I’ve been using DayOne as my journal since 2014. Very early on, I realized that a good part of my daily journaling was actually done on Twitter. Over the years I’ve used IFTTT to import my tweets, but the fact that that system didn’t include images or quoted tweets removed a lot of important context. I wanted something nicer that showed the full Twitter card with graphics, etc. DayOne’s recent release of activity feeds seemed to be a good solution, but it, too, lost a lot of context and was very manual.
Read more...Back in May my Comcast — DBA “Xfinity” because that totally makes me forget they’re Comcast — bill went up to $150. We were paying $110 which was already more than I thought I should pay for data-capped mid-range broadband and some television, but that extra $40 pushed me over the edge. Mentally, $150 is a lot closer to $200 than I felt comfortable with.
In East Nashville, AT&T offers uncapped gigabit fiber to the home for only $80. I was sold. The only outstanding issue was television. Though more than half of our family television watching happened on Netflix, the rest came from Comcast. I did a quick audit of our DVR and realized over 90% of what we watched was available on Hulu or broadcast TV. With the wife’s buy-in, we decided to cancel Comcast and switch to antenna to supplement what we couldn’t get on Hulu or Netflix.
Read more...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.
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