachos. In part, this is because it helped UofG solve a problem with existing contact tracing solutions. According to UofG, people who keep a device in their pocket, purse or backpack may be less ‘visible’ to a contact tracing system, making it less accurate. However, in these ‘hidden-phone’ scenarios, UofG’s Smart Contact Tracing app improved accuracy from about 56 percent to 87 percent.
Machine learning also allows UofG’s app to distinguish certain locations, such as a users’ home, where it can temporarily disable contact tracing features.
Finally, Spachos says that privacy was core to the app’s design.
“No location data or other personal data about the user are kept. Preserving privacy is our first priority. We don’t know where the interaction took place and we don’t know who the users are,” Spachos said.
Beyond that, the UofG system works similarly to Apple and Google’s system. It stores two weeks of contact information, users can upload that encrypted information to the cloud if they test positive for the virus and the app then notifies people who were in contact with them. Spachos describes the system as a lottery, noting that “whoever has the numbers, it means they were in close proximity to someone who was infected.”
The UofG team received a $50,000 Alliance COVID-19 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council as well as $20,000 from UofG’s COVID-19 Research Development and Catalyst Fund.
Datasette’s plugin system is one of the most interesting parts of the entire project. As I explained to Matt Asay in this interview, the great thing about plugins is that Datasette can gain new functionality overnight without me even having to review a pull request. I just need to get more people to write them!
datasette-plugin is my most recent effort to help make that as easy as possible. It’s a cookiecutter template that sets up the outline of a new plugin, combining various best patterns I’ve discovered over the past two years of writing my own plugins.
Cookiecutter will run a quick interactive session asking for a few details. It will then use those details to generate a new directory structure ready for you to start work on the plugin.
The datasette-plugin README describes the next steps. A couple of things are worth exploring in more detail.
Writing tests for plugins
I’m a big believer in automated testing: every single one of my plugins includes tests, and those test are run against every commit and must pass before new packages are shipped to PyPI.
In my experience the hardest part of writing tests is getting them started: setting up an initial test harness and ensuring that new tests can be easily written.
datasette-plugin adds pytest as a testing dependency and creates a tests/ folder with an initial, passing unit test in it.
The test confirms that the new plugin has been correctly installed, by running a request through a configured Datasette instance and hitting the /-/plugins.json introspection endpoint.
In doing so, it demonstrates how to run tests that interact with Datasette’s HTTP API. This is a very productive way to write tests.
The example test uses the HTTPX Python library. HTTPX offers a requests-style API but with a couple of crucial improvements. Firstly, it’s been built with asyncio support as a top-level concern. Secondly, it understands the ASGI protocol and can be run directly against an ASGI Python interface without needing to spin up an actual HTTP server. Since Datasette speaks ASGI this makes it the ideal tool for testing Datasette plugins.
Here’s that first test that gets created by the cookiecutter template:
from datasette.app import Datasette
import pytest
import httpx
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_plugin_is_installed():
app = Datasette([], memory=True).app()
async with httpx.AsyncClient(app=app) as client:
response = await client.get(
"http://localhost/-/plugins.json"
)
assert 200 == response.status_code
installed_plugins = {
p["name"] for p in response.json()
}
assert "datasette-plugin-template-demo" in installed_plugins
My hope is that including a passing test that demonstrates how to execute test requests will make it much easier for plugin authors to start building out their own custom test suite.
Continuous integration with GitHub Actions
My favourite thing about GitHub Actions is that they’re enabled on every GitHub repository for free, without any extra configuration necessary.
The datasette-plugin template takes advantage of this. Not only does every new project get a passing test - it also gets a GitHub Action - in .github/workflows/test.yml - that executes the tests on every commit.
It even runs the test suite in parallel against Python 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 - the versions currently supported by Datasette itself.
A second action in .github/workflows/publish.yml bakes in my opinions on the best way to manage plugin releases: it builds and ships a new package to PyPI every time a new tag (and corresponding GitHub release) is added to the repository.
