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: Random Strings on the Command Line Browsing through some old files today I came across this note: To Generate A Random String:tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c 8 | xargs Curios …
: The Tao of Cal The Tao of Cal - Cal Newport With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down …
: Godot Isn't Making it Godot Isn’t Making it Outside of a miracle, we are about to enter an era of desperation in the generative AI space. We’re two years in, and we have …
: Gross Apple Marketing I’m not sure what’s going on over in Cupertino for them to think that any of the recent Apple Intelligence ads they’ve been running are a good idea. …
: Scout I’m rooting for these guys. If they can pull off this truck at the $50-$60k mark, I think they are going to have a winner. I’ve been looking at …
: The Manual with Tim Walz An error occurred. Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser. Love this guy. Patrick …
: Loading and Indexing SQLite What a difference a couple of lines of code can make. I recognize that databases have always been a weak point for me, so I’ve been trying to correct …
: The Perfect ZSH Config If you spend all day in the terminal like I do, you come to appreciate it’s speed and efficiency. I often find myself in Terminal for mundane tasks …
: Future Work and AI I’ve been trying to wrap my small monkey brain around what ChatGPT will mean in the long run. I’m going to try to think this through here. In many …
: GPG Signing Git Commits On my way towards completing another project I needed to setup gpg public key infrastructure. There are many tutorials and explanations about gpg on …
: Why BBEdit? I spend a lot of time in the terminal, but I spend an equal amount of time in my text editor. My main requirements for a text editor is that it be …
: My 2022 Mac Setup Starting its fifth year on my desk, my 2017 iMac 5k is still going strong, but starting to show it’s age. There’s still nothing that I can’t do with …
: The Reminders Experiment Over the past month I’ve been experimenting with cutting down on the number of applications I use on my Mac. One in particular I though was going to …
: The Subtle Art of Snowblowing If you are fortunate enough to live in a home with a driveway, and fortunate enough to live in a region that gets a lot of snow, you are already …
: More on 1Password 1Password 7 was an incremental improvement on 6, and 6 was an incremental improvement on 5, and so on all the way back to the original 1Passwd. But …
: For the Future It’s been a busy couple weeks in the Mac community. From horrendously serious topics like Apple taking on child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by …
: Switcher Season 2021 Years ago Alex Payne wrote “Switching Season”, about how he thought about switching from Mac to Linux. I know how he feels. From time to time I get …
: Setting up BBEdit 14's Python Language Server Protocol Bare Bones released the new version of BBEdit recently and it’s packed with features that teach the old dog some modern IDE tricks. When programming I …
: MacSparky and DEVONthink Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting with David Sparks about an upcoming Field Guide he’s doing on DEVONthink. He had asked for power users of the …
: Inner-Document Markdown Reference Links I’m writing a fairly large document for internal use at work, and instead of using something like Word I’ve generated a bunch of markdown files that …
: Student Advice A student asked me for advice for what to focus on getting into the compsci field. Here’s what I said. I have two pieces of advice: Stay curious. If …
: Healthy Tech I deleted my twitter account this morning. I’ve been on Twitter long enough to remember when it was spelled twttr, and there was a SMS bridge to a …
: Getting Small Again It’s been quiet here at home lately. Grey and overcast, rain morning, noon, and night. A good time to rest and recover from a lot of busy weeks. I’m …
: Cloud Backup with Arq and B2 I’m a fan of the three-pronged approach to backups. I’ve got two different drives attached to my iMac, one for Time Machine for hourly backups, and …
: Over the Air I recently dropped our cable service and switched our home entertainment system to be centered around the Apple TV (the box, not the service), with an …
: How Long Will macOS Be Unix? I’ve started to worry about the Unix core of macOS. Possibly unnecessarily, but there have been a few troubling signs over the years, the biggest of …
: Nostalgic Development Like many my age, my first introduction to writing code was creating basic web pages, mimicking what I could find by right-clicking on a site and …
: Think About the Future Over the past twenty years the tech industry has greased the tracks of an express train to dystopia. As age creeps up on me and my hair continues to …
: The September 2019 Apple Event Several more professional sites have written longer and better articles about Apple’s recent event than I can do here. A few of my favorites in no …
