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  • Set up a little writing nook at the new house. Pretty pleased with it.

    → 10:01 PM, Nov 21
  • I don’t know if I want to call it my “Everyday Carry™️”, but here are some things I like and the bag I like to carry them in.

    → 6:17 PM, Oct 24
  • New Fjällräven messenger bag I picked up at the store downtown today. Love the Kånken backpack, so hoping this ends up being of similar quality.

    → 6:22 PM, Oct 9
  • I’ve used a paper planner on and off for the last four years. My favorite is the Hobonichi Techo. It’s an A6 sized planner from Japan which uses the fabulous Tomoe River paper. I use it as a planner, journal, scrapbook, and place to jot things down.

    → 9:14 PM, Oct 8
  • Picked up this Corona #3 portable typewriter from an estate sale recently. It’s about 100 years old, in great working order, and I’m pretty sure had only one owner. This model is primarily famous for being used by Ernest Hemingway.

    → 10:41 AM, Sep 1
  • Sending a bug to your old team at Apple that no-one else had reported during the beta cycle is a nice feeling ☺️

    → 10:28 AM, Sep 1
  • I replaced the two thermostats in my house with Nest ones this weekend and so far, so good. I’m interested to see what the learning features end up landing on for my schedule and how much I need to tweak that.

    → 6:08 PM, May 30
  • Took a lovely trip to the Portland Japanese Garden this morning. I’d like to start going during member hours (8-10am) and just sit and think or read for a while.

    → 5:35 PM, May 22
  • I’ve turned off Xcode’s new tab behavior, and I think it’s better. I haven’t found much benefit in tabs opening automatically for me when I can just as easily go forward and back, and it seems no matter what I do, in pretty short order I end up with tens of files open.

    → 3:51 PM, May 20
  • Currently reading: The Way of Zen by Alan Watts 📚

    → 2:16 PM, May 20
  • A question for my web developer friends: assuming I understand but am not great with CSS, is it worth using a web framework? The main selling point for me is it will look hip out of the box, but maybe wabi-sabi is preferable to looking more generic?

    → 1:01 PM, May 17
  • I managed to get my web project connected to Postgres and on Heroku. I’d been wanting to get it going on a VPS, but realized that I don’t need to learn everything all at once and administering servers can come later.

    → 10:28 PM, May 16
  • Favorite Apps and Tools (May 2021)

    I haven’t done it in a long time, but every so often it’s fun to look at the apps and tools I’ve been using and share that. A lot of these haven’t changed over the years, a couple are new, but most have stayed updated. Let me know if you discover anything you didn’t know about.

    Development

    Xcode

    What I do 90% of my work in.

    Dash

    A documentation browser that is better than Xcode’s in every way. You can also download docsets for lots of other languages and frameworks, which is about 100x better than searching the web every time you need something.

    BBEdit

    My goto for anything to do with regular expressions and big text files. I also use it for proper programming and writing in Markdown sometimes if other apps are giving me trouble or not acting how I want.

    Tower

    A Git client that you’d be silly not to use. It does nearly everything you need faster than the command line.

    Nova / Visual Studio Code

    I put these two together, because I jump between them a lot. Visual Studio Code is probably the best Electron app I’ve used. It launches fast, the plugin ecosystem is amazing and for most things the code completion is untouchable.

    Nova has the potential to do most of the same things, and some of them even better (setting up tasks is so much nicer), but with a much nicer and more Mac like interface. When Nova will do what I want, that’s usually what I go for, but it just doesn’t have the functionality yet and the plugins that exist are almost uniformly not as good. It’s also missing debugger support, which Visual Studio Code has. I’m looking forward to do the way when I can use Nova exclusively.

    Proxyman

    If you need to see what’s network calls are being made from your computer and what they’re returning, this is the best app for it. You can also write scripts that do things with the responses and replace URLs to return something else instead, which I used recently for testing image caching.

    Paw

    Paw is a great app that I don’t use as much as I should. What Paw is great for is creating a document representing all the calls that can be made to an API so you can test against it outside of your code.

    Patterns

    Still the best regular expressions app, but it hasn’t been updated in years. It’s only a matter of time before it stops working and I’ll have to write my own thing.

    Audio

    Logic Pro X

    My favorite audio editor/workstation — and I’ve used a bunch. If you’re using GarageBand, just switch. It’s such an easy transition and you can do so much more.