For this to work you’ll need to create a PyPI API token and add it to your plugin’s GitHub repository as a PYPI_TOKEN secret. This is explained in the README.
Deploying a live demo of the template with GitHub Actions
Whenever possible, I like to ship my projects with live demos. The Datasette repository publishes a demo of the latest commit to https://latest.datasette.io/ on every commit. I try to do the same for my plugins, where it makes sense to do so.
What could a live demo of a cookiecutter template look like?
Ideally it would show a complete, generated project. I love GitHub’s code browsing interface, so a separate repository containing that generated project would be ideal.
It’s powered by this GitHub Action, which runs on every push to the datasette-plugin repo, installs cookiecutter, uses cookiecutter against some fixed inputs to re-generate the project and then pushes the results up to datasette-plugin-template-demo as a new commit.
As a fun final touch, it uses the GitHub commit comments API to add a comment to the commit to datasette-plugin linking to the “browse” view on the resulting code in the datasette-plugin-template-demo repository. Here’s one of those commit comments.
Figuring out how to build this took quite a bit of work. Issue #4 has a blow-by-blow rundown of how I got it working.
I couldn’t resist tweeting about it:
Writing a GitHub Action for a repo that generates content for a second repo and pushes that content to the second repo and then posts a comment to the commit on the first repo that links to the newly committed code in the second repo
Our computers and phones are pretty much constantly beeping at us, but did you know that you can change these sounds to make them a lot less grating?
On Mac, this process is super easy, and Windows 10 isn’t that much harder, so anyone can do it if they feel like making all those beeps into something a little more soothing.
macOS
To change the default alert sound, you need to enter into the ‘System preferences’ app and select ‘Sounds.’ Then, at the top of that window, select the option ‘Sound effects.’
From there, you can choose a sound you like and it will become your default notification tone.
The second step is figuring out what apps and services that sound applies too. For instance, the email app Spark has its own notification sound, but you can disable it if you’d rather the default. Slack, on the other hand, has a few custom sounds of its own.
Sadly that’s the state of notification sounds on Mac, but generally, if you go into an app’s settings, it will have some sort of notifications section to give you some options. Everything else that doesn’t will use the base tone you set earlier.
Windows 10
As I stated above, things are a tiny bit trickier with Windows, but you do get some more customization options, so that’s a plus.
The first thing you need to do is open the sound preferences. The quickest way to do this is to click on the search button on the Taskbar and looks for ‘change system sounds.’ Once it appears, click on the option and a little window will appear that looks like the picture above.
This is where things get a little confusing. When you want to change a sound, you need to find that ‘Event’ in the list and then select a new sound for it from the drop-down menu below.
The main sounds I change on my computer are as follows:
Asterisk
Calendar reminder
Critical battery alarm (laptop users only)
default beep
desktop mail notification
device connect/disconnect
Exclamation
New mail
New text
Notification
System notification
You can change more, but I find these to be the ones that pop up often for me. The first few times I did this, I was worried applying the default windows sounds options to these events would confuse me, but I find that I get back into the new sounds after about a day of work, so that shouldn’t be a huge concern.
Alternatively, you can upload your own sounds to the service or some that you’ve downloaded from online by clicking ‘Browse’ and choosing your custom sounds.
Once you’re done, I recommend saving your sound setup so you can easily switch back to this pre-set in the future and then hit ‘Apply’ and ‘Ok.’
But wait there’s more…
Just like on macOS, many apps take notification sounds into their own hands, often you’ll need to go into the individual preferences or settings of the apps you use frequently and change what you can there.
Ich habe eine Funktion in der Corona-Warn-App des RKI's vermisst. Ich weiß, **ich habe sie installiert & aktiviert** - aber wie sieht es denn in meinem aktuellen Umfeld aus? Haben Menschen um mich herum ebenfalls die App am Start?
