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Web Excursions for March 29, 2019

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Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanMyMac X, all the tools to speed up your Mac, in one app.

Norsk Hydro will not pay ransom demand and will restore from backups
Just remember that every time you hear about a company paying ransomware demands, it probably means they have outdated/nonexistent backups. I know it’s more complex on a large scale IT network, but you really should back up (ooh, check out this week’s sponsor, Backblaze :)).
Grav - A Modern Flat-File CMS
I’m still pretty deep in Jekyll as my blogging platform right now, but I’m reaching some limits. Assuming I stick with a flat-file CMS (as opposed to WordPress), this one that Rosemary Orchard turned me on to is a top contender.
tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum
This tmux plugin is awesome: continuous save of your tmux environment for automatic restore whenever tmux is started, even after a reboot. Load up the tpm plugin manager so you can install this and the requisite tmux-resurrect plugin to get going.
asciinema - Record and share your terminal sessions, the right way
I’ve been seeing these terminal recordings in GitHub readmes and they’re pretty awesome. Text-based session recordings from your terminal, optionally hosted for playback. Recordings can be paused so you can copy text right out of it.
postlight/mercury-parser-api
Mercury Parser is the API that services like Feedbin and Reeder use to give you full content articles in your feed. It’s shutting down, but Postlight has open sourced the parser and the API. I’ve been playing with a local install and it makes a great markdownifier. (I’ll probably be updating Marky with it soon so I can switch over to https…)

CleanMyMac X

When you find a hair clipper worth writing about…

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Just to be clear, this post is about a hair clipper called the Shortcut Pro. This is not about Shortcuts for iOS or any kind of automation. It’s about a hair clipper. You have permission to feel whatever you need to about that.

I mentioned the Remington Shortcut Pro in my “Favorites of 2018” post. I had only had it for a short while at that point. I knew I liked it, but didn’t realize it was going to be a continuing love story.

This review is about a product for keeping hair short coming from a person who keeps his hair very short. It’s not for everyone. It’s just for people who keep their hair short, and who like doing so for themselves.

The clipper is a little puck, really, that fits into the palm of your hand. This makes it almost like using a comb: it’s easy to use with either hand, and even easy to use on the back of your head while looking in a mirror-on-mirror situation and trying to convince your muscles to do the opposite of what you’re seeing. Holding something in the palm of your hand versus gripping a stick seems like a small difference, but it’s been a huge speed increase in my weekly shavings.

The clipper blade is curved. I have a cowlick that actually grows in every direction. A swirl. Maybe all cowlicks are like that, but when I used to have enough hair to go to the barber, he was always amused by it. So anyway, this curved blade is the first tool I’ve found that makes cutting that part a 2-pass job, rather than the 7-or-8-pass job that it took me with straight clippers. The curve wraps around all the contours of my skull. It’s so fast.

It’s also fully waterproof. Not that I’m shaving my head in the shower, but it makes it really easy to clean. Just run it under water and wipe it off with my finger, dry it, drop a bead of oil on it (I’m going to make this thing last forever) and stick it in the drawer.

The battery life on the thing is pretty incredible, too. Just to see how long it would take to wear out, I put off charging it after I got it. At the risk of eventually leaving my head half shaved while it recharged at some point, I went 3 months without plugging it in. It never died, I just eventually figured I should charge it up to be safe. So I’ve charged it once in 6 months now. Granted, 15 minutes of use once a week shouldn’t kill a battery too fast, but I’m still impressed. Beats my last pair of cordless clippers ten-fold.

The Shortcut comes with 9 attachable combs for setting the length. My beard trimmer slides out to vary the length, and more than once I’ve pushed the guard too hard and shortened the length, leading to having to trim my whole beard shorter to match. Never a problem with separate, attachable combs. I’m pretty sure the Shortcut would make a good beard trimmer, too, but I’ve been growing mine out since I got it, so I haven’t tested yet.

Anyway, I like this clipper enough that I felt compelled to record my feelings on the internet. If you happen to also sport a “not bald yet but might as well be” haircut, the Shortcut Pro is worth the $55 price tag.

By the way, I found a service called The Review Index that takes an Amazon product url and shows you an AI-curated summary of all of the reviews for that product. Check it out.

BrettTerpstra.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees when linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Macstock 2019 is on the horizon

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Hey, guess what? I’m speaking at Macstock 2019 (and yes, see the end of the post for my special discount code!). It’s coming up on July 27th and 28th this year, once again in Woodstock, IL. Which you obviously know is the town where Groundhog Day was filmed.

