Shawfactor

Princes Park Touch Winter 2o25

Peter Shaw — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 06:56:00 +0000

In 2025 the tradition of “Social touch Football in Melbourne’s heart” continues with PPT’s Winter touch rugby season.
If you are interested in entering a team please visit the website, where you can find more information and the team entry process.

https://princesparktouch.com

Individual players should leave their details here.

We should all name and shame

Peter Shaw — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 14:37:22 +0000

In any society there has always been behaviour that is legal but undesirable. In the past this was discouraged by the close community bonds that existed that most valued and were fearful to jeopardise.

Unfortunately those bonds are breaking down. My startup is working to remedy that by introducing functionality to “name and shame” individuals who act poorly. Here it is in action:

Hall of Shame

Peter Shaw — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 06:01:40 +0000

Bookmarked https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/micropub/.

Bookmarked: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/micropub/

There is no logic in lockdown

Peter Shaw — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 14:07:00 +0000

The Victorian covid slogan is

Staying apart keeps us together
lying government propaganda

Lets do the maths and see if this is correct. Here is a simple calculation based on figures that are widely available and making assumptions that allow for the worst case possible.

Here are the facts, I´ll base my calculation on, they are all based on the worst possible outcomes anywhere in the world:

In the worst effected cities in the world COVID-19 has killed so far 1 in every 600 people. Note this is at a city level. The worst country (Peru) is actually 1 in more than 1000.
The median age of death of coronavirus in Australia 82.5 years. I can´t find a wordlwide figure but figures in other countries are similar. So lets assume a mean age of death from COVID of 80 years.
A that age the average person (who has lived to 80) can expect to live anoter 10 years .

Lets crunch the numbers

365 days in the year * 10 years / 600 people = 6 days per person

So the maximum possible benefit per head for lockdown is an extra 6 days of life per person. I need to reiterate here this is the extreme upper bound of the benefit. If I rejigged these figures to account for the fact that the average covid death is an 82 year who is LESS healthy than average and that the worst country has a death rate better than 1 in 1000, then this figure is less than 1 day. If I rejigged it to allow for an average outcome worldwide the figure would less than 6 hours per person

So we have decimated the world economy and compromised personal liberty everywhere in the world for this. Obviously not everything in life is about crunching numbers but I don´t know about you but quality of life is a thing and I’d happily sacrifice 6 days of my life to live the last 6 months in a normal way.

We can all come to different conclusions on these decisions but these sort of figures reresent the real collective risk that covid poses to our society and to me it is sad that no one is talking about them.

Native apps are (mostly) a waste of time.

Peter Shaw — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 04:14:47 +0000

So you think you need an app for your phone and you were considering shelling out some cash to a developer to build you a native app. Before you waste your money (and time) paying a developer to deliver a native app the first thing you need to consider the advantages an app has over a traditional website.

The big three are:

It is installable, ie it appears on the phone home screen, this gives it a massive advantage over a traditional website in ensuring ongoing user interaction.
An app is fast, ie it is faster to load and interact with than a traditional website.
It can send notifications, again this increases user interaction substantially.

Obviously these are not the only reasons but they are the major ones.

Now here is the kicker, you can get all the above features on a website on the majority of phones right now! Goodbye native apps and welcome to the world of progressive web apps.

What is a progressive web app (PWA), you may ask? Well at it is heart it is just a website with some additional features. Those features enable all three of the advantages I outlined above on the majority of smart phones worldwide, right now!! But being a website a PWA also has some massive advantages. They include:

They are linkable, ie you can access them by opening a URL.
They are much easier to build, after all they are just a website with some substantial enhancements.
They are updatable, ie any changes can occur as soon as the PWA is accessed (as opposed to waiting for a user to download a new version of a native app).
Being on the web they are cross platform.

Lets look at the state of play on different phones:

On android phones which now constitute the majority of smart phones worldwide all of the above advantages are currently already available to progressive web apps. ie visitors will be prompted to instal your website on the phone (provided it meets the PWA criteria) right now and that website if properly designed will be fast and be able to send notifications

For apple the situation is not quite so good. Yes you can install a web app but the installation experience not obvious and there is no ability to send notifications. The good news is that but in the upcoming IOS version (IOS 12.2) there will be significant improvement. Once installed on your phone a well built progressive web app will behave like its native counterpart, with the only issue that it will not be able to send notifications. But that functionality is coming.

Update: since March 2023 IOS supports push notification for those running PWAs on IOS 16.4 or later.

So in conclusion is that unless you need certain hardware apis that are not supported by PWA´s yet or you desperately need notifications on Apple phones then you should find a web developer who can enhance your existing website to become a PWA. The future is PWA´s and the future (to a large extent) is already here.