Für Android habe ich deswegen eine kleine App geschrieben (natürlich kostenlos und ohne Werbung), mit der man angezeigt bekommt wie viele unterschiedliche Geräte um Euch herum ein Corona-Warn-App "Begegnungs-Erkennungs-Signal" senden.
Bis das ganze über den GooglePlayStore verfügbar ist, dauert leider noch ein paar Tage (ich warte auf die Freigabe), könnt Ihr Euch das APK einfach direkt von GitHub holen (mein erstes echtes OpenSourceProjekt) und als SideLoad auf Eurem Android Telefon installieren. wenn Die Corona-Warn-App vom RKI bei Euch auf dem Gerät läuft, dann sollte auch der Tacer laufen.
In that posting Matt points to Rev Dan Catt’s recent week notes, in which he describes the types of tools he makes for himself. Like Matt I love this kind of stuff. I have some small tools for myself like that, and it is the primary reason I have been running a local webserver on my laptop: it allows me to do anything I could do online right on my laptop, as home cooking. Transposing code snippets into safe HTML output for instance. Or converting bank statements into something I can import in my accounting spreadsheet. Those are however somewhat of a mechanical nature. They’re by me, but not about me. And that is the qualitative difference specifically of the letter/cards tracking tool described in Rev Dan Catt’s post.
That is more akin to what I am trying to slowly build for myself since forever. Something that closely follows my own routines and process, and guides me along. Not just as a reference, like my notes or wiki, or as a guide like my todo-lists and weekly overviews. But something that welcomes me in the morning by starting me on my morning routine “Shall I read some feeds first, or shall I start with a brief review of today’s agenda.” and nudges me kindly “it’s been 15mins, shall I continue with …?”, or “shall I review …, before it becomes urgent next week?”. A coach and PA rolled into one, that is bascially me, scripted, I suppose. I’ve always been an avid note taker and lists keeper, even way before I started using computers in 1983. Those lists weren’t always very kind I realised in 2016, it became more a musts/shoulds thing than mights/coulds. Too harsh on myself, which reduces its effectiveness (not just to 0 at times, but an active hindrance causing ineffectiveness). I wanted a kinder thing, a personal operating system of sorts. Rev Dan Scott’s correspondence tool feels like that. I reminds me of what Rick Klau described earlier about his contacts ‘management’, although that stays closer to the mechanical, the less personal I feel, and skirts closer to the point where it feels inpersonal (or rather it challenges the assumption ‘if you don’t know it yourself and keep a list it’s not authentic’ more).
Building personalised tools, that are synchronised with the personality and routines of the person using it, not as an add-on (you can add your own filter rules to our e-mail client!), but as its core design, is mostly unexplored terrain I think. Because from a business perspective it doesn’t obviously “scale”, so no unicorn potential. That sort of generic scaling is unneeded anyway I think, and there is a very much available other path for scaling. Through the invisible hand of networks, where solutions and examples are replicated and tweaked across contexts, people and groups. That way lie the tools that are smaller than us, and therefore really provide agency.
It’s also why I think the title of Matt’s post Personal Software versus Factory Produced Software is a false dilemma. It’s not just a choice between personal and mass, between n=1 and statistics. There is a level in between, which is also where the complexity lives that makes us search for new tools in the first place: the level of you and your immediate context of relationships and things relevant to them. It’s the place where the thinking behind IndieWeb extends to all technology and methods. It’s where federation of tools live, and why I think you should run personal instances of tools that federate, not join someone else’s server, unless it is a pre-existing group launching a server and adopting it as their collective hang-out. Running personal or group tools, that can talk to others if you want it to and are potentially more valuable when connected to others, that have the network effect built in as an option.
Wall outlets are in short supply on planes, trains, and buses—and in many airports and hotels—so packing a portable power strip is a must for frequent travelers.
This is well worth getting some popcorn. DHH is notoriously vocal, and even though Hey seems like a pretty weird and pricey take on e-mail, it is a beloved and geek-anointed one seeing as it shares the Basecamp philosophy, so of course it is going to garner a lot of highly visible support.