    Audio Hijack Pro

    This is what I use for capturing both guest and my own audio for podcast recording.

    Descript

    It’s an Electron app, and it kind of sucks as an audio editor, but it has one killer feature: you can edit audio like text. It makes editing a long podcast recording so much easier than it would be. If this was a native app that had worked a little more like a regular DAW when you needed it too, it would be the coolest thing in the world.

    Writing

    iA Writer

    I was using Ulysses for a while, but the fact that it hides Markdown links behind UI, and doesn’t exactly support regular Markdown got me off of it. iA Writer is a great app for writing things like blog posts when I don’t need to do a bunch of search and replace and other editing.

    Marked

    I use this for previewing things I write in Markdown. It’s inexpensive and way better than any of the build in previews in any text editor I’ve seen.

    MarsEdit

    Sometimes I write things directly into MarsEdit, but usually I write in iA Writer or BBEdit, and then paste into it. It gives a nicer UI for sending things up to my blog with the proper categories, etc, than the web interface.

    General

    1Password

    This is where all my passwords and two factor auth codes go. It’s great.

    Soulver

    Soulver lets me write any math I need to do out as (nearly) English. Sometimes I use a regular calculator, but most of the time Soulver is easier and more powerful.

    NetNewsWire

    The best RSS reading app.

    Acorn

    My image editor of choice. Mostly I do simple things, and it’s always been the best for that. If I needed to do more complex operations, it seems totally capable.

    Not Apps

    Ruby

    Since learning Ruby I can’t think of any reason I’d write a shell script. I used to use things like AWK all Shell all the time, and there’s no reason to for most things when Ruby exists and I know it. It’s the closest thing to “Objective-C without the C,” probably including Smalltalk.

    Regular Expressions

    You don’t need to be that good at regular expressions for them to change how you work with text on a computer. I might write a tutorial on them at some point.

    → 8:56 PM, May 10
  • Weren’t Cmd+F and Cmd+Shift+F standard shortcuts for search current scope and global search, especially in Apple’s apps? What happened here? It drives me crazy that I need to remember different commands in different apps now for something like this.

    → 11:21 AM, May 10
  • Reset macOS Dock to Default

    I’m a man with a lot of hobbies. The stupidest one, by far, is hitting reset on my iOS home screen layout once or twice a year and reorganizing everything.

    Today I found out you can do the same with your dock on macOS.

    defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

    Reorganizing the dock is a lot less time consuming than redoing your iOS home screen. Sometimes it’s nice to have a fresh start.


    Subscribe to RSS feed

    → 10:00 AM, May 7
  • No More Activity Rings

    The time that I was the most fit was when I lived in Portland the first time from 2009 to 2014. The Apple Watch didn’t exist, and the most advanced tracking I ever had was a basic Fitbit pedometer. Since then, I’ve tracked a lot about my fitness. I have heart rate data going back years now. I can tell you my Vo2 max, which isn’t even a thing I knew existed before a few months ago.

    Am I in better shape though? Would I be in worse shape if I didn’t have all of this data? I don’t know.

    Beyond basic step tracking, I’m not entirely convinced collecting any these data has had any practical use for me or have made me any healthier. The reason I was more fit before was that I was riding my bike and walking everywhere. I didn’t need to track it to know, I know it because of how I felt at the time.

    If you’re a hardcore athlete, tracking these things probably has some use. What if you’re just someone who wants to live a healthy lifestyle and feel good? Do I even have the expertise to turn these numbers into anything truly actionable?

    Anyone who has tracked their activity before knows the feeling of leaving home for a walk or bike ride and forgetting their activity tracker. If you don’t track it, does it even count? But that’s ridiculous — tracking your bike ride isn’t what makes it healthy, it’s doing the thing. Wearing an Apple Watch that tells you that you closed all your rings today doesn’t change anything. In fact, I think it could be counter-productive.

    Here’s why: once your watch tells me that I’ve closed those rings, I tend to feel done. I did the activity and hit the arbitrary goal, and now I don’t need to think about fitness anymore. If I don’t have that, the only metric I can use is how I feel. If you learn to listen to your body, I think it will tell you when you’ve had enough.

    So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not going to worry about closing rings. I’m going to wear whatever watch I feel like, I’m going to walk or bike whenever it’s an option to get where I’m going, and I’m going to let the numbers take care of themselves.