: Enterprise Software Again I realized today that it’s been ten years since I dedicated an entire post to complaining about enterprise software. In that ten years not much has …
: That One Mac Guy I bought my first Mac in 2004, a white plastic iBook G4. It was slow, the screen resolution was terrible, but wow did I love Mac OS X. After several …
: Setting Up Webster's Dictionary Via a post I saw today from Chris Bowler, via a newsletter by Sarah Bray, discussing an article written by James Somers, wherein he describes the …
: Stories “We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one eh?” Christians, shaman, poets, and authors all know one thing… what we believe shapes who …
: Inessential Thanks I believe this will be the last I muck about with the design of the site for the foreseeable future. After being disappointed by the available themes, …
: Example 50031 of Web Developers Overcomplicating Projects I spent some time over the past couple nights adopting a new theme for the old digs here at jb. I found the beautiful Chalk theme by Nielsen Ramon and …
: Merging the Mac and the iPad It seems undeniable that, given an infinite timescale, Apple will eventually simplify their two most popular systems into a single platform. Merging …
: A Dream Jekyll App I’ve never been 100% happy with this site. On the one hand, Jekyll lets me have full control of my content, and I never have to worry about losing any …
: It's the Price The recent hubbub about Apple’s earnings guidance has “analysts” and pundits talking a lot about China and the global economic situation. I’m sure …
: An Optimistic 2019 CPG Gray and Myke Hurley have been talking about assigning a theme to a year on their Cortex podcast, in lieu of new year’s resolutions. I quite like …
: Software Subscriptions and Bundled Apps The Omni Group’s recent announcement that they’d have a subscription option for OmniFocus has me thinking about how I’m going to be handling …
: The 2018 iPad Pro Sometimes even I get caught up in waves of pessimism, and the recent onslaught of negativity against smart phones, social media, and technology in …
: The Typewriter Project A phrase I’ve found myself repeating to friends and family from time to time recently is that “some things used to be better”. As a technologist, and …
: Less, But Better I’m becoming increasingly interested in an emerging line of Eink devices that intentionally do less than other devices in the same category. Of …
: Taking Notes I loved Yojimbo for many years. I still think it’s the most “Mac-like” app for taking notes and storing data. The best thing about it was that when …
: Simple File Encryption for macOS For years now I’ve wanted a simple way to encrypt or decrypt a file in macOS, so this morning I built it. This takes five to ten minutes to setup, and …
: Day One, Ulysses, and Bear I’ve been using, and subscribing to, Ulysses, Bear, and Day One for a while now. It seems a bit silly, especially since they all do basically the same …
: It’s Not About the Apps David and Katie are great, they really are. I’ve enjoyed MPU, like most of you have, for years. I’ve bought the books, the scanners, implemented the …
: A Fresh Coat of Paint I spent some time remodeling the old digs here, adding a fresh coat of paint in the form of a new theme, new hosting, and a shiny new SSL lock. The …
: The Mediacom SSH Issue Sometimes it’s a miracle the Internet works at all. For the past week or so I’ve been unable to clone, pull from, or push to private Git repositories …
: Dropbox and AWS Dropbox apparently saved a boatload of money by moving their infrastructure off of AWS and building out their own data centers. Taken at face value …
: A New macOS I’ve heard several people on podcasts or blog posts claim that they’d like to see Apple hold off on new features that nobody wants and just fix the …
: The Future of DevOps is AI The work of systems administration, that is, racking new hardware, running cables, and loading operating systems, is quickly becoming eclipsed by …
: What's a Computer? I’ve been enjoying watching the new iPad commercial of a kid and her iPad roaming around the city. Two things come to mind. First, is this what it’s …
: Veterans Day I gave a talk at our school Veterans Day assembly today. I didn’t get everything I wanted to say in, but it seemed to go over well. So, I thought an …
: The City Museum I’m in St. Louis for the Strange Loop conference, and the conference kicked off last night with a party at the City Museum. I didn’t bother to look …
: Running Again At the beginning of Spring, I signed up for two races, the half-marathon Dam to Dam in the summer, and the full Des Moines Marathon in October. This …
: Serverless Jekyll Hosting on AWS This is a bit silly, I’ll be the first to admit. The contraption I’ve built to host this site is clearly unnecessary, especially when I could host the …
: Recommending a New Mac I got an email from my mom the other day asking me for a recommendation on a new Mac. The first question I asked was what her budget was like. She …
: My Next Mac So, yesterday I cleared off my desk and tried to work with nothing but my MacBook again. No standing desk, no external monitor. It looked great, but …
