Things I Have Written
Scott Hanselman is one of the good people in tech, and his YouTube channel is full of great tech topics explained in his clear, instructive fashion. While watching one of his git videos, I noticed his nice Windows terminal prompts that even indicate git status for him when he’s in a repo directory. You can see his terminal setup in his blog post How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh.
Obviously the first thing I did upon seeing this was pause the video and go in search of a way to make my Mac terminal do that crazy prompt thing. As I discovered, it’s easy if you use Zsh, which I already do.
Note: All this below assumes you’re already using Zsh as your shell.
You can see for yourself whether you’re using Bash or Zsh with the echo $SHELL command. You’ll …
You may know that Homebridge is an outstanding piece of software that lets you tie many smart home devices that don’t have native HomeKit support into your HomeKit ecosystem, but I submit to you that one of Homebridge’s biggest benefits besides that is its logging.
Most smart home devices are just kind of there and do their thing, but you have no insight into historical activity, aside from HomeKit secure video cameras which keep recordings around for some period of time depending on your available iCloud space. Homebridge changes that.
Homebridge logs the activity of any devices connected to it. If a light goes on, it gets logged. If someone connects to the smart doorbell camera and takes a peek, that gets logged. It’s wonderful. You can set up your Homebridge Config UI X web view to show the more recent entries in your log file, which is handy for quick understanding of recent activity if you’re restarting the service or adding or updating plugins. …
Sometimes Shortcuts makes me scratch my head in bewilderment at how convoluted dealing with different data types can be. If you ever pull in an RSS feed to parse, you’ll know what I mean.
I’m writing a shortcut for Ronnie Lutes to easily publish episodes of The Liner Project. Why he needs a shortcut to do this is another topic, but primarily it’s because we’re hosting his site in a static site generated by Hugo. In order for him to get an episode added, uploaded, and scheduled for publication without having to deal with an annoying checklist of tasks that all have to be done in exactly the right way each time, an automation is perfect.
In order to present as few information-gathering dialogs and text boxes to Ronnie as possible, the shortcut tries to figure out everything it needs to about the episode being published, including things like season and episode number. A lot …
It’s amazing the caliber of people who just randomly pop into your Twitter life sometimes. I posted about the lack of text diff tools on iOS a couple days ago, and the very next day Jacob Sam-La Rose very kindly gave me a tip that took me in a direction I didn’t expect: JavaScript and web views.
It turns out that Jacob is the author of a very handy Diff action for Drafts that uses this very trick to let people compare a draft in current form to a previously saved version. It’s really cool use of a web preview and it’s something I would have used many times in Drafts had I realized it existed.
Drafts Diff action by Jacob Sam-La Rose
As Jacob mentioned to me, the JavaScript Diff Algorithm written by John Resig is easily applied to any JavaScript parser such as Scriptable, which also allows for easy file selection for choosing two …
When I started the Hugo-based incarnation of this website, I wrote all posts for the site in iA Writer. It’s a very clean and focused Markdown text editor suited well for blogging with Hugo or other platforms that take Markdown and convert it to HTML.
Then I accidentally discovered a secret about Ulysses.
When you export a sheet to Markdown text from Ulysses, you get a text file of plain text with all your Markdown formatting. But when you attach images to that same sheet and export it as Markdown, it gives you a zip file with your Markdown document and all attached images. Furthermore, if you put the images in the text of the document, Ulysses lets you add image metadata which it then puts into the Markdown image tags that it creates.
Ulysses image attachments and metadata
The above image shows what it looks like when I attach an image to the sheet (attachment seen in the right attachments pane) and drag it into the document and …
Based on my luck at finding a good text diff tool on iOS, doing text diff must be the most difficult task in the universe. Is that was diff stands for? Difficult?1
There once was an amazing iPad app called Kaleidoscope that was beautiful and did an outstanding job of comparing text files, but its makers stopped updating it long ago and now it isn’t even on the App Store anymore.
Kaleidoscope for iPad was both powerful and beautiful.
Clearly this means I’m finally going to have to learn how to write iOS apps like I’ve been saying I was going to since 2008 and make my own text diff app.
This could cost me a few years of life I don’t have.
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Sorry. That’s a very difficult joke. ↩︎
iOS 14 beta is remarkably stable and performant, but running betas always carries a risk that a subsequent beta version will break something important to you. iOS 14 dev beta 2 (and public beta 1) broke some fundamental actions in Shortcuts – Split Text, Combine Text, and Change Case.
Because I have several shortcuts that do a lot of text parsing, not least of which are my blog post and podcast episode publishing shortcuts and helper shortcuts, I noticed this immediately. It didn’t take much troubleshooting and testing to realize that these three actions now return nothing regardless of input. They’re just completely broken.
The good news is (also thanks to changes made to Shortcuts for iOS 14) it’s very easy to create a folder for iOS 14 beta specific versions of your shortcuts, make copies to that folder, and then fix them. Folder …
My friend and former podcast cohost Ronnie Lutes has launched a brand new, super fun podcast called The Liner Project that mixes music, history, and Ronnie’s enjoyable knowledge and friendly personality.
I’m alive! https://t.co/NFnmWx9xM8
— The Liner Project Podcast (@TheLinerProject) July 16, 2020
I can’t wait to hear more of what Ronnie has in store for his listeners!
I do a lot of work on my iPad and I don’t normally advocate diving into iOS betas in general anyway. And even though my iPhone isn’t as critical to me now as it was before I really got into modern iPads, I still need it to last through the day and generally be stable. So you might think I decided to avoid the iOS and iPadOS 14 betas like the plague.
Narrator: He did not avoid the iOS and iPadOS 14 betas like the plague.
The 14’s: iPadOS and iOS
The funny thing is that while Apple didn’t mention performance and stability at all during the WWDC 2020 keynote, iOS and iPadOS 14 are quite performant and very stable, remarkably so for any beta let alone the first beta. It’s about as far from last year’s iOS 13 beta experience as you …
I’ve been doing a lot of website testing lately as Vic and I work together on a podcast theme for Hugo. Part of website testing involves using the element inspectors and developer tools available in most (all?) desktop browsers. Sadly (I thought) I couldn’t do this in the same way on iPadOS, which I spend a huge percentage of my time working in.
I was wrong.
Inspect Browser is one of those third-party iOS apps that proves that while Apple may not care much about enabling people to get real work done on their “Pro” devices, the people out there doing the work do care.
The developer of Inspect Browser claims on the website that their app provides desktop-class web development tools and features, and they are not kidding.
JavaScript console, HTML and CSS element inspectors, device previews for responsive design work, network inspector – it’s all there. …