    I’ll let you know how it goes.

    → 10:53 PM, May 6
  • Can't Quit BBEdit

    BBEdit — it doesn’t suck, but it sure isn’t leading in features. I’ve spent a bunch of time with different editors, even reading a book on VIM once. I wrote about my experimentation with different editors recently, and most of what I said stands, except for that my experience with Nova is significantly better since moving from Python to Ruby for scripting[1].

    I’ve experimented with Visual Studio Code, which despite my reservations about Electron apps, is obviously the frontrunner for editors with lots of features that are reasonably easy to use and configure[2].

    I also spent time with TextMate 2. I know people who still swear by it, but while it’s still being developed, it doesn’t feel like something I want to invest in starting to use now. Maybe if I were already an expert, I’d ignore the UI bugs that don’t get fixed or the fact that most of the bundles are a decade old, but I’m not, so I don’t think I will (unless I change my mind).

    So, here I am, typing in BBEdit. There’s other options. Why has app form the nineties that mostly still looks like an app from the nineties stuck with me?

    What’s Good?

    It never crashes

    Being in the middle of writing code, hitting go, and having the app you’re using freeze up and crash really sucks. I can’t remember BBEdit ever crashing on me.

    It’s fast

    BBEdit loads fast so I can get to putting text into a window quickly. A lot of times I’m just pasting something to a temporary location, and I don’t think there’s a better option than BBEdit for that.

    Regular expression support

    All the serious editors have regex support. For some reason, BBEdit’s just feels the easiest to me. Pattern Playgrounds are pretty functional. The interface for saving a library of regex sucks, but that’s not such a big deal for my use.

    Per language settings

    I really enjoy being able to have a per-language color schemes and indentation levels. BBEdit does this better than anything I know.

    What’s Missing?

    Intelligent completion

    Ctags are supported and work okay, but they aren’t context aware. I do really like that BBEdit’s completion will let me tab between placeholders. Xcode does this, but most of the other editors seem to stop at putting the name of what you’re doing in and stopping there.

    Syntax awareness

    Here’s a couple of examples that drive me nuts in BBEdit: If I’m writing a list in Markdown, and type an asterisk *, write something, and hit enter, BBEdit does nothing. It should insert another asterisk so I can continue the list, but, it doesn’t. Other editors have had this forever now.

    If I write something like def my_method in Ruby and then hit return, BBEdit should be smart enough to know that the next line should be indented by two spaces. It’s not just a Ruby thing, I tried this with C and Python as well and BBEdit just doesn’t have this feature.

    Extensions/packages/bundles

    Whatever you call these, I want a way to easily add a new list of completions, or a theme, or language support to BBEdit without downloading a file I found somewhere and moving it to a subdirectory of BBEdit’s Application Support folder.

    Multi-cursor support

    All the other GUI apps have this now — even TextMate — and you know what? I like it. Column selection when you hold down option is not the same thing and the prefix/postfix lines window is a crutch at best.

    A nod to visual appeal

    Just a little one, please. Can we get an icon update for Big Sur while we’re at it? I don’t ask for much.

    Still Using BBEdit

    So here I am: using BBEdit. I keep trying other things, and I keep coming back. At this point I’m probably going to stop worrying about what editor I’m using so much and get back to work[3].


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    1. So much relies on the quality of the extensions you’re using in Nova. I stand by that they need more first-party language server extensions.  ↩

    2. The promise of Nova to me is Visual Studio Code with a Mac UI. It comes really close. Configuring build tasks in Nova is way easier and better.  ↩

    3. That’s a lie. I will definitely continue worrying about what editor I’m using.  ↩

    → 12:29 PM, May 6
  • The Fast Decline of HEY World

    Before deciding to come back to primarily posting on my own blog only, I’d been enjoying using HEY World. Something I was interested in seeing was what the usage of that looked like over time. Since I’ve been learning Ruby, this seemed like a great thing to write a script for and find out.

    The first thing I needed, however, was a list of blogs. To do that I created a for hey.world.com links on Twitter, used Proxyman to get the responses.

    I did a bunch of scrolling back in time to when HEY World first came out, copied the responses, and then wrote a script to grab all of the usernames of the blogs that were being linked to. I ended up with a list of about 523 unique blogs that had posted a link to Twitter at least once. Seemed like a pretty good sample to me. I was actually a little surprised there were that many to begin with.

