tyler.io

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.

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.

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 … Read more

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.

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.

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…

I’m a firm believer in the whole mind like water spiel that David Allen preaches through GTD. I jumped on the Gettings Things Done bandwagon around 2004 I think – the first of my two senior years in college. And here we are in 2020, which means I’ve been practicing this methodology (with varying levels … Read more

Remember standing in line at midnight to literally pay $129 for Jaguar? Or in 2007 for the iPhone launch? There could be no more literal embodiment of the Futurama SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY meme than the way I felt at those and many other Apple community events. It was a momentously joyful whirlwind of nerdery and consumerism run amok in truly the best way possible. The Apple of old used to earn our money by creating products we loved. Now it feels like they take our money by locking us into services we have no choice but to use.