Last year I spoke on tagging, which you know I love, but it’s a hard sell and a tough talk to do (I discovered too late). This year, the theme of the conference is “Create,” and I pitched one I’ll really love doing. I haven’t finalized all the subtopics of this year’s talk yet, but the subject is going to be automating and improving all kinds of writing on the Mac (and iOS). It’s going to be fun.

I even happen to know that — among the many folks I’m looking forward to seeing — my friends David Sparks and Rosemary Orchard (of MPU/Automators fame) are going to be in town, with some live podcasting and a presentation from Rosemary that I’m truly looking forward to.

The Early Bird Sale for tickets is on now, with weekend passes going for $179US (regular price $249). Macstock grows every year, and I’d love to see you there. I see this as the most viable replacement for the best parts of the Macworld expos of yore, so the more the merrier.

Start thinking about making it to the midwest for a weekend of Mac and iOS fun this summer. You can use the code TERPSTRA to get an additional $10 off the early bird price right now!

Web Excursions for March 22, 2019

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Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Udemy. Learn Anything.

There are plenty of good reasons to do open source for free
A look at the reasons why developers choose to open source their projects. Unlike design, this isn’t spec work. My favorite argument here is that creating open source software is a way of paying for all the open source software that got you to where you are. Seems legit to me…
Three Reasons Why the “Nothing to Hide” Argument is Flawed
A great post in response to the “Why should I care? I have nothing to hide” argument that comes up when discussing digital privacy.
Espresso — The Web Editor for Mac
I somehow missed that Espresso was back. This used to be my favorite editor for HTML/CSS, and the new features are downright amazing. If you’re looking for a dedicated editor for web development, check this out. It’s not cheap ($79US right now), but worth it, in my opinion after trying it out for a few days. And for those on Setapp, you already have it!
CodeKit
Mentioning Espresso makes me want to also mention CodeKit. CodeKit, as its tagline states, is “THE Mac App for Web Developers”. Basically a GUI for everything from minification and optimization to JavaScript linting and transpiling, as well as a fully-fledged “LiveReload” style server for seeing changes live in your web browser as you work in your preferred editor.
generative-music/generative.fm: A platform for playing generative music in the browser.
A node-based platform for playing generative music in your browser. See it in action at Generative.fm.

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Finally, new columns for iTextEditors

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I posted an update on iTextEditors yesterday, and got a great response from people adding to and updating the list. This inspired me to finally add a couple of new criteria (that didn’t even exist when the original chart was created): Document Provider support and Split Screen support.

I had previously started to compile a list of apps supporting these features with the help of a few field testers, but the list of apps has changed significantly since then and I need some help with updating. If you look at the list, you’ll see most of the apps listed with a question mark in those columns. If you browse it and happen to know that an app does or does not support either feature, please let me know. And I’ll tell you what, you don’t even have to use the submission form in this case (though you’re still welcome to, and absolutely should if you’re submitting a new app). You can just let me know (via Twitter or the contact form) the name of the app and yes or no for one or both of those criteria.

Thanks for the help!

The dwindling number of iOS text editors

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Over the weekend I weeded out the dead apps on my iTextEditors comparison chart and was surprised to find that over 30 of the 90 editors on the list were no longer available. I figured a few would be gone, but a third of them had gone the way of the dinosaur1.

Perhaps the cream has risen to the top and most people are settling on the leaders of the pack. Maybe there just isn’t that much money to go around in the iOS text editor market. I was definitely sad to see apps like Writing Kit and Trunk Notes call it quits, while some of the others I knew had morphed into different applications (e.g. Daedalus->Ulysses).

So I’d like to ask for the crowd to help me make sure iTextEditors is up to date with your current favorite apps. Check the chart, and if you don’t see yours (or any that you have on your mind at the time), please submit new forms for them. It will help keep this resource going even though Apple has ensured that I don’t personally make any money off it

Thanks in advance, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got!

P.S. please do use the submission form and don’t just name apps in the comments or on Twitter2. I don’t have the bandwidth to track down the details on every editor myself.

  1. Avoiding a Revelation 12:4 reference here…

  2. I already know this will be commonly disregarded/ignored, but I had to try.

Get better stats for your writing with Marked 2

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I’ve put together a new screencast demonstrating some of the document statistics capabilities of Marked 2. In addition to being a great way to preview your Markdown documents as you work, Marked can go further to provide character and word counts, sentence and paragraph counts, various readability indexes, reading time, and even show progress toward your word target for the piece. Check it out!

YouTube Video

Be sure to check out some of the other Marked screencasts I’ve posted. Intrigued but not currently a user? Check out Marked 2 at marked2app.com!