    I then wrote my other Ruby script to pull the feed of every HEY World blog I had, add up the global posts per day, and save them to a hash. Once that was done, I outputted it as CSV so I could see it in Numbers.

    Screen Shot 2021 05 04 at 12 50 14 PM

    HEY World became publicly available on March 4th, 2021. On that day there were 212 posts, the next it was 194. Lots of them are just people trying it out to see what it is and then never posting again. There’s a lot of blogs that have 1-2 posts, which seems expected. After the first couple of days it trails off pretty quickly and within ten days or so it’s in the 20-30 posts a day range.

    Of course the reason this is interested is due to the controversy surrounding Basecamp, and what’s happened since then.

    On April 27, 2021, the Verge posted their article Breaking Camp about what had gone down at the company. For a couple of days, the numbers stayed around the low to mid twenties, which seem about average.

    The last four days, however, they’ve dipped into the 12-14 new posts a day range. It could be normal, since there’s other slow days, but my feeling is that the people who’d remained using it (like me) pretty much stopped as more and worse information has come out about what was going on at Basecamp.

    → 3:20 PM, May 4
  • Preparing for the Summer

    I’m usually not great at planning ahead. One reason I love Disney Land, but don’t have a big desire to go to Disney World, is it seems like you have to know that you want to ride Slinky Dog Dash at 11am on Wednesday three months in advance.

    This time, however, I’m breaking my usual pattern. After being stuck in a house for a year, now that everyone is getting vaccinated, I want to get outdoors and do outdoors things this summer as much as I possibly can. The problem is, everyone else wants to do the same thing, and if I’m not careful, all of the places I want to go and things I want to see will be booked up. Here’s what I’m doing.

    Prioritizing top places

    Made a list of the top places I want to go and coming up with a plan to get there by the end of summer. These include Crater Lake, the Oregon Coast, and Silver Falls.

    Researching alternatives

    I’m lucky that in the Pacific Northwest there’s so many beautiful places you can go that aren’t one of those three to five most popular. I’m trying to find places which might be available on shorter notice, since placed like Crater Lake are likely to be booked out all summer.

    Buying supplies when I see them

    I have a list of supplies that either didn’t make it from California, or that I need to refresh. If I’m in REI, or wherever, and I see the thing I need, I’m buying it right away.

    I knew I needed a new cooler, and wanted a nice one this time, so I made a point to find a Yeti I liked of the right size, and bought it. With the pandemic supplies are likely to be constrained for all sorts of things, and with lots of first time campers getting out there this year, things could run out.

    → 10:59 AM, May 4
  • Owning My Soapbox

    After what’s been going on with HEY, I’ve realized if I care about the words I write, I need to be my writing from my own domain with my own RSS feed that I can take with me to a different blog-thing if I want to. I’m not making changes because of what I think of Basecamp’s actions, but because I don’t want the URL of my blog to suggest anything about me to my readers.

    For now, the thing I’m choosing to use is Micro.blog. I’d been resistant to using it as the main thing I blog from for two reasons:

    1. I didn’t know how to point the RSS feed people are served to Feedpress.
    2. I didn’t know how to filter out my Micro posts from the RSS feed.

    The first one is solved by a custom theme. It took me maybe five minutes to customize the Micro.blog theme I’d been using to serve my feed correctly. It even works if you put my URL directly into an RSS reader like NetNewsWire.

    The second was solved by Micro.blog having a feature to get custom category feeds. It will even automatically filter posts to that feed that are longer and have a title, so I don’t have to remember to do anything special. All I did was point Feedpress to that feed, and I’m off.

    Sorry if there are any repeat posts in the RSS feed. That shouldn’t happen again.

    → 2:41 PM, Apr 28
  • My COVID Vaccine Experience

    Yesterday around 2:20 p.m. I drove myself to the Oregon Convention Center, stood in line for about ten minutes, and was freely provided with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

    I expected that I would be standing in line for some time and that the whole thing would be extremely disruptive to whatever I had planned for the day.

    Instead, the line was quick and efficient, and afterwards I was able to make a follow-up appointment scheduled exactly 21 days after my first. My arm didn’t even really get sore.

    If the vaccine is available to you, do it. If your state is anything like mine, it’s quick, easy, and most important, puts you five weeks from having your life back.