Every single indie app developer who’s been slighted by Apple (and a lot of corporate ones who rely on service subscriptions of any form to drive revenue) is going to rally behind this, and I, for one, fully agree with them (even if I do think Hey is going to milk this for all they’ve got and would prefer other champions, just because they come across as feeling overly entitled sometimes).
Incidentally, the App Store review policies (and the insane developer fees for individual users) are the main reasons that whenever I developed for mobile (back in the day) I did so for Android first, or stuck to web technologies.
Because there is zero incentive to have those headaches even for pro-bono apps. And that is Apple’s loss entirely.
They are reaping what they sowed either way, and what better timing to do so than when they’re being probed by the EU and a couple of days away from WWDC?
OK, this has nothing to do with online learning. But in this argument I hope you'll see a pattern of reasoning that you've seen in this newsletter before. First, the problem: "elite capture. The laws, the regulations, the bailouts, and the wonks who write and evaluate all of the above are all powerfully influenced—if not functionally controlled—by elite political and corporate interests." Second, the response: "Until we demand and organize for power itself—rather than pleading for those who have it to take the actions we’d like—we will never get it." I would add to this article that the problem of elite capture isn't just an American issue, and it isn't just a policing issue, and that there's no one-time solution, but rather, a vigilent and ongoing response is needed.
Apple’s augmented reality hardware ambitions are finally starting to come into focus thanks to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
According to the report, one headset looks to combine augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into a single industry-leading device designed for gaming and content experiences. The other previously rumoured AR glasses, on the other hand, are focused on overlaying data like map navigation on top of the real world.
The AR/VR headset is codenamed ‘N301’ and might be announced in 2021, while the more ambitious ‘Apple Glasses’ — codenamed N421 — won’t be released until 2023, according to the report.
Apple’s VR headset is tipped to feature a high-resolution VR display and a “cinematic speaker system” that aims to help combine the real and virtual world. The gaming headset was at one point designed to be used with a wireless hub, allowing the wearer to freely walk around with the headset on as long as they don’t move too far away.
This hub would have allowed the headset to feature powerful graphics, but Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive, who has since left the company, didn’t like the idea of having a secondary device powering the headset. This dispute regarding the direction of the gaming headset lasted for months, with Apple eventually going forward with a headset-only plan that featured reduced hardware power.
The report goes on to state Siri voice control commands will be the main input method for both the headset and glasses, but also mentions the former device is being tested with a gaming controller.
Apple’s upcoming all-digital WWDC is set to start on Monday, June 22nd at 1pm ET/10am PT. While we likely won’t learn more about Apple’s AR and VR headset plans at the event, the tech giant is expected to reveal new iOS 14 augmented reality features, including a dedicated AR app.
Hornby Bike Lane. Burrard Bridge Bike Lanes (three times). Point Grey Road.
Same arguments – Carmageddon and business catastrophe confidently predicted – and the same results: no serious negative consequences and a better, healthier city. And once the temporary bike lanes are in, as Commissioner John Coupar noted, we don’t go back.
There’s an obvious reason for that which, oddly, he didn’t articulate: they worked. They helped build the city we said we wanted. (Which, if John has his way, will stop at the borders of our parks.)
Last night before the Board of Parks and Recreation Board, it was the same old debate with a twist. For those who want to return to the way it was, it’s a fight now on the side of the marginalized, the people who, they say, need most of the asphalt in the park to provide access and parking – meaning by default full Motordom for all, forever. Definitely what Lord Stanley had in mind.
But here’s the one piece of new information that came out that really is important, by way of Park Commissioner Dave Demers: Park Board staff estimate visitation within Stanley Park is up by 50 percent since May 1. They have counted 350,000 cyclists over the last 67-day period, compared to about 60,000 vehicle trips in the same period last year, a quarter of which were thought to be using Park Drive as a shortcut to bypass the Causeway. Motor vehicles, in other words, were 17 percent of all trips with something involving wheels.