: Install Gems Without sudo in macOS I came across a neat little command line tool via Rob Griffiths’ Robservatory this morning, a Ruby gem named iStats1. Install is easy enough in Rob’s …
: Beware of VPNs I’ve seen quite a few smart people recommend using a VPN service in the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to repeal privacy rules for ISPs. …
: Daring Fireball - The Mac Pro Lives Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking …
: Philippians The book of Philippians is such a beautiful, and challenging book. This is what I needed to hear tonight: Do all things without grumbling or …
: The Life We Live My daughter’s cheerleading coach passed away last night. What was first thought of as diabetes turned out to be an extremely aggressive cancer that …
: Eero and Disney Circle tldr: If you have a Circle device and an Eero mesh network, plug the Circle into the Eero connected to your modem with an ethernet cable. The router …
: Nirvana In Nineteen Ninety-One, I was a freshman in high school, living in a tiny house in small town Montana. Just me and my mom. My family, like so many at …
: On Computing Tomorrow I’ve been thinking more about my defense of the Mac as a long-term computing platform, and I’m slowly coming around to understanding that at the base …
: Sal Fights For the Users Link Sal Soghoian, writing for MacStories: Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Apple decided to combine their engineering resources to …
: Future Viability of the Mac Despite aspirations of expanding my fields of interest and adopting new hobbies outside of technology, my day-to-day work gets done on a Mac. I’ve got …
: The Recipe From time to time I wonder if I could get by without any 3rd party software installed on my Mac. What would I have to do to adopt to not using the …
: Ten Billion Reasons Why What could an organization comprised of some of the smartest, most driven people on the planet do with ten billion dollars in a year? Apple increasing …
: More Phish This is fantastic, pure Phish. I’m so glad that they’ve just been getting better over the years. Vibrating with love and light, pulsating with love …
: The Dancer We humans are complicated creatures. I run for miles at a time, even though I’ve got nowhere to go, and nothing is chasing me, nothing but time and …
: Homecoming Night One of the surest ways I know I’m well on my way to crotchety old man status is not the grey in my hair, but my gut reaction to a certain tradition in …
: Thinking it Through My favorite new-to-me site is Farnam Street by Shane Parrish. I’ve been experiencing a slow change of interests over the past several months as Apple …
: Studying in the Pit I just started reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work and I’ve found myself nodding along in agreement through the introduction and first two chapters. His …
: That’s Fine For Marco Overcast is moving to an ad-supported business model. Ads are the great compromise: money needs to come from somewhere, and the vast majority of …
: The September Apple Event Another keynote came and went yesterday, and there was nothing I could do after it was over. I couldn’t order the new iPhone 7, or upgrade my current …
: Write it Down If you really want to remember something, write it down. By hand. There is a growing body of knowledge that shows the benefits of writing things down, …
: Life Long Intellectual Pursuits I’ve always been curious. I remember having coffee with my cousin and her boyfriend as a teenager and saying, in my naïvety, that I wanted to know …
: How to Pick The Right App Computers are complex tools; designers and developers are always trying to strike a balance between usability and usefulness. I have a theory that …
: Rules for Sane Living in a World of Constant Outrage Turn it all off. I’ve deleted the twitter apps from my phone and computer, I don’t log into Facebook anymore, and I’m limiting when I read news …
: BBEdit and Python Tags I’m in the process, a very long process, of switching from Vim to BBEdit as my primary editor. The reasons are long and varied, but boil down to me …
: The NES Classic Edition This looks fantastic. The NES is coming back to stores! Pick up the new mini NES Classic Edition on 11/11 w/ 30 included games! — Nintendo of …
: Standing Desk Review For the past two months I’ve been working, on and off, with a Rocelco Height Adjustable Standing Desk Riser, a less expensive choice for working at a …
: The New Setup Starting a new job working from home gave me the opportunity to evaluate exactly what I wanted from my work environment. I knew I was getting a new …
: Manton's Stickers I was listening to Core Intuition a few weeks back and Manton said that if anyone was interested in his project to let him know, and he would send a …
: Making The Move From Sysadmin to DevOps Everyone’s professional path follows a slightly different trajectory. We are each a unique recipe of skills, experience, and interests, which shape …