    → 1:10 PM, Apr 28
  • Pretty disappointed by HEY for Domains turning out to just be a rebrand of HEY for Work and not a way to use the normal service with custom domains. It’s pretty clear that’s what everyone expected, and the communication indicates that’s what they planned to deliver.

    → 11:25 PM, Apr 24
  • It’s weird moving back somewhere you’ve lived before. I already know how to get everywhere without looking it up, what all the food I like is, if transit was a thing I was doing right now, I’d already know how all of that works. Kind of wild.

    → 3:44 PM, Apr 20
  • Think I might be able to publish my first public Rails project by the end of next week if I work on it a little everyday and haven’t way underestimated how hard running a periodic background task to update the database will be.

    → 3:04 PM, Apr 15
  • Since moving to using Ruby and Rails more instead of Python and Django, I’ve really come arond on Nova. It’s been the easiest to setup a custom tasks with and make things of anything. Debugger support would be nice, but I hear that’s coming maybe?

    → 10:37 PM, Apr 14
  • Even with the help, moving is incredibly exhausting. So glad it’s the home stretch.

    → 9:10 PM, Apr 14
  • Packers are here finishing up everything I didn’t get to, and then folks coming to put it all in the truck tomorrow. Of all the things you can pay someone to do for you, taking 90% of the burden of moving off your shoulders might one of the best values.

    → 10:34 AM, Apr 14
  • Packing just feels never ending. My apartment is full of boxes and it still seems like there’s a ton to do.

    → 9:51 PM, Apr 13
  • The Run Loop With Special Guest Gus Mueller

    The Run Loop returns with special guest Gus Mueller to talk about Acorn 7, Real Basic, unit testing, and a lot more. It’s a good one!

    Show page • Overcast link

    → 12:36 PM, Apr 5
  • Useful Shell Aliases

    Like any good computer person, I maintain a collection of dotfiles. Mine is pretty basic. I don’t use any crazy zsh package manager framework thing or external dependencies. I do have a bunch of aliases, however, that I think are pretty helpful. I’m sharing them here. I hope some of these are useful to other people.

    LS Aliases

    These three are pretty straightforward. You probably already have one or more of these if you’ve customized your shell at all.

    alias ls='ls -G'

    Always show colors for ls.

    alias l='ls -lG'

    Show directory contents in list mode.

    alias ll='ls -aGl

    Directory contents in list mode with color.

    Package Manager Stuff

    alias brewup='brew update && brew upgrade'

    Update and then upgrade Homebrew if that was successful.

    alias gemup='gem update --system && gem update'

    Update all Ruby gems.

    alias allup='brewup && gemup && mas upgrade'

    Upgrade Homebrew, Ruby gems, and the Mac App Store together. If any fail, stop so I can fix it.

    alias ibrew=’arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew’

    For the time being, there’s enough x86 only Homebrew packages that I’m running both the x86 and ARM versions in parallel. Maybe I should just run the x86 version for everything? For the time being, at least, I have this alias to run the x86 version.

    Grab Bag

    alias zshconf='bbedit -w $HOME/.zshrc && source $HOME/.zshrc'

    Open zshrc in BBEdit and then source it after it’s done being edited.

    alias in="arch -x86_64"

    Run any command in x86 mode.

    alias ded='rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData'

    Delete Xcode derived data. Make sure you close Xcode before running or it will complain. Thanks Brent!

    alias domains_grep="defaults domains | sed 's/,/\n/g' | grep -i"

    Grep to find the user defaults domain of something.

    take() { 
        mkdir $1 && cd $1 
    }
    

    Create a directory and change to to it.

    → 1:23 PM, Apr 3
  • The state of Mac code editors

    I like to think of myself as a typist who doesn’t ask for much. The last thing I ever wanted to be was another programmer, dissatisfied with the state of text editors for macOS in 2021, writing yet another article comparing code editors. Regardless of my best intentions, however, here we are.

    My short answer is this: it’s pretty bleak out there. Whatever age we’re in right now in terms of text editors with modern features for the Mac, it is emphatically not golden.

    Here’s what I want from an editor:

    • Hit ⌘R to run a script.
    • Reasonable autocomplete.
    • Auto-indenting as I type.
    • Be a Mac-assed Mac app, or at least not an Electron app.
    • Supports projects and individual files equally well.

