Mischief Managed: Update Tools, Learn New
Mischief Managed is a series of posts on tasks and technologies I use to maintain my computing environment. It’s part of what I do between projects. Try it out. Most of us do not update our operating systems or toolkits while a project is ongoing. It increases the time to produce the product, adds risk that things will stop working, it’s just not worth doing. But once the project is over, it’s time to update the tools and study new ones.
Mischief Managed: Archiving
Mischief Managed is a series of posts on tasks and technologies I use to maintain my computing environment. It’s part of what I do between projects. Try it out. When a project or engagement is completed, support is over, and you’re on to the next thing (or taking a break), it’s best to move these files and tasks out of your current folders and into archive folders. Here are some of the things I do:
Mischief Managed: Google 2-Factor Authentication
Mischief Managed is a series of posts on tasks and technologies I use to maintain my computing environment. It’s part of what I do between projects. Try it out. I’ve been planning on doing this for ages, but no excuses, you should too. And then this happened. Last week, Mat Honan got hacked hard (see Yes, I was hacked. Hard.). Someone gained access to his Apple ID, reset his other accounts and nuked all his computers.
Mischief Managed: Clean Inbox
Mischief Managed is a series of posts on tasks and technologies I use to maintain my computing environment. It’s part of what I do between projects. Try it out. My Inbox has gotten out of control, several thousand emails reside in the combined inbox in Mail.app and I have not filed or archived any for weeks. The last time I cleaned it up, it took me hours because I had to drag and drop each email into the right folder, and half the time I had to scroll to find the right folder.
New Site Font
I love Octopress, but I have never been happy with the default fonts. The default PT Sans and PT Serif fonts are very, very nice, but not awesome. I did like the X and Y height, the clarity, the ease of reading, but the letterspacing on the serif font was too tight and it started to look jaggy. This week, Adobe released Source Sans Pro, their first free and open font, and I think it’s great for a technical blog-style web site.
Change is Good - New Applications replacing Old Ones
There is some amazing independent software out there for the Mac. And I use a lot of it. I realized today, while fixing a problem on my wife’s laptop, that I have pretty much replaced many older products with new ones on my computer over the last year or so, yet she still uses all the old stuff. Change is good for me. I love using new products that improve my productivity, work better or look better.
Moom Corners
Another quick trick, this time for Moom. When doing Ruby on Rails programming, I like my terminal at the bottom-right of the screen, my text editor at the bottom-left, the browser top-right and BBEdit (for taking notes) at the top-left. When blogging, I like the terminal in the same place, but I want Byword at the top-left. I got tired of dragging windows everywhere, so I set up keyboard shortcuts usimg Moom to place windows in the corners.
Setting up BBEdit for Markdown
Two advanced settings are needed to make BBEdit treat all new documents as Markdown format, and to save with the correct file extension. They are: defaults write com.barebones.bbedit PreferredFilenameExtension_Markdown -string "markdown" defaults write com.barebones.bbedit DefaultLanguageNameForNewDocuments Markdown If you use TextWrangler, replace the “bbedit” in the above with “textwrangler”. But I’d recommend purchasing BBEdit instead.
Day One updated to v1.7
My favorite journaling application Day One has been updated for both Mac and iOS. Amongst the best new features are photo’s, location checkins using Foursquare and weather. They have also updated the markdown engine. I use it all day to capture what I do as well as log all my activities (such as creating this post or committing code, see Bread crumbs in Day One - The Hiltmon). Since this new version is sandboxed, the command line client has been moved.
My first computer - Sinclair ZX81
With the Commodore 64 turning 30 today (See: BBC News - Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today’s kids make of it?), I started thinking about my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81 (see it on Wikipedia), also called the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA. Photo of Sinclair ZX81, tv and tape (c) Mike Cattell on Flickr (because I have none). The year would have been 1982, I was an awkward teenager, and this new device changed my world.