That increase is extraordinary. And that’s without tourists in the mix.
But what those opposed to providing a separate lane on the drive seem to ignore is this, at least if they presume much of that increase can be accommodated on the seawall:
A shot from the late 1990s prior to the construction of the Seaside Greenway’s separated lanes and still the condition of some parts of the seawall around Stanley Park.
Inducing congestion on the seawall by trying to avoid vehicle congestion on the drive is going to have some unpleasant consequences.
I was wondering whether the NPA commissioners would have anything positive to say about the need to accommodate this desired growth in walking and cycling in a harmonious way. But no. The NPA has made a calculated decision to appeal for the support of people who work up a lather in condemnation of taking space from vehicles – people like Nigel Malkin, quoted here in a CBC story:
Stanley Park Stakeholders — a group of 14 businesses and societies — signed a letter directed at the park board calling for the immediate opening of roadways and the removal of traffic calming concrete blocks. Members say they rely on vehicle traffic for their survival.
“They’re all out of business,” said Nigel Malkin, a spokesperson for the coalition. “We need to stand up.”
You might remember Nigel: he was the populist rabble rouser who did the number on the proposed North Shore RapidBus, especially the section through Ambleside in West Vancouver. Transit, bikes, greenways – anything that might require the removal of parking or the reallocation of road space he’s loudly against, and looks around for amplification.
So why does the NPA fail to get a good return on their almost personal opposition to bike lanes and their indifference to active transportation (with the exception, I’m glad to say, of some of the new NPA councillors and now the COPE/Green commissioners). A lot of the people who share the NPA board’s perspective don’t live in Vancouver. And the people who do live here have, during the pandemic, discovered what they can do with their feet, and they like it.
Those who argue that only a small fraction of Vancouverites and Metro can reach the park without cars I think have missed the impact of the bike network (the physical one, not the all-powerful lobby) made by previous councils (including, ironically, the NPA councils of the 1990s.) It’s not just privileged West Enders (like me) who come to the park on foot and bike; it’s Vancouverites by the tens of thousands who have discovered that it’s realistic to get there via the Beach Flow Way that feeds them in seamlessly from the bikeways, greenways, slow streets and transit.
As John Coupar observed, once we get a taste of the temporary, we don’t go back.
More thinking about what online conferences could be. "Takeaway: the hallway track works best when it’s about multi-tasking, and you can move up and down levels of engagement with the presentations and the conversations." So... "ONLY staring at a conference talk just doesn’t make sense. INSTEAD let me watch a conference talk AND ALSO have a text conversation about it, perhaps even with the speaker who may have pre-recorded their talk in order to participate in the simultaneous text channel." Exactly. There's a lot more in this post, so have a look.
You've seen those blogs with embedded tweets in them; click on the tweet and you're taken to the original. This is the same sort of thing, except for any web page. The idea is that you copy some text fro a webpage, whih saves it into your quote library. Then, when you're writing a post, you can open your quote library and insert the quote into the post. Right now the extension is available only for Chrome, but there's a Firefox version on the way. What would be really neat would be some way to leave a trace on the document you've quoted, much the way WebReference works.
A new shipping container packed with Velo Orange favorites landed at the warehouse yesterday. Items back in stock include a selection of handlebars, rims, stems, fenders, and accessories that many of you have been eager to get your hands on.
Our always popular Klunker Bars are back in both noir and nickel finishes. We've received too many phone calls and emails asking when we would have more. We're always impressed by the demand and look forward to seeing all of your Klunk'd up bikes in the future.
Our rim lineup has been replenished. We once again have 32- and 36-hole Voyager and Enterprise rims in 650b, 700c, 26", and 27" sizes.
