The backup and sync saga never ends! Now on my desktop I have been unable to open the Insync UI or apparently get it to sync at all. I killed it and run it by console to see if there was any output, and it fails before it starts syncing anything with an error: GDAuthError: Access token refresher stopped. Only two search results appear for “GDAuthError Insync”. One from a year ago has no solution, but someone commented recently that it happened to them, so perhaps there was a regression.
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I’m starting to figure out my photography workflow on Arch Linux. Previously I used Adobe Lightroom for organization but still did almost all editing in Photoshop. I never quite figured out an editing workflow I was happy with in Lightroom. But now I get to circumvent that step and figure it out on Linux. :-)
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I sat down this week to start writing a small Python application to aggregate my data and generate a status page like the AWS Service Health Dashboard but with my goal completion instead. This is largely supposed to motivate me to find ways to spend more time doing deep work, but more automatically planned than my past efforts. Well, as I feared, it has taken a few days to lay the groundwork. The last piece involved more trial and error than I would have liked due to lacking documentation, but perhaps someone can make use of this configuration.
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I almost pried myself from reading news story after story this morning thanks to Google Now’s suggestions and the endless shenanigans of the current administration. Then I clicked one more, a SitePoint article “The Best Markdown Editors for Mac“. I skimmed it, mostly looking to see if MacDown was mentioned. It was not, but another caught my eye, and I was converted to Typora before I even tried it. The editor itself is the live preview!
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Over the past few months of using Anki consistently, I have been trying to streamline my process of adding and organizing cards, as well as making them somewhat pretty. It has not been easy!
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I spent some time today reading Vim documentation and a handful of blog posts. I learned the extreme basics of Vim many years ago, but I have not graduated much past cut-paste and search-replace until this year. In my mission to memorize more things I never bothered to for lack …
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This is simply to register my conversion from a tabs-to-spaces guy to a tabs guy, thanks largely to finding Nick Gravgaard’s elastic tabstops page, which also turned me on to Input, a “a proportional programming font”.
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I spent a bit of today taking photos of creatures in my saltwater tank, and while I had my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens out, I figured I would take a photo of Alan’s eye and then my eye. One thing led to another, and I tried to figure out how to tether my Nikon D800 to my laptop so I could use the screen as a viewfinder, making self eye portraits easier. It was not easy.
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This is just to document that I solved a somewhat innocuous problem with a quick command. I use CloudPull to back up my Google Drive and email, and I think it has been working fine. I have noticed a bunch of errors in my console, though I don’t think …
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I noticed May 11 I could not upload photos to Facebook via the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Facebook plugin I had been using for several years. This was not a surprise, as I have been having intermittent issues with my publisher connections through my recent reformatting and data shuffling process. I thought the worst case would be needing to reauthorize the plugin and perhaps create a new “May 2017” album to continue uploading to. Then I checked Facebook and saw it was much worse. Thousands of photos were missing, and I was not alone.
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I don’t know what came over me the other day, but I looked at the popular apps for macOS Sierra, and I downloaded the game 2048. It looked simple and thus I thought it would be a quick diversion. Oops.
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A few weeks ago, when configuring my server to host my mom’s new business website, I finally looked into Let’s Encrypt and decided to go with it. The service provides an automated way to install and update SSL certificates for HTTPS website hosting. Previously I had been using the free-ish certificates from StartCom.
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To improve the readability of the body text in my posts, I use Markdown as much as possible. When uploading and inserting images using Movable Type’s editor, the result is a jumble of image tags all on one line containing extra information I don’t need. I finally took 10 minutes to fix this, making it output Markdown instead.
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I started using Runkeeper to track my runs in July 2010, and soon after I started paying $19.99 per year to support the service. The additional features for the money were limited, basically boiling down to some extra charts and a live run feature where others can see your run in real time. This wasn’t as cool as it could be, or even as similar features from competitors. I’ve seen friends using a Nike app, I think, where it would post to Facebook at the start of a run, and the phone would read comments and cheers as friends interacted with the post. As far as I know, Runkeeper never did anything like that. And I’m not sure I would have used it anyway.
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Today I received a newsletter from Mapbox that linked to a tutorial for JavaScript based heatmaps. It looks pretty cool, and I wondered how it might look used to plot runs.
