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Shortcut for DayOne journal prompts

Download the Shortcut I’ve been keeping up on my DayOne habit fairly well, but there are some days where staring at that blank page just makes every thought drop out of my head. Initially, I had a lot of success with a simple change, just writing about the previous day. I found that with a little time for reflection I had a more nuanced look at what happened, what was important, and what I thought about it. Lately though I’ve avoided writing some days because I’m not sure what to lay down. I r

Sharing Shortcuts on iOS 13

I’ve been foolhardy and have been running the iOS 13 beta on all my devices since beta 2. I haven’t hit anything past a few weird layout issues until today. While working on a blog post about a shortcut I built I went to share my work … and there was no share icon. I looked around, long pressing everywhere and trying every button I could find. I even got desperate and looked around in the Apple Settings screens. Nothing. After lots of duckduckgoing I found the answer. You need to download a sh

Overheard

“Well, you’ll need to get change from the ice cream store to buy a newspaper.” Dad leafs through his wallet and finds a five. He hands it to Wyatt showing him the note written of the face of the bill in sharpie. “See what is written on the front? To Aspen from the tooth fairy.” “Dad … How did you get this?” “Well I don’t know, they gave it to me at the store.” “Dad, that raises even more questions, how did this make it to circulation?”

What does your perfect morning look like?

My Ink & Volt Planner has me start each week with a reflection. On a good Monday I can find the time to do it in the morning. Today I managed to get there before the end of day, which is still pretty good. “If you want to be more productive, you need to become master of your minutes.” — Crystal Pain Plot out your perfect morning and make it happen one day this week. Can you master this perfect routine? Practice makes perfect. * Wake up early, before the kids, ideally 6am. * I went to bed b

Comic Rocket

Although OOTS just published strip #1150 it’s still working on the same original plot line that it started with. At this point some of the early sub-plots and side quests are a bit hazy in my mind and I was thinking it would be nice to catch up. I wanted to read it through my RSS reader, starting over from the first comic, with 5 a day. It seemed like a pretty easy script to write, but I googled for a service first. I found Comic Rocket which for the bill perfectly. It lets you replay an RSS fe

Choose how you spend your time

A few years ago I was introduced to the idea of replacing New Year’s resolutions with a theme for the year. Rather than tying your success for the new year to specific goal, you pick an area to focus on instead. It’s easier to feel accomplishment if you have several, changeable ways to reach your goals. The first year I chose ‘Make more things’. It was fun and exciting, we made beer and sourdough. A major renovation took over the whole top floor of the house. My wife and I had a bake-off to see

On manager README’s

… there is no way to write these and not be self-serving. You are writing them presumably to shortcut problems that arise when people misunderstand your behavior or when they act in a way you don’t like or otherwise violate some expectations that you believe are within your rights to set. Camille Fournier I hate manager README’s

A couple days a week I run commute to work.

Strava supports recording your run without the phone but will not upload the results without the companion app. It drives me nuts. It’s impossible to call a Lyft, Car2go, or electric scooter from just the watch. Uber still has a watch app but I won’t support their business. Text messages may choose to go to your watch … they might go to your iPad or Mac instead. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern. The Washington Post app just won’t refresh without your phone. LTE be damned. Surprisingl

Running BaasBox 0.9.4 on Ubuntu 14.04

This is a simple guide to getting BaasBox up and running on Ubuntu. I’m running it on a vps on digital ocean. Right now this is purely for a dev environment and you shouldn’t expect to use the setup for a production site. First we get our dependencies installed: # Install Java, Supervisor, and unzipnsudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -ynsudo apt-get updatensudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer unzip supervisor Next setup an account to run BaasBox # Add baasbox user and set up

Swift Playgrounds and 3rd Party Dependencies

Recently, I have been teaching myself swift and exploring 3rd party libraries. It seemed like playgrounds would be the natural way to do this, but I have spent hours trying to figure out how to make it work. My breakthrough finally came when I found this stackoverflow answer explaining the requirements. Immediately after that I found the Apple documentation for the same thing. Of course, the explanations outlined what needed to happen to use external frameworks but didn’t explain how to make it

BaasBox and Swift - Part 2

In my first post I stepped through the process of porting the skeleton of the BassBox tutorial from Objective-C to Swift. This post takes that project and implements the actual tutorial in Swift. The completed project can be found on this github branch. The Model The model is a very basic class with two required fields, the title and body which are both strings. We initialize it by overridding initWithDictionary. The main Swift-ism here is using optional binding to verify the dictionary contai

BaasBox and Swift - Part 1

BaasBox is a tool that allows you to quickly build a backend for an application. The getting started guide for using BaasBox is a little dated and written entirely in Objective-C. The tutorial is fine, but since I’m working in Swift day to day the application I was looking to build would also be in Swift. My first thought was to just google around and find newer tutorials. I found a single post that seemed relevant, Swifing with BaasBox - Building a quiz app with BaasBox Rather than lose all ho

Key listing support in Consul client

For integration between ansible and consul I’ve been using a third party python client called consulate. It is decent, however both it and consul are new and it doesn’t support the full consul HTTP API yet. Currently I’m trying to model our topology in consul’s key value store but lists of values are not intuitive. Consul seems to only store strings, so without doing string parsing / casting I am unable to get complicated values out. For example, I’d like to store something like this: /roles/

Dynamic inventory and variables in Ansible

I’ve been building out automation for deploying micro services in ec2. We’re using consul for service registration, discovery, health checks, and configuration. Since consul provides an available key value store for configuration we’ve been trying to define the topology that way. Ansible has some very good documentation and it is one of the things I like most about the project. Documentation for building your own dynamic inventory is fairly complete, but I was having trouble with including vari

One Way Sync Jira to Things

Little ruby script to take the results of a jql query (advanced search) in jira and create todo item’s for Cultured Code’s Things App. I use it at the beginning of a sprint to keep track of my own work and progress. If I get less lazy I could always sync back in the other direction. https://gist.github.com/7902002.js?file=config.yaml https://gist.github.com/7902002.js?file=jira_to_things.rb

Getting Tumblr to Octopress Working

Ruby 1.9.2, Jekyll, and OS X Date