The container also brought a couple of new items. We're really excited to now offer our Mojaveand Modernistewater bottle cages in Noir. These are the first black bottle cages we have made, and they will go great in combination with our other noir components for your blacked-out builds.
We have also restocked Happy Stems, wheel stabilizers, saddle loops, bottom bracket tools, a range of fender sizes, and more. Take a look around the site if you have been waiting for something and don't see it mentioned here. As always, you can sign up for notifications to receive an email when a sold-out item comes back in stock. We'll have more, including Crazy Bars, arriving next month.
Back in 2016, Apple added a water-ejection system to the Apple Watch Series 2. It’s been part of the Apple Watch ever since, but thanks to a new video from ‘The Slow Mo Guys’ on YouTube, you can now see how it works at about 2,000 frames per second (fps).
For those unfamiliar with the system, it uses the speaker to vibrate rapidly and push water out of the smartwatch housing. However, at 2,000fps (or about 80 times slower), it’s a very unique thing to witness.
The Slow Mo Guys record the water ejection using a macro lens to help get viewers right up close to the speakers. It’s incredibly interesting how the water droplets fly out of the speaker hole. Further, some of the droplets cling to the side of the Apple Watch because of surface tension, collecting other drops and growing larger.
Interestingly, the speakers don’t expel all the water. They cycle through a frequency a few times, pushing water out, but also sucking some of the water back in. Because of this effect, Apple actually designed the ejection system to run, pause, then run again. This gives the water time to pool again before the second round, which helps push out more liquid.
The Slow Mo Guys also record the watch in slow motion without a macro lens to give viewers a better sense of the scale. When zoomed in close to the watch, it looks like there’s much more water than there actually is. Finally, The Slow Mo Guys also briefly show the screen of the Apple Watch at 1,000fps (or 40 times slower), which is enough to see the OLED screen refreshing.
Although this is a Slow Mo Guys video, it only features Gavin Free. Free notes in a comment below the video that his partner Daniel Gruchy currently can’t enter the U.S. because of COVID-19.
If you haven’t before, check out the rest of The Slow Mo Guys’ channel. It’s full of awesome videos showing a variety of things in super slow motion.
Steffani Cameron, Social-Distancer@SnarkySteff
My work this week involved global trade history & how China's lack of need for external imports made UK, who needed… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Jeff Jedras@jeffjedras
Doing this in Florida was an obvious problem months ago. The state leadership never took the pandemic seriously. twitter.com/Devin_Heroux/s…
mkalus
shared this story
from Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive.
As a mortgage agent, Lorina Serafico, a home-financing adviser with Scotiabank, often gets asked when is a good time to buy a home.
“If a household has the income, down payment, and the credit score to qualify for a mortgage, it is always the right time,” she said.
According to Serafico everyone needs a home, whether owned or rented.
“I consider mortgage payments as a forced savings plan,” Serafico said. “A $500,000 property you bought today will be worth $873,000 in 10 years. That’s an average of 7.45 percent annual increase, beating a medium-risk investment portfolio.” …
With more than a decade as a mortgage agent, Serafico has served numerous customers, and a number of them have started meeting with her again.
They’re usually owners of townhouses and condos, and now they’re thinking of upgrading to single-family homes.
“They like what is happening in the market. There’s more inventory; prices have stabilized; and interest rates are good,” Serafico told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
On March 27 this year, the Bank of Canada slashed its key interest rate—which determines bank lending rates—to its lowest level of 0.25 percent.
– excerpt from ‘Mortgage holders can seize on opportunities to upgrade’, Carlito Pablo, Georgia Straight Vancouver’s News & Entertainment Weekly, 17 June 2020
It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. (attributed to Yogi Berra)
– ed.
Facial recognition 1, by EFF, license CC BY
Dan Rather @DanRather
CBC British Columbia @cbcnewsbc
internetofshit on Twitter.
Sarah Cooper @sarahcpr
Steffani Cameron, Social-Distancer @SnarkySteff
Jeff Jedras @jeffjedras
Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive.