Archive for Software
I’ve been having problems with notifications in various computer contexts for a while now. For example, notifications that I missed were a contributing factor to the awfulness at work that ate up half of my year last year. More recently, I’ve been getting lots of iOS notifications from Mary Anne’s calendars despite having turned off […]
The Mac task management app Things 3 came out in 2017 or so, but it removed an important feature that I relied on heavily in Things 2. (The ability to sort the Today task list by date.) So I kept on using Things 2 at work all this time. But Things 2 recently stopped working, and I decided to […]
I finally got around to creating a Shortcut on my iPad to automatically set various settings when I want to launch a particular app, and it was pretty easy and straightforward, so I thought I would post about it. Background: When I launch the Simply Piano app, I’ve been doing a couple of things manually: […]
I recently had use for a little question-mark-in-a-circle icon. I did some searches for such icons, and found some, but it occurred to me that it would be better to use CSS or SVG to create a quasi-icon that isn’t an image. So I did some searching, and found two ways to do it. There […]
Do you want to download an archive of an entire Yahoo Group? Here’s how. But do it today, because you may not be able to do it this way after tomorrow. Background: Yahoo stores Yahoo Groups messages and files on their servers, but (as I understand it) they’re removing access to those after Saturday the […]
Me: Hey, cool, there’s a tool that checks ePub files for accessibility! Me: …Uh-oh, it’s a command-line tool. Me: [Downloads and installs node.js, as required by the accessibility-tool instructions.] Me: [Figures out that a certain command must be run as superuser, which isn’t clear from the cryptic error message.] Me: [Runs npm command to install […]
The password-management app 1Password switched from a pay-once model to a subscription model a while back. But it turns out that if you want to buy a license, you still can; the company has decided not to prominently display that option, but it’s still available. To purchase a pay-once version for the Mac, for instance, […]
When you’re interviewing for a developer-docs-oriented tech-writing job in the software industry, chances are fairly good that at some point in the process, you’ll be asked to read some code and explain what it does. So before you apply, I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with some common simple things that a brief code sample might […]
Last night, I was on my way to bed at a somewhat-reasonable-for-me hour when I noticed that the Google Photos app had generated a “best of 2017” album and was offering to turn it into a printed photo book for me. Intrigued, I took a look and found that it had also generated several other […]
At various times, various companies and groups have tried to come up with a new unified communications system that can replace email, text messages, instant messaging, and all other such systems with one combined tool. The result is usually either that the new tool fails to catch on, or that it becomes yet another example […]
The excellent old tabletop roleplaying game Fringeworthy had a page of tables for quickly generating the physical appearance of an...
An example of how news gets distorted: DeepMind, which is part of Alphabet (Google's parent company), published an interesting and...