: DevOps & Evolving Systems Administration The phrase “DevOps” gets thrown around quite a bit, so I thought it might be helpful for me to write down exactly what it means to me. DevOps is the …
: Everything Changes And everything is changing for me again. The CTO of the company I work for spoke with me yesterday, our office is being shut down and they are laying …
: Mac Power Tools My brief experiment with mutt ended mostly how I expected it would. With me turning on my email in Mail.app again and carrying on as normal. I try to …
: Power Tools After reading through Matt Gemmell’s latest post on mutt and the good doctor’s response, I fired up my old mutt config and gave it another run …
: Mac Magazine Sometimes I think I’d like a really great magazine, like The New Yorker, but for Mac geeks. A beautifully printed, monthly magazine with all the best …
: Winning NaNoWriMo So, I won NaNoWrimo, and wrote a “novel”. Although, it’s not really a novel, more like a novella, and it’s not really written just yet, it’s 50,000 …
: US Cellular Strikes Back Let me start by saying that US Cellular has the best coverage in Iowa. No matter where we go in the state, we’ve got a great signal, almost always in …
: Faith, Hope, Love What if Christians actually lived the way Jesus commanded us to? Love your enemy. I’m afraid we’ve gotten a bad name, mostly because we haven’t been …
: Moby Dick I’ve been slowly working through my list of books, and Saturday I finally knocked another one off the list, Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s whaling epic …
: Link Blogging With Quicksilver I can’t quite make up my mind on how I feel about “link blogging”. On the one hand, there’s already a lot of people out there who do it better than I …
: Starting a New Post With Automator Automator is one of my favorite tools on the Mac, and unfortunately one of the most unappreciated. I have several workflows and services that I’ve …
: A Runner My workout this morning called for five miles. Run two, walk one, run the last two. I think in the Fall or Spring it would have been fairly easy, but …
: Select A Column of Text in MacVim I often need to work with columns of text; output from commands, text grabbed from a web page, what have you. Since I have a somewhat odd aversion to …
: Goodbye to The Annual Review John Siracusa hung up his cape today, announcing on his blog that he would no longer be reviewing OS X. Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review …
: Research Kit and the GPL Apple released ResearchKit as an open source project on GitHub today. The project is complete with pull requests, a wiki, and a few sample projects to …
: The Invisible MacBook A thread of minimalism weaves through Apple’s products, starting with the Bondi blue iMac and flowing to the Apple Watch. One could argue that the …
: The New MacBook The tech world is once again loosing their grip after Apple has gone, as they see it, too far, too fast with the new MacBook. They can think of a …
: The Long View Computers as tools for creation are unique in that they change and evolve over time as software is updated. A hammer that you buy today can reasonably …
: The Best of What's Around Marco struck a nerve with his latest post lamenting the declining quality of Apple software. The post was picked up by “analysts” and debated on …
: Adopting BBEdit Scripts for Vim In addition to my experiments with the design of this site, I was also testing out BBEdit as my main writing and programming tool. BBEdit didn’t …
: All Mine I’ve been experimenting with the design of this site for the past couple weeks. First, I used a default Jekyll template, slightly modified to my …
: Cellular Options I pulled into the gas station on my way home after a long day, picked up my phone in my left hand, intending to put it in my pocket, and opened the …
: AWS reInvent Conference The re:Invent conference was fascinating. Culture First, the overall experience of the conference was fantastic. There were, of course, a few hiccups …
: Open Source News Design Finding good design in open source can be hard, but it’s almost impossible to find in open source news sites. These sites take “reader hostile” to a …
: Sensible Information Organization There is no one application or system that is right for managing all of your information. If there were, we wouldn’t need apps like Contacts or …
: A Technical Education - The Operating System It’s good to think of a computer as something like a cake with several layers. If the hardware is the first, and foundational layer, then the …
: A Technical Education - Base Level Hardware The first and most important thing to remember when considering a computer is that computers are machines. Incredible, wondrous, bordering on magical …
: A Technical Education I didn’t grow up with computers. They just weren’t a common thing in Montana in the 80’s. When my family moved to Texas for two years during my sixth …
: Home Built Software and Systems GigaOm is running an article written by Ralph Dangelmaier, the CEO of BlueSnap, claiming “We’ve reached the end of ‘build it yourself’ software.” It’s …
