A common problem for my wife and daughter since I started working from home more and more was knowing when I was on a conference call. My office has a glass door and the hallway behind it leads upstairs and to the master bedroom, so my family — understandably — likes to know if they’ll be on camera or not when they walk past. It’s also handy for them to know when they can ask me a question verbally rather than having to send me a text message from the room next door.
Read more...I really enjoy automating things using Workflow, Hazel, shell scripts, or just about anything else.
Last night I got the idea that it would be cool to have a graphical archive of each post to my website as it appeared the day it was posted. Over time I’ll have a visual history of how my website has changed and, who knows, might make a little coffee table book or something.
The automation for this is fairly simple. I took an existing Workflow I had that used the JSONFeed of my site to grab the most recent post and modified it
Read more...As I noted in my quick review, I love Whalebrew. Whalebrew has allowed me to use several tools I was too afraid of before in my day-to-day workflow. The biggest of these tools is Mermaid.
I’ve been using Mermaid for years to make quick and simple Gantt charts and other diagrams. Up to now, however, my workflow has involved saving my Mermaid file in a text document and copying and pasting the text into the online Mermaid generator when I need a new image.
Read more...It seems that each and every day there is a cool command line tool to try out to help automate or generally improve some part of my day-to-day. The problem with many of these tools, however, is that they require all sorts of dependencies (Ruby, Python, Node.js) each of which have their own package managers and sub-dependencies. Homebrew solves this for many things, but they are pretty picky about what they allow in, so more often than not, I’m left trying to decide if I risk messing up my machine by installing a web of dependencies or skip giving the tool a try. Not any more.
Read more...The PowerBook 1400 is the last PowerBook to have a real keyboard and is wellknown for having one of — if not the best — keyboards Apple ever put into a notebook. Several years ago, I bought a PowerBook 1400c off eBay as my grandmother’s first computer. She used it lightly for a few years to surf the Internet on dial-up AOL, but since 2003 or so, the PowerBook has been sitting in a box unused.
Read more...Almighty Father who is the source of all life, give thy servants an extra measure of thy grace that we, directing the intellect and energy thou hast gifted mankind, might so order our minds as to successfully configure and migrate the systems we steward to the service of thy Holy Catholic Church and to the glory thy Son, Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit reign as one God, now and forever. Amen.