mostly nonsense
After my previous post I got curious as to the total number of words I’ve written in Day One so far. A quick Google search didn’t turn up any obvious solutions, so here’s a short PHP script that gives you a total. Just pass it a path to your .dayone journal file at the command line like so php count.php /path/to/journal.dayone
Back in October I wrote a post about how I’ve adopted a routine of journaling what I’m currently working on throughout the day in addition to a final recap of the whole day each night before bed. My one year anniversary of starting my journal passed back in February with little fanfare. But looking at it now, I’ve logged 626 entries and have a streak of 428 days in a row. As far as total word count, I’m guessing I’ve written somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 words. That’s a whole book! Reflecting on that today has caused me to look …
Back in 2008, when I worked for Yahoo!, I had the good fortune of chatting with Tom Coates a few times about the now defunct Fire Eagle location brokerage service. Fire Eagle was my absolute favorite product to come out of Yahoo! during my time there. I’ve always been fascinated by real-time location data and sad that Fire Eagle’s intersection of privacy and ease of use never caught on. Anyway, fast-forward to last Summer, I was bummed that although so much of my life is documented through photos, tweets, and journal entries, my location data was missing. A few products …
In case you missed it, I’ve been working on a new Mac app for the past month or so. I spent the last few days polishing things and getting it into an MVP state – not quite as full featured as I’d like, but complete enough that I felt comfortable sharing with the world. So, yesterday evening I launched Minion. What is Minion? It’s a simple concept. Minion watches for events to happen on your Mac and then notifies you when they occur. Right now, those notifications go to your email or your phone via SMS or the Minion iOS …
Yesterday, Daniel Jalkut tweeted The only things better than shipping an app are the thankless months of hard work that go into making it halfway presentable. Yep, it’s fun. — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) April 4, 2014 That’s an apt way of describing the strange mix of joy and awe programmers feel when, after hours, days, maybe even weeks or months of work, the computer does what you tell it to do. I’ve been working on my new app, Minion, for the last four weeks. And, today, I finally had my first successful end-to-end test run of the app. Everything on …
A few weeks ago, I started working on a new Mac app called Minion. It’s nothing too big or complicated – just a quick project that I hope will be useful to Mac power users. My goal was to build the app and the accompanying web service in under six weeks. With two weeks until my self-imposed deadline, I’m well on my way to completing it. The app is built. Now, it’s just a matter of finishing the web service and the marketing website. One thing that’s giving me pause, however, is how to price the app. The web service, …
Never underestimate how crazy busy your life will become when you have kids. Our first son, born this past New Year’s Eve, hit us like a ton of bricks. Taking care of him, on top of a day job, has meant my side business has taken a backseat at times. Nonetheless, since he’s been born I’ve managed to launch a brand new design of our website, release a major upgrade to VirtualHostX, build a new Mac app (coming soon), and I’m in the process of writing my second book. None of that would have happened if I had spent much …
I had a conversation yesterday with two friends. Neither one is technical at a developer level, but both are long-time Mac and iPhone users. They know their way around the platform. My first friend, we’ll call him Ted, said he was having trouble with his iPhone. His photos and videos had grown to take up nearly 10GB of storage space. And with a only a 16GB iPhone, his phone was very nearly out of room. He wanted to know how to backup his photos off his device but still be able to access them when needed. He assumed there was …
We have a three month old kid. That means we take a lot of photos. I’ve done the math, and in the last three months we’ve taken 1,202 photos of him. As I’ll write about in my upcoming book on Dropbox photography, all of those photos are stored and sorted in a shared Dropbox folder that both my wife and I have access to. For other family members and friends, we share the best of those photos via a shared iOS Photostream. I’m really a big fan of this feature. With just a few taps I can share as many …