: The Apple I Knew As usual, John Gruber has the best take on the Apple Watch that I’ve read, and one sentence in particular stood out. Rather, I think Apple Watch is …
: Marked Down If you really, really care about Markdown, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Stack Exchange fame has a new project for you. Apparently, Jeff didn’t …
: Small Site Update I’ve been publishing this site with Jekyll for several years. I’m not sure exactly when I switched over from Wordpress, but it’s long enough ago that …
: What it Does Our relationship with technology has become unexpectedly skewed. I was just reading through Sid O’Neill’s recent article, Losing Apple, and found …
: Responsibility “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” – The Lorax I believe that it is my responsibility to …
: Site Design Non-Update The site design of jb was very nearly upgraded tonight. Well, upgraded is not quite the word for it. Changed is more accurate. Even though I’m quite …
: For The Fun Of It I still need an anything bucket, and nothing fills that gap like my old friend Yojimbo. I was an early adopter of Yojimbo, back with version one, and …
: Converging Mobile and Desktop Environments Computing has been on a linear progression towards smaller, more mobile, and more personal devices for seventy years. It seems unlikely to me that …
: Command-T Crashing Vim For some reason today when I opened up MacVim and hit ,t to navigate to a file, MacVim crashed. The terminal spat out an ugly, and unhelpful error …
: Parsing iostat Results In the course of load testing a new system, we gathered the output from iostat from a group of servers. In addition to parsing through the device …
: A Different Vision of the Future I ran across a few articles in the past week or so that predict the majority of the population will be living in cities by 2050.1 I don’t dispute the …
: Statement of Faith I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that he became a man and was born to a virgin. Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life, and died …
: Be Excellent To Each Other The recent row over iA Writer’s developers and their patent application reminded me what a small community the Mac developers are. The real problem …
: Bigfoot Footnotes in Jekyll Like the good doctor, I knew as soon as I saw Bigfoot that I would be adding it to this site. 1 I’ve avoided footnotes up till now because the HTML …
: Burn it Down As the year comes to an end it would be easy to look back and see all of the things that didn’t work. Mistakes were made, endeavors failed, and it was …
: Desktop Setup For a Sysadmin My Mac is a finely tuned machine. I have been using a Mac for Unix systems administration work since 2006, starting with a PowerMac G4, and have …
: Zen, Art, and Tools I’ve been a Mac user since returning to the states in 2003, but I’ve been a Unix user for a few years longer. Originally, I was drawn to the Mac …
: Go2 and Paragraphs Are Now Open Source I see no reason to keep the code for Go2 and Paragraphs to myself. I have no plans to continue developing them, have received no requests for support, …
: Avoiding Complexity I’ve noticed a tendency in my Mac setup to veer towards higher levels of complexity. In truth, I’d rather not use anything outside of the Apple …
: Quicksilver Quicksilver will change the way you use your computer. That is not a claim to make lightly, but after using Quicksilver on my Mac for the past eight …
: Exciting Night My wife and I were sitting at the dinner table chatting, winding down for the night, when I saw a pair of headlights shining in our back window. The …
: Technical Education in K-12 Our small school is nearing the end of the four-year cycle for a one-to-one program that provides all students in grades six through twelve with a …
: For The Public Good I just finished another article for OStatic where I imagine what web services would be good candidates for public, non-profit organizations. The two …
: A Daring Adventure or, A Good Life I’ve been floundering. I’ll go ahead and call it an early “midlife crisis”. For the past few years I have been drastically thrashing …
: Personal Information Architecture For my computer to be useful to me I need to be able to quickly save information, and then easily retrieve it later. Saving and retrieving information …
: Farmdog Closed Update: July 30, 2013 - Farmdog is not closed, but I am rethinking everything. Paragraphs will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future. …
: Where We Stand In the online help for Paragraphs, I have a rather odd statement: Farmdog is made of dreams. That comes from the heart. My company, Farmdog LLC, is …
: The Hardware Racket Every now and then something just gets to me, and for the past few weeks, that something has been the process of purchasing enterprise hardware. …
: Mozilla Turns 15 Mozilla has been one of my favorite open source projects since I first learned of them back in 2002. I remember downloading the Mozilla browser, and …
: Paragraphs In the back of my mind, I always knew that the name “Scout” made no sense. I like the name, I like the bit of a kick the “Sc” at the start of it …