    Based on my requirements, I can rule out a few of the possibilities right away:

    • Electron apps: Visual Studio Code, Atom, et al.
    • Non-Mac-like native apps: Sublime Text, CodeKit, a bunch of others, I’m sure.
    • Java apps: So, anything by Jetbrains. They’re all big heavy IDEs written in Java that they look and feel like it.

    So what contenders remain?
    • Nova, the new code editor by Panic.
    • CotEditor, a free, open-source text editor for macOS.
    • BBEdit, the venerable text editor from Bare Bones Software.
    • TextMate 2, the once mythical creature, come to life.
    • CodeRunner, a paid code editor that’s been around a few years.

    Nova
    Nova is a recently released editor by Panic. On its face, it’s very exciting. Nova is responsive, looks good, and has support for lots of languages. My main issues are that it’s too project-focused, and there’s no “run in Nova.” 

    If you’re in a project, you can set up tasks, which are fine, but that doesn’t work at all for individual scripts, 

    Nova does have autocomplete, but it relies heavily on third-party extensions for basic language support. That was a bold choice for a brand new editor that’s starting from zero. For obscure languages, that choice makes sense to me. Good autocomplete for languages like Python and Ruby, however, should be built-in. At the least, there should be first-party from Panic users can expect to get regular maintenance.

    Panic is the follow-up to Coda, an editor that focused on the web and making static websites. Although Nova is called a code editor, it still feels like the only thing that is a first-class citizen is making websites by hand with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It has no concept of things like virtual environments in Python, which effectively makes it unusable for serious development. My feeling is the people at Panic just don’t use those kinds of languages a lot in their work, making it hard for them to know what’s needed. 

    I wanted to love this app, and I’m sure I’ll keep trying to use it, but it’s just not there yet. Nova is still really young, though, and I don’t see any reason it can’t add the things I wish it had in the future.

    CotEditor
    CotEditor is arguably the best looking of the bunch if what you want is an app that uses native Mac controls. It’s the only editor on my list whose UI updated for Big Sur. It is Mac-assed to its core — it even supports versions (remember that?). It’s an outstanding text editor. 

    The problem what CotEditor is that it’s missing almost all of the features you’d want for development. You can’t run scripts, and there is zero-autocomplete and no automatic indentation. It has no features beyond syntax highlighting for coding. One thing I’ve only seen in CotEditor is a “give execute permissions” checkbox in the save dialog, which I now think all of these apps should have.

    Once again, if they could add some or all of these features, CotEditor would be a killer app.

    BBEdit
    BBEdit is what I use to do regex on a big file or just type something up quickly. It launches fast, even with huge files, and so it’s great for that. The UI is really behind the times though, autocomplete is only through Ctags —which I can’t be bothered with — and there’s no auto-indenting. I don’t think I’ll ever stop using BBEdit but I also don’t see myself using it for scripting.

    TextMate 2
    TextMate 2 feels mostly maintained. It gets updated every so often, but the UI is pretty creaky, and it has weird UI bugs that never get fixed, hence the mostly. Its features were probably great for 2006, but pretty behind the times today. It can run things with ⌘R, but there’s no autocomplete. It does have great auto-indenting, however, so that’s a huge win.

    CodeRunner
    CodeRunner seems like a sleeper to me. It has a ton of features (a debugger!). Autocomplete is of varying quality for different languages but doesn’t require installing anything. Python support is outstanding. You can have custom launch scripts, so it could work for projects as well as individual scripts, but that’s not what it’s made for. If what you want to do is write individual Python or Shell scripts, this is the one to use. I’d keep it around just for that, even if I didn’t use it for anything else.

    And...?
    I’m about as confused as I was when I started writing this. There just aren’t any great options. I’ll probably keep trying to use Nova for anything project-based and hope they update it to be better for things that aren’t static websites. CodeRunner is hard to beat for one-off scripts, so I’ll use it for that. BBEdit is sticking around for regex on big files. I’ll possibly TextMate 2 if the others all suck at auto indenting the language I’m using too much.

    At the end of this, I wanted to say that I had a single text editor that would mostly do what I want, but here we are, probably using four different ones for different tasks. Fantastic.
    → 1:27 PM, Mar 29
  • Update and Source Shell Files Alias

    After doing the bbedit ~/.zshrc followed by source ~/.zshrc a few times, I realized I could write this alias to speed things up a bit:

    alias zshconf='bbedit -w ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc'

    What this does is opens my zshrc in BBEdit, waits for me to edit the file, and then sources it once I’m done. The -w is the wait flag for the BBEdit command line tool, but most other editors I’ve used have something similar you could use.

