Thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. I’ve been a user of both the Backblaze cloud backup and their B2 storage service for years, and it’s the best solution I’ve found for complementing my local Time Machine and drive clone backups. I’ve even been through the restore process, which is the true test of a backup service, and they passed with flying colors. Great to have them this week!
backup, cloud, sponsor
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.
hardware, productivity, review, shortcuts
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.
macstock, personal
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there.
bookmarks, browser, developer, editor, music, source
Thanks to MeisterTask for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. I’ve been using MeisterTask extensively—including integration with Slack and GitHub—for collaborative projects for quite a while now. I’m happy to offer my endorsement!
automator, sponsor
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.
ios, itexteditors, support
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.
editor, itexteditors
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!
marked
Whenever I link to an Amazon product on this blog, I use an affiliate link through the Amazon Affiliate program. They pay me a nominal amount for the referral and it doesn’t cost my users anything. I don’t always add a disclaimer for these links, but when I do I often mention that “clicking this link helps support the site.” It turns out — as pointed out to me by a reader (thanks Jean) — you’re not supposed to do that. But there is a standard disclosure provided by…
affiliate, amazon, blogging, html, jekyll, liquid, plugin, programming, snippet, tagging
As I mentioned previously, I’m working to make this site as respectful of privacy as it can possibly be. To that end, it was pointed out to me by a reader (thanks @maclm) that the comment system I’ve been using, Disqus, is actually pretty bad for privacy and tracking. Hilton Lipschitz wrote about this back in 2018, and I’m just slow to catch up, apparently. Since most people reply to me on Twitter anyway, I don’t have such lively discussions on the blog that I’m…
comments, privacy
Marked 2.5.31 is available via automatic update, the Mac App Store, and Setapp. It’s all fixes this time around, but I took care of a bunch of little bugs.
marked
I’ve made a few changes to my sites to be more in line with my own thoughts on privacy and security. When I’m using the internet, I use ad blockers, a VPN, and secure DNS on all of my devices, yet I’ve still been running websites that collect unnecessary data for Google and which don’t provide standard encryption. That’s changed, and more changes are coming.
browser, google, privacy, security, server
