Dev With Imagination

I used to use Brett Terpstra’s Slogger for logging various activities in to Day One. Probably around 6 months ago I stopped using Day One, just out of lazyness, but now I am trying to write down my thoughts and experiences more. Part of this is driven just by my poor memory.

Back to Slogger. Over the last 6 months this should have been silently running every evening, updating Day One with information in the background, but the scheduled task has been failing. Because I was not actively using Day One over this period I never noticed. This possibly stopped working around the upgrade to Mavericks, or it could have been when I started toying with Ruby development. Either way it is screwed. And the error that was appearing in the console was less than helpful.

28/01/2014 21:31:29.437 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[275]: (com.brettterpstra.Slogger[6346]) Exited with code: 1

All the searches I did on this just resulted in no response forum posts, or it magically working on its own again. I needed to find a solution.

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I’ve started using Hazel to automate some repetitive tasks, like filing PDF bills and financial documents that I download. Hazel is a fantastic timesaver of a tool that I should have bought a long time ago. Once the rules are set up correctly I don’t need to worry about dealing with things in my Downloads folder, Hazel does that for me! One of the first things I set up was a rule to periodically clean out that pesky iPod Photo Cache that was causing my iPhoto library to unnessecarily grow!

I thought I was in luck when all the bills that I receive electronically were properly searchable, and Hazel’s contents filter was able to match all the information I needed. Unfortunately my bank had to be the awkward one.

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PRAGMATIC

Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology. Exploring the real world trade offs we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

After hearing many positive reviews about this show, I thought I would give it a listen. I had meant to download the first episode in order to try it, but ended up getting the latest episode at the time by accident: episode 6 (Design Reviews in Name Only). The two hosts have backgrounds in different industries (one software, one electrical engineering) which gives a good mix of perspectives. I came away from listening to this episode with a better idea of how to manage reviews more effectively, even though the discussion mostly focused on design reviews in the electrical engineering world. A different perspective often leads to a clearer vision of how a process can be improved.

I just started listening to the actual first episode today (Faraday’s Cage), and it is fascinating. Completely outside the area of information I would look for, but it goes in depth to how the design of the iPhone has changed over time and how it has effected the radio/antenna performance through the generations.

I have queued up the rest of the episodes, it is a must listen if you have a technically curious mind.

H/T Marco Arment

I was recently fixing my car audio setup, as my previous aux lead was now only working in one channel. This cable is a bit of a pain to replace as it is wired in to the back of the head unit (it is a Renault), so I was looking for an alternative to a single wire that would no doubt break again.

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I was certain that I was going to buy a 32GB iPhone 5s after seeing how much space free I still had on my 16GB iPhone 4, but then I got thinking: how much of the stuff I have on this phone really needs to be on the device and not just accessible somehow?

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