    → 3:13 PM, Mar 16
  • Syncing Scratch Projects and Preferences Between Macs

    Last week, I moved from the one computer lifestyle to having two different Macs — an M1 Mac Mini and MacBook Air. Using both is creating two points of friction I’d really like a better solution for.

    The first is that I have a lot of little test coding projects that I start that I might want to use both computers, but which I’m not ready to create a new repo on GitHub for. What do I do? I can either:

    • Keep them in iCloud Drive folder until I’m ready to move them over to GitHub? It seems like that would be okay as long as they’re not also git repos, since I’m told having repos in iCloud Drive is problematic, although I’m not entirely sure it is in practice, rather than theoretically.
    • Have a git private git repo — “Scratch” — that I put all of my temp projects in to sync them across machines. If something graduates to its own repo, I’ll move the files out of scratch and set that up. A scratch repo is less ideal — because it means I still have to remember to commit — but it sort of solves the problem.

    The second issue is syncing app preferences. The only app I know that does this without intervention is BBEdit, because of course, it does, but I’d also like my Xcode keyboard shortcuts, Terminal themes, and everything else to work this way. The best solution would be for this to be a feature of iCloud, obviously, but it isn’t.

    One solution is I could add each thing individually to my dotfiles repo and use a script to set up symlinks. I do this for my actual dotfiles, and it works fine for those, but there are not that many of them — doing it for every app I want to sync sounds tedious. I also don’t like that I have to remember to commit and pull to keep things in sync.

    I could also use this Mackup thing, which is a project on GitHub that claims to do what I want automatically, but which I find a bit terrifying to unleash on my machines?

    If anyone has a better solution for either of these, please reach out. My goal is to pick up either of these functionally identical computers and use them without worrying about how they’re set up or where things are.

    → 1:50 PM, Mar 6
  • Maybe I’m crazy, but hear me out — using popular open-source libraries for things that are not the core functionality of your app, and you could replace if you had to probably isn’t the dumbest thing.

    If writing a YAML parser or whatever excites you, though, be my guest.

    → 5:52 PM, Feb 9
  • A couple of things have really helped me with productivity and focus lately.

    1. Locking my phone away so I can’t get to it outside scheduled breaks.
    2. Time blocking my day (I’m using the Time Block Planner).

    I’d suggest either to anyone, but as someone with ADHD, it’s been huge.

    → 12:50 PM, Feb 7
  • A couple of different angles of my little writing nook. If you’d like a letter, just let me know.

    → 6:19 PM, Jan 27
  • Sometimes I’m too extra even for myself.

    → 7:15 PM, Jan 20
  • The top couple of books for adult ADHD everyone says you should read are about 500 pages long, and I think that is kind of hilarious.

    → 1:13 PM, Jan 18
  • I’ve been working on a little Django Python project I want for personal use here and there for a few days, and it’s really coming along. Not bad for a few hours with a framework and language I only kind of knew going in. I’m using Nova by Panic which is quite nice!

    → 7:31 PM, Jan 17
  • Trying to get more exercise and also more sun in the morning to help with sleep and general health. Today’s was a walk through the neighborhood in the morning and a walk to a park and back a little bit from my house.

    → 6:23 PM, Jan 17
  • A far lonelier death

    One of my best friend’s dads just died of COVID after battling it for several weeks until he was eventually in a coma. They were forced to remove the feeding tube when there was nothing else that could be done. She is heartbroken. Quoting her, “A COVID death is not like other deaths. It is far, far lonelier. And it leaves very lonely people behind.”

    Her dad did the right things and still was infected with this horrible disease, probably from someone who didn’t even know they had it.

    Wear your mask and get your parents vaccinated. If you can’t get them vaccinated yet, do what you can to get them to stay home and not take unnecessary risks. I’ve struggled to get my own parents to take this as seriously as they should. Don’t let anyone you love die hooked up to machines alone in a hospital.

    → 4:03 PM, Jan 15
  • I’ve spent the day watching the Capitol building be raided and trashed by armed terrorists attempting some kind of coup. I will never forget the president calling them patriots, repeating his lies, and saying he loves them. What a dark time to be alive.

    → 6:54 PM, Jan 6
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