So I made this. It’s not even what I’ve been spending most of my hacking time on the last couple of days, but that’s not quite ready to unveil yet. Actually, neither is this…
cli, markdown
Sponsor: Rittman Mead (Mar 6th) Thanks to Rittman Mead for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! Link cleaning extensions for PopClip (Mar 6th) A couple of new extensions for lengthening shortened urls and clearing off query strings and Google tracking information. Owning your cloud backup (Mar 9th) Using Arq 4 and a remote Mac for offsite backups. Don’t miss out on the Arq 4 Giveaway! GeoHopper and iBeacons for proximity scripting (Mar 10th) An experiment in using iBeacons…
recap
Stormboard is a new web app for collaborative brainstorming. It’s based on sticky notes and multi-section boards. While not my ideal brainstorming format, it’s very effective for quickly getting ideas out, organizing them and developing them. It’s ideal for remote teams who are used to using whiteboards, and comes with SSL-encrypted connections even at the free subscription level.
brainstorming, productivity
MindMeister, my favorite online Mind Mapping application, now has a Google Docs add-on available. It can take any bullet list in your document and turn it into a mind map embedded in the document. No MindMesiter account is required to use it.
google, mindmapping
It was fun talking with David Duval on this week’s Systematic. He’s a university professor who’s worked in both New Zealand and Canada. We talked about picking up and moving to new countries, life in New Zealand and technology in higher education and distance learning.
podcast, systematic
Arq 4 is a major step forward for the offsite backup application. Along with support for myriad new storage types (including GreenQloud, DreamObjects, Google Cloud Storage, and any Amazon S3-compatible service), it also added SFTP backup so that I could use my remote mini as a backup storage device.
apps, backup, giveaway, macos
I have been working for a long time to make lights in my house follow me around with accurate proximity detection. I always have my iPhone on me, so I’ve been using Bluetooth to handle this. Originally, I hacked around with Proximity to accomplish this, but ultimately found EventScripts to be a better solution. It still wasn’t as accurate as I wanted it to be.
automation, ibeacon, iphone
I’ve just added a couple of extensions to the PopClip collection. They lengthen short urls and clean query strings out. One (LinkCleaner) is for replacing text in an editor, and the other (CopyCleanLinks) is for copying to the clipboard.
popclip