I wrote in November about Runkeeper heatmaps and a method to generate images from run data on a computer …
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Two of my roommates let me know Friday the Internet sucked in the kitchen. I knew this used to be the case, and I suspected our metal framed kitchen table of causing issues, but I thought it was solved.
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We’ve had some network issues lately, so I dug out one of the Raspberry Pi Model Bs I got for free from Adafruit with my first couple of orders in September 2013. I then set it up to do network monitoring using Smokeping. Since it takes 10 or 20 seconds to generate the graphs, I switched to a master-slave setup where the graphs could be generated on my web server, but the measurements taken from the Raspberry Pi on my home network.
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Since my first programming book 15 years ago, I remember the convention of using extra spaces to align the equal signs in lines of variable assignments. This has been pretty standard in most of the languages I’ve used over the years. It’s not a big deal, but it’s something I do instinctively. I struggle much more with other spacing and indentation issues, and seeking guidance, I read Python’s PEP8. And I’m not sure I like with what I found.
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A few weeks ago I got addicted to installing SmartThings in my house, and I wrote of my initial woes getting that set up. This is just to say I managed to get mostly everything working as desired, mostly using the default provided “SmartApps”. I am still having consistent problems …
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Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.
Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.
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One third of four multiplied by three is not four, according to the OS X calculator. I know this quirk is due to behind the scenes floating point arithmetic, but it’s interesting Apple hasn’t found a way to cosmetically fix this considering this calculator might be the most commonly used one in the world!
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The Apple OS X Messages app stores files sent and received in a folder with a structure that doesn’t lend well to browsing. If you want to separately back up the family photos and videos received via iMessage on your computer, you can use some ideas here to help.
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While I was looking for some old political test results in my files, I stumbled across a font I made of my handwriting in high school. The filename is charlie2006.ttf, though I seem to remember making the font earlier than that. Perhaps I made two. Making that font using some program I don’t remember took many hours of painstaking curve plotting and adjustments, but I figured there might be an easier way now. And sure enough, Google showed me myscriptfont.com.
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Deciding how to fix health care is hard enough. But when huge problems I didn’t even know were problems come to light, it makes me wonder how we can ever hope to change. Then again, every problem is a solution waiting for someone to take charge.
In this case, drug shortages could be studied and solved through smart tracking software run by a national health organization or on a smaller scale within a hospital system.
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Last week I built a hackintosh, and it took a few days of troubleshooting to get the USB ports working properly so I could access all my data, which is stored on a Drobo 5D. I had to wait several days before I could fully access my data, and now it seems I have to wait yet again.
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As explained in my journal, I built my first hackintosh this week. While it’s functional enough, I hope, I still have some potentially major problems with the USB ports, lowering my confidence about using an external drive to store all my data.
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Since I bought my first (Micron) computer when I was 10, I’ve had a thing for desktops and customizability. I did buy a giant Dell laptop in around 2003, but after that, I always built my own desktops.
Moving across the country in 2012, though, started convincing me to try to make a laptop work as a primary computer. I had to fit everything I owned in a small SUV, and desktops take up a lot of space! MacBook Pros around that time were starting to get sufficiently powerful to use with external monitors and play movies and everything else, so it seemed it was time to chuck the desktop. Also, all the travel I’ve done in the last two years was infinitely more feasible while using a laptop as a primary.
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Today marks my first Chrome app release! Embedder is a Chrome packaged app for generating embed codes for Google Photos and Picasa Web Albums content. It is available in the Chrome Web Store.
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One of my work clients is undergoing a migration from Movable Type to WordPress, and the decision was made to change the URL structure of basically every piece of content. While not ideal, this move can make sense, especially if the old structure wasn’t very future proof and started causing duplicate URL conflicts.
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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
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This week involved not much more than working 56 hours (unusual), though it was at least in the company of my dog, Vera, since her new owner was out of town.
Work has been pretty crazy lately, as two of my large clients are undergoing migrations and redesigns. One of those launched this week, which went pretty smoothly, but just took a lot of time I didn’t have. The other has a lot of work left, but I hopefully finished most of my role and provided enough documentation for others on my team to fill in the gaps. Time will tell, there. As for me, I supposedly have off two days next week in exchange for the overtime this week, and I am already planning to take off the entire following week to get caught up on personal stuff.
I almost forgot to get a new Adderall prescription this week. I am prescribed one 25mg capsule daily, but because amphetamines are Schedule II drugs, it is somewhat inconvenient to actually obtain what I am prescribed. For most drugs, I can get 90 day prescriptions automatically filled by the mail order pharmacy my insurance uses, OptumRx. The two drugs I take, however, aren’t so easy. (Truvada as PrEP is a story for another time.)
