Remember not too long ago I had to confess my regular expressions deficiencies to you, the dear reader, regarding an overly verbose regular expression I needlessly crafted, not realizing the greedy nature of the RegEx rendered part of it completely unnecessary?

It happened again.

This time it happened to me with a regular expression that I’ve used many times before. It has to do with my blog posting shortcut(s) and how I handle parsing markdown footnotes in iA Writer documents.

Here’s the regular expression I was using to find footnotes in my iA Writer texts:

\[\^(.+)]

My thinking when I wrote it is that it would find anything starting with [^, followed by one or more of any character, and ending in ]. Which it did, and it usually did it the way I expected it to. But then one day I typed the following paragraph: …

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If you’re a podcaster who records on a Mac, the odds that you’ve heard of and are using software from Rogue Amoeba as part of your recording process are pretty high.

Rogue Amoeba makes some of the greatest Mac apps ever invented. Vic and I are soundboard junkies, and Farrago is an absolutely amazing soundboard. Using Audio Hijack, we can record our mics, the soundboard, and the group call all on individual tracks. And with Loopback installed, the soundboard isn’t just local, it can be heard by everyone on the podcast by combining it with the microphone as the input source to the call.

Loopback is very cool. It allows you to set up virtual devices and use them as inputs or outputs to other programs. I have a Loopback device called “Shure Beta 87a & Farrago” that I use as my input to Skype and FaceTime calls, and that’s what lets me share my soundboard with my podcast co-hosts. …

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You may have observed that my frequency of writing here has slowed a bit, but I’m not dead yet. Vic and I are working on a website for Ronnie’s soon-to-debut podcast. In addition to that, I’ve spent some fairly non-productive time this past week playing with a major upgrade to my iPad life, namely a 2020 12.9” iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.

Coming from a 10.5” 2019 iPad Air, this iPad Pro seemed massive at first, and I really worried that I’d made a mistake. But now I know I didn’t. I do a lot of work on my iPad, and I love the screen real estate.

I also use my iPad as a tablet much of the time, if not most of the time, and while the 12.9” model is a little more unwieldy for that, it’s fine. …

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