: Scout Beta 2 So, quite a bit has changed in the past week or so. I got a lot of great feedback from a few beta testers, and stomped out a few bugs. A bigger deal …
: Updates on Farmdog, Scout, and Go2 Last week I sent in the certificate of organization to recreate Farmdog as an LLC in the state of Iowa. I have the domain name, twitter account, and a …
: More Scout Tips Eventually I’m going to need to compile this into a proper help doc, but for now, documenting Scout with Scout will do. Scout handles pages just a …
: Beta Testing Scout Well, as much as I’d love to procrastinate for the rest of eternity, the time has come for Scout to take it’s first baby steps out of it’s private …
: Real Music My grandparents house was outside of town, at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by woods. Papa kept his guitar in a black case under his bed, …
: Electrogent's 50 Rules One of my favorite things about the Internet is finding a little treasure trove of writing and style that I previously did not know existed. …
: Details Thought of the week: I don’t like this “top ten” business. It’s the bottom ten that I like. I think you’ve got to go for the little things, the …
: Meta You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. I’ve been writing on this site for six years now, but with little direction or topic. I’ve gotten …
: Cutting Corners After reading the MacSparky piece on craftsmanship, I’m reminded of how I like to look at my career as a systems administrator. I find that there are …
: Misunderstanding NSString So, while I was debugging the first post using Scout, I found an oddity in NSString. I was building the links between the posts using …
: Scout and FTP Building a desktop application that manages creating your site is great, but only publishing to a local folder is for the birds. After only a few …
: Footnotes and Other Scripts I’d like a really simple way to insert footnotes in the text. However, I’m not sure how much of that I can do with the Markdown parser that I have …
: Dogfood I would like to introduce you to Scout, my desktop, baked blogging engine. I’d like to, but Scout is not quite ready yet, so I’m keeping him under …
: A World of Things It is very easy when living in the technology field to ignore the actual physical space we occupy. Skills once thought essential are slowly being …
: 13 Virtues for 2013 Instead of looking back, I like to look forward. As a guide on how I’d like to live the next year of my life, here are Benjamin Franklin’s famous 13 …
: No More Guns I’m angry. You should be too. On December 14th, a young man shot his way into a locked elementary school in a small town in Connecticut and murdered …
: On Culture You never need to prove to anyone who you are. You simple are who you are. Claiming that someone else is faking their interest in a topic is …
: Quiet Time The office is empty this morning. I just closed iTunes, and I am enjoying listening to my own thoughts. No music, no talking, no background, just …
: Energy Saver Preferences My MacBook at work sits on my desk all day and all night. When I sit down to work on it, I expect it to be ready for me, and ready to ask how high …
: Forgotten and Beloved I was given a clean slate of a Mac to work with this past Monday, so I gave some thought to which apps I wanted to use. Looking back at some of my …
: Reinventing The Wheel Or, Redesigning the Tablet Computer This is an old paper I wrote in college in the Spring of 2006. I wrote this before the iPad, iPhone, or iOS was …
: ArcDown - My First Open Source Project Part of a Farmdog project I’m working on needs nice syntax highlighting for markdown. After searching around for a bit I found Ali Rantakari’s PEG …
: The Computer User I Want To Be Learning about computers can be a dangerous thing. Breaking though the veneer of graphical interfaces reveals inefficiencies and inaccurate metaphors. …
: Make it Matter You do what you do because it matters. At HP we don’t just believe in the power of technology, we believe in the power of people, when technology …
: New Mac Essentials - MacVim Investing time learning a text editor is a serious commitment. Over time, you find yourself reaching for the editor’s built-in shortcut keys …
: Mountain Lion Reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was released today, accompanied by a handful of reviews by the best tech sites. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica …
: The end of do-it-yourself - TechHive Beta Blog Link It makes sense that you’d need a special tool or kit to replace a cracked screen, but why should I have to send away my laptop in order to …
: Should All Software Be Free Introduction We live in the information age. Digital devices and Internet connected, hand held computers are the prevalent way we communicate. The …
: New Mac Essentials - Quicksilver Introduction Setting up a new Mac can be fun, but time consuming too. As I scan the icons in my dock, I see several that will not be there when I …