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I recently started doing my local development on virtual machines using Vagrant, and PuPHPet. I really should have started this long ago given all the hoops I’ve had to jump through setting up Perl and friends with every new version of OSX. And even though the new OSXes lately barely qualify as a new version and come out more and more frequently, they still break nearly everything about my development environments. So, virtual machines are super convenient.
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Though maybe not hidden to their target audience.
Earlier this year, at the top of Runkeeper’s HTML (actually, after 50 blank lines, for some reason), I found this cute message:
<!doctype html>
<!---
,------. ,--. ,--.,--. ,--.,--. ,--.,------.,------.,------. ,------.,------.
| .--. '| | | || ,'.| || .' /| .---'| .---'| .--. '| .---'| .--. '
| '--'.'| | | || |' ' || . ' | `--, | `--, | '--' || `--, | '--'.'
| |\ \ ' '-' '| | ` || |\ \| `---.| `---.| | --' | `---.| |\ \
`--' '--' `-----' `--' `--'`--' '--'`------'`------'`--' `------'`--' '--'
,--. ,---. ,--. ,--.,--.,------. ,--.,--. ,--. ,----.
| |' .-' | '--' || || .--. '| || ,'.| |' .-./
| |`. `-. | .--. || || '--'.'| || |' ' || | .---.
| |.-' | | | | || || |\ \ | || | ` |' '--' |
`--'`-----' `--' `--'`--'`--' '--'`--'`--' `--' `------'
,---.,---.
,--.,--. ,--. ,-----. ,-----. ,---. ,--------. ,-----. ,--. ,--.| || |
| || ,'.| | | |) /_ ' .-. '' .-''--. .--'' .-. '| ,'.| || .'| .'
| || |' ' | | .-. \| | | |`. `-. | | | | | || |' ' || | | |
| || | ` | | '--' /' '-' '.-' | | | ' '-' '| | ` |`--' `--'
`--'`--' `--' `------' `-----' `-----' `--' `-----' `--' `--'.--. .--.
'--' '--'
It's dangerous to go alone!
Take this!
/jobs.
or email us directly! jobs[at]runkeeper[dot]com
-->
<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/">
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Five months ago, I started a Japanese vocab and kanji learning program through a website called WaniKani. My brother Tim had been using it for almost a year prior to that, and I wish he had forced me to start using it then. Granted, I didn’t know I was going to Japan quite at that point, but it would be so nice to be nearly done with the program by now!
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I set up a VPS on Rimuhosting using their default Ubuntu 13.04 image and then attempted to follow the instructions on Alex Cabal's PHP Best Practices for configuring PHP-FPM.
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I've been using Basecamp's web based service for a few days now to organize projects for my new position at Six Apart, and it's generally worked well, but there are a bunch of things I find lacking after my experiences with the more robust ActiveCollab.
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Overall, I feel left out of the conversation, as Spotify is not very forthcoming about how it uses your connection. The only mention I can find in their help documents is a question "How much disk space and bandwidth does Spotify use?" where it states without answering the question:
To reduce download data, increase the cache size. To reduce upload data, reduce the cache size.
Or, just block Spotify from uploading and leave your cache alone, and Spotify will respond much faster and allow your household to enjoy the Internet again. And Backblaze can resume uploading my data. :-)
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I'm running a fresh installation of OSX Mavericks on my MacBook Pro. My mobile phone is an Android, and I listen to music exclusively with Spotify. I therefore believe I have no need for iTunes, and wanted to remove it. OK.
sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app
Not so simple.
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I need to stop taking naps midday. Or stop being tired midday. Or something. But I hate just getting to work in the afternoon! When I could be almost done for the day!
I started using the app Sleep Cycle last night. We’ll see.
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Note to self that might be useful for others doing really basic stuff:
Often I use Random Web Service’s API to get a JSON file of data repeatedly, but that file doesn’t need to be refreshed 600 times a second. I can then use a simple PHP script to store the file and retrieve it from disk until it gets to be a certain age.
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I started using Google's Picasa to manage my photos probably two years ago when I learned of its awesome facial recognition feature to largely automate tagging people. Then when I discovered Alan Lundeen's plugin to automate uploading to Facebook, life was blissful.
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