October 29, 2013

i3 wm

Had a nice play recently with the i3 wm for Linux. It’s a really nice paradigm for working with when programming. It uses the same style of keyboard navigation as vim for moving around your windows. The windows key can be bound as your modifier key and then used to navigate to a particular workspace (e.g. Windows + 2 to go to the browser workspace). Particular applications can be configured to open only on certain workspaces.

September 23, 2013

SSD upgrade MacBook Pro

Tutorials I recently updated my hard drive on my MacBook Pro to an SSD drive. I used the following tutorials to do the upgrade, which was pretty stratightforward: The second video is particularly interesting. You can purchase a cradle for another hard drive. This can be used either for you existing hard drive, or a second identical SSD that you can then put in RAID configuration. Parts I picked up the pieces from Amazon UK here: Optical Bay Caddy Samsung 840 Series SSD

September 19, 2013

Google Reader Replacement (follow up)

I spent a bit of time today customising my RSSOwl setup to make it more to my liking. I now have it looking like this: That’s one long reader with all my feeds. Here’s how I did it. Select View -> Layout -> Newspaper Deselect View -> Toolbars -> Feed Toolbar Deselect View -> Status Right Click Main Toolbar and select Customise Toolbar Delete everything except New, Update All, Mark Read, Mark All Read, Search (or whatever is your preference) Right Click Main Toolbar and select Lock Toolbar Click Search, do a search for all titles not containing something impossible (eg asjdlfjkasdfkdaj) Save search (I called mine “All News”) Select the newly created “All News” category from your feeds (More details on this here: http://tutorial.

May 22, 2013

Axure - Wireframing Application

I recently started using Axure as my primary wireframing application. I’ve tried a couple of other solutions in the past, such as balsamiq and Adobe Illustrator. There’s a good article here which discusses some of the other alternatives: http://www.creativebloq.com/wireframes/top-wireframing-tools-11121302 My own criteria for selection were: No web apps While I love cloud based solutions for some stuff, for my core apps I loathe anything that requires connectivity to use. If I have my laptop, I should be able to do my work, regardless of whether I have access to the internet.

April 8, 2013

Google Reader Replacement

Google Reader is going the way of the dodo. I am/was an active Reader user. Mostly from the browser while I had some spare minutes I would dip and read some of the latest news. The news hast left me somewhat wary of online alternatives. There have been quite a few mentioned: http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.netvibes.com/ https://www.pulse.me/ While all of these seem perfectly reasonable, it’s all coming back to the same issue for me.