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Time to Cleanup My TextExpander Snippets

I ran across a terrific blog post by Thomas Borowski discussing his TextExpander snippet for Pelican blog posts. I have my own snippet for such purposes, but love his solution for Slug creation.

TextExpander is one of those small pieces of software I use every single day and can’t imaging doing without. The premise is simple, a short bit of text expands and turns into a large amount of text. For example, I use dates a lot in my day job, so I have several simple snippets that dump dates in the right format. Number one on the list is ,ds which expands into 2014-03-22.

Sublime Text 2

I wanted to see what all the buzz is about, so I downloaded the evaluation of Sublime Text 2, and bought a copy a few minutes later. What a terrific editor. It’s clean, easy to work with large projects, intuitive, and powerful.

My favorite part so far, and keep in mind I’ve only been using it for a few hours, is the Find and Replace with regular expressions. Many editors will do this, but this is the first editor where I’ve very easily been able to find a pattern, select all the locations at once, and make a chance in all the locations with ease.

iPhone Speed Vid

Very cool video showing speed tests of all iPhones side by side.

Enjoy!

Second Life's Strang Second Life | The Verge

alter-text

The Verge has a good article about Second Life, but the interesting part is the posts layout. The post has some nice features, like eye catching pull outs and rotating images, all floating on a retro background. Well done.

When mainstream media outlets touched down in Second Life seven years ago they tended to focus on the strangeness of it all. People were having sex through a game and dressing up as foxes and kittens. The reality, says Tom Boellstorff, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is more prosaic: “Humans already live many different kinds of life: online is just one more of those kinds of lives.”
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The Galaxy Note II After a Week or So

The thing is huge! I know I’ve said that a dozen times already, but it is ridiculously large. Its the same (almost) screen size as my kindle touch. For someone without an iPad, the extra screen real estate might be nice, but as a phone, it is just way too big.

There are a couple of features that I really do like. For example, a setting will mute the phone if it is sitting face down on the desk. I don’t know where the setting is, I was hoping to find it and include as part of the post, but I can’t find it. I know about it because a popup shortly after I started using the phone told me about the feature and offered to activate it.

The Galaxy Note II by Samsung

I got an evaluation phone at work to fiddle with for 30 days. I’ve been a long time apple iPhone fan, and still am, but I’ve been hearing more and more good things about Android and Android phones that I figured it was time to check them out.

My first reaction when they handed me the box was, “Damn! This thing is huge!”

1Password yeah! I wasn’t smart enough to look for a 1Password android version first thing. It took me a couple of hours and several typed passwords before I wised up and searched. 1Password syncs with my dropbox password list just like on the iPhone.

DIY Weekend

I did a bit of DIY this weekend. I love my car, but also really wanted bluetooth audio with the stereo. The factory Toyota options are a bit on the pricey side, so I screwed up some courage, picked a cool new stereo off of Crutchfield, read many websites, and watched many sample videos, then installed the new stereo.

Taking apart the dash turned out to be pretty darn easy, and not all that frightening. It’s all snapped together, with two screws holding the base pieces. To be honest, I wouldn’t have accomplished this part with the instructions alone. Watching a couple of video’s on youtube showing how the dash comes apart to access the built in stereo really helped.

A Simplenote Affair « Macdrifter: “WriteRoom Dropbox sync is amazingly fast. It’s faster than Simplenote with a large collection of notes. I use WriteRoom to quickly add a note. The launch and refresh time beat Simplenote by a large margin. The only thing I don’t like is the enormous margin in landscape.”

I’ve settled on Byword on my iPad for writing, and Elements for search if I can’t find what I’m looking for by the title.

Podcasts

I am so behind on podcasts. At present…after a day of listening to podcasts, I have 8.2 days of content left to listen to. And it’s good stuff! I’m a huge fan of the TWIT network podcasts. I remember most of these guys from the old Tech TV days, and enjoyed Leo’s radio show in L.A.

The ‘I Should Be Writing’ podcast is one of my favorite writers/authors podcast. Of course NPR’s Books cast is great, but there’s something very engaging about Mur’s casts. She also has some outstanding interviews.