: The Winchester Imperative Major Charles Emerson Winchester III was a fictional character on one of my all time favorite shows, M*A*S*H. While he had many memorable scenes, the …
: A New World CocoaHeads changed my life. This afternoon I am killing time in a coffee shop, about to head to work for an appointment with HR. When I get there, …
: Recovering Data From FileVault Full Disk Encryption Disclaimer: If you do not have your recovery key, or if you have lost your passphrase, this post will not help you. Sorry. So, just for kicks, say …
: Go2 1.3 Release Notes Most release notes are so dull. A cut and paste list of code changes, new features, and fixed bugs. Go2 version 1.3 certainly contains it’s share of …
: Uncompromising Others have already said so much about Steve Jobs stepping down as the CEO of Apple that I had serious doubts about adding my voice to the existing …
: Writing Online Every so often I get the inkling to make this site more than what it is. Since 2008 I’ve been writing fairly regularly here about whatever comes to …
: A Glimpse of the Future The Motorola ATRIX 4G is technology released before its time. At first glance, it seems like any other Android phone with impressive technical specs …
: Personal Quality My daughter had an ear infection. A common occurrence in children, so I brought her down to our local doctors office. The doctor took one look at her …
: Text Editing in MacVim The venerable BBEdit recently received a big upgrade, and looks poised to attract users of TextMate, which, by all accounts, has been abandoned by its …
: Mission Control OS X Lion is a big step forward in personal computing, and, over the next few years, we are going to see a lot of our preconceptions about how …
: Keyboard Driven Safari Update Since writing Keyboard Driven Safari I’ve updated my list of extensions that make Safari my browser of choice. Shut Up YouTube5 uTube …
: Letter to Lotus Notes Developers I have some issues with the design of Lotus Notes. I’m a relatively new user, I started using Notes in 2006, and at the time we were using 6.5 on …
: Stereotypically Apple makes great products, and Brooks Brothers makes great clothes, but neither make the man. It is pure foolishness to judge another person at all, …
: Found On The Path I woke this morning at 5:20, got dressed, and went outside for my morningworkout. Today’s weather was beautiful, perfect temperature, and the smell …
: The Experiment The Experiment Ideas, Stress, and Time I remember someone saying once that ideas were worthless, and onlyimplementation mattered. I disagree. Ideas …
: Supersite Daring Fireball linked to Paul Thurrott today, citing Paul’s comment that Lion is simply an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary update. John says: …
: Two Views Of The Cloud A few years ago, there was a distinction between the “world wide web” and the Internet. The distinction has decreased, but in the wake of Apple’s …
: On TermKit - Steven Wittens I’ve been administering Unix machines for many years now, and frankly, it kinda sucks. It makes me wonder, when sitting in front of a crisp, 2.3 …
: Solving The Right HA Problem High Availability, HA for short, refers to an applications ability to continue operating after a hardware failure. HA comes in many different shapes …
: Wallpaper Desktop wallpaper is a cheap trick. It’s only purpose is to make your computer screen look pretty, but I have yet to come across a photo or a work of …
: Introversion Intuition Thinking Judgment INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion “Does it work?” to everythingfrom their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. I first …
: Mandatory My workplace is adopting Agile methodologies for our development and client relations departments. As part of the adoption, it was decided that all of …
: Imperfect Dock Brent Simmons recently wrote about his dislike of the iCal interface in the latest developer preview of OS X 10.7. In his article, he says how the …
: Jekyll Bookmarklet I have a handful of Automator scripts I’ve created to make maintaining this site with Jekyll just a little easier. The first script let’s me highlight …
: Principle of Least Software Use only the software that you need. No more, no less. Choose one application for each task, and become an expert on that application. I have two …
: Keyboards and Wheels I have one wish for the next major iOS release: full keyboard support. The iPad works with the bluetooth keyboard, and the original iPad came with a …
: Quicksilver and Go2 Go2 1.2 is in review, and when it is released it will bring a new feature that I’m hoping will speed up access to bookmarks considerably: Spotlight …
: Fragility of Free - The Brooks Review When you pay for software/services upfront you know how much it is going to cost right away. via: Fragility of Free — The Brooks Review Great post …
: Back in Black There used to be a line between having a Mac, and owning a Mac, and that line was drawn with Quicksilver. Quicksilver changed the way I thought about …
: Dazzle Them With Science It’s not really a science, it’s more of an art. If you are careful, and attentive, you can see when someone starts working this particular art form. …
