Last week at work I was working on a fairly large refactor of our front-end. Large pieces of code were being moved around and others re-written to be cleaner and more understandable. Throughout this process, I was leaving myself todo's so that I'd remember to fix something later. Problem is, I would rarely ever go back to them. That was until someone on my team shared some bash functions they had written to make following up on those todo's much easier
I'm using Alfred a lot less these days. Many of my workflows have been easier to build in Keyboard Maestro. The remaining few that are left in Alfred are ones that I heavily depend on, one of which is accessing my Server Favorites in OS X.
Up until OS X …
I was generally happy with how I was using Contacts.app with TextExpander to create snippets for my emails, phone numbers and addresses. However, as I eventually realized, I have to have Contacts.app running for it to work. When AppleScript and JavaScript talk to applications in OS X, they have to be running. That isn't the case for C and Objective-C libraries, so I decided to see how hard it was to use the Objective-C bindings for Javascript.
As it turns out, adding critical css wasn't trivial, but didn't take as much effort as I had originally thought. My site's layout doesn't contain that much styling, and so I simply added all of my CSS as an inline style tag. The tricky part, was getting Jinja to play …
While reading through my RSS feeds the other night, I came across this article from One Tap Less about what he did to improve load times on his site. My first thought was, "I use a static site, I don't need to worry about this" and dismissed it. Then I figured, why not just try out my site on Google's PageSpeed Insights. Turns out, I had some work to do.
It's always a good idea to keep backups of data you can't replace, including email. For the last few years, I've had a script that automatically backs up my Gmail account. Since switching to Fastmail, I figured I should continue doing the same thing. It turned out, it was pretty easy to set up another account.
Changing your email or phone number isn't fun. You have to tell everyone, update all of your online accounts, and make sure your TextExpanders are up-to-date with the right information. One of the places I will always update is my contact information in Contacts.app, so why not just use that as the source of truth for TextExpander snippets?
My adventure with Mac Javascript Automation continues. Things still aren't easy and the documentation is poor, but I'm finding that it's still easier to write automation scripts in Javascript than it ever was with Applescript.
I frequently work in ssh sessions and have found terminal multiplexers like tmux to be invaluable. The problem I was constantly facing was having to re-attach or create a new session each time I would ssh into a machine. Sometimes I would accidentally create a new session when one already existed and would then have to find where I had been working previously.
I ride with a Garmin 810 with a cadence/speed sensor1. I wanted to compare the Garmin to the Apple Watch for a bike ride.