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March 2020

So, uh, I think Catalina 10.15.4 Broke SSH?

Uncategorized Mar 31, 2020

I was completely at my wit’s end and feeling like I had lost my mind until about a half hour ago. And I don’t know what difference connecting via a hostname versus an IP address would make when specifically using a non-standard port above a certain threshold. I’m not even going to go into it. I don’t want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina. I just hope I’ve stuffed this post with enough keywords so that anyone else searching on Google might come across the answer.

A Quick Shell Script to Keep a LAN File Server Mounted All the Time

Uncategorized Mar 25, 2020

Now that we’re all stuck at home practicing social distancing, my children’s mood depends on their favorite TV shows and movies always being available during their iPad free time. And my sanity depends on not hearing the awful clicking noise of the external drive our video library is stored on while I’m working at my desk. Moving it to a networked file server running off a Raspberry Pi was simple enough and solved the problem. But after trying a few 3rd party apps to keep the network share always mounted, here’s the simple shell script I wrote instead.

Spotish for macOS

Uncategorized Mar 25, 2020

I know I keep referring to this tweet of mine from last year… One day I will get around to either releasing or open sourcing the dozen or so bespoke, one-off Mac apps I’ve built just for myself. Today is not that day. The reason for that is because I really do have a backlog of random, one-off Mac apps…

Three Things Today

Uncategorized Mar 20, 2020

Every task management app has a feature that will let you postpone, delay, or snooze a task. You can tell them to push a todo item out by a day or a week, etc. But I like to think Three Things is smarter than that. It’s designed to be flexible and forgiving – pragmatic and realistic. When you defer a task, it won’t accidentally reschedule it for a day that’s already overflowing with commitments. It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.

It fits my brain. Maybe it’ll fit yours, too.

The Stack View is a Liar

Favorites, Uncategorized Mar 16, 2020

…Firing up Xcode’s wonderful view debugger, however, completely blew my mind and shattered any remaining self-confidence I had as an app developer. And then nearly an hour later I’m really questioning everything I thought I knew about ones and zeroes until a google search leads me to this page. And, sure enough, my bug is spelled out right there.

DefaultApp

Uncategorized Mar 14, 2020

DefaultApp is an open source starting point – a template. I maintained it in Objective-C for over a decade before finally porting it to Swift in 2018. Anytime I start a new app – big or small, whether or not it’s something I plan on releasing publicly or if it’s just a small prototype or utility app I’m building for myself – I start with this project.

With DefaultApp I can go from initial idea to writing actual code in thirty seconds.

That said, I would’t use this as the basis for a billion dollar corporation’s enterprise app. Or with a team of “100 engineers” “solving hard problems”. But if you’re a one-person development shop or a team of just two or three engineers building a typical macOS shoebox or document based app? Please take a look.

Followup: Comparing my Current B2 Storage Costs against Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Uncategorized Mar 07, 2020

This is a quick followup to my post from this week about backing up my family’s photos and home videos with Google Photos and B2. A reader asked why I use B2 over Amazon’s cheaper S3 Glacier alternative. I started to reply directly, but then like everything I write, it kept growing. And then I thought my answer might be interesting to others as well. So, here you go…

My Family’s Photo and Video Library Backup Strategy in 2020 – Plus a Fun Anecdote I’ve Never Told Before

Favorites, Uncategorized Mar 06, 2020

Two of the topics I’ve written about the most on this blog are backing up your data and photography – not professional, artsy photography, but more in the sense of your family’s photo and home video library. I’m a huge nerd for these topics. Part of the reason for that is my own obsessive personality traits, but also because of my affinity for nostalgia and history. My life, to a certain degree, is documented through the literal data I’ve created over the years. And the lives of the people I love are likewise documented through the digital archives I keep. So when those two topics intersect, holy cow do I ever proudly fly my geek flag.