: Please Give The devastation from weather related disasters in the past few years has been overwhelming. Japan was ready, as ready as you can be for a disaster …
: Apotheker Seeks to Save HPs Lost Soul With Software Growth - Businessweek Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Apotheker …
: Anatomy of a Crushing We charged money for a good or service I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole …
: Our Lean Startup There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium …
: The end of the IT department 37 Signals comments on a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years. Data centers and IT departments are not the core competency of most businesses, …
: Handmade I love these videos from Field Notes. Play Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
: Be Great If you take a moment to look around the room you are in now, what do you see?Are you surrounded by things that matter, and were built by people who …
: Reading and Readability Readability is a subscription based service that allows you to read the text off of websites in a beautiful, clean, consistent interface. Since I …
: RSS Triage Like many who are interested enough in the tech industry to attempt to stay up to date on current happenings, I’ve been struggling with an ever …
: Keyboard Driven Safari A friend was explaining his preference for Google’s Chrome browser the other day, and was using 1Password as an example of why he felt that Chrome …
: Friendly Conversation for the Drive It’s snowing again, which means my normal 40-minute commute will now be closer to an hour. I’m actually a bit excited by the prospect of a long drive; …
: Past Blast I’ve loved reading some of the “Past Blast” articles that have beenlinked about in Twitter, so here is my contribution. Two from Me On Graduation Day, …
: Go2 and the Mac App Store Yesterday, Go2 was one of approximately 1000 applications available on launch day of the Mac App Store. It’s been a nerve wracking experience, but …
: Delicious Bookmarks Word leaked out yesterday that Yahoo has it’s popular Delicious bookmarking service on the chopping block. I don’t personally have an account, not …
: PC Apps Interesting choice of wording in Apple’s most recent press release. The intent of the release is to announce the availability of the Mac App Store on …
: The Proper Place of Technology In Our Lives It’s now the middle of December, which signals the end of my first semester ofgrad school. I took two classes, both focused on HCI: cognitive …
: Weekend With Android I should have known better… I do know better, but it was on sale, and it was Black Friday, and I bought an Android phone. I purchased the HTC Desire, …
: Android Marketplace Inconsistencies Living out in the farmland of Iowa where we do, there’s really only one carrier who provides decent service, US Cellular. US Cellular has a great …
: Emotions and Machines I’ve been using different forms of computer “chat” for over ten years now, starting with operator-to-operator communications over a 9600baud satcom …
: Interaction Last night I did my civic duty by casting my vote at the local community center. I walked down since it was not far from my house, and enjoyed the …
: Clean and Clutter Free I like to keep both my desk and my computer desktop clean and clutter free. I’ve found that when there is less visual noise, I’m able to better …
: An Idea About Money So, last night, when I should have been sleeping, I had an idea. What if, instead of going to a bank to get a loan, you could ask a few of your …
: The Smell of Salt A long, long time ago, what seems like a different life now, I was a Sailor.Towards the end of my teenage years, I came to a point where I knew I had …
: Add a User - Send an Email I was asked on Twitter the other day why I disliked IBM’s enterprise software. This, in addition to my previous TWS rant, is my answer to that …
: Linux Hidden ARP To enable an interface on a web server to be part of an IBM load balanced cluster, we need to be able to share an ip address between multiple …
: Adamo - Apple Pushes the Industry Forward I almost feel sorry for the other hardware manufacturers. No matter what they do, no matter what they come out with, they seem to be forever following …
: A Work in Progress A few days ago I decided that I was not going to use anyone else’s theme on my site. It happened after I stumbled across another site using the exact …
: AutoYast I wrote this last year and never posted it. I’m glad I found it and can post it now. One of the projects I’ve been working on in the past week has …
: Account Pruning I’m a geek. Understanding that little fact puts me a little closer to being in touch with myself, and understanding that I’ve got a habit of trying …
: Agility To create the perfect datacenter, what would you recommend? For me, the perfect datacenter would be based on agility. We would be able to add new …
: 9/11 I slept. The world changed all around me, and I slept. My wife woke me up in a shaking, excited voice, “Jon, get up! Terroristsattacked the World …