Posts

Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning: We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months. I don’t get it. So they count heads, and see that not as many people use Google Reader as they’d like. But the only people I know that use RSS on a daily basis are the one that counts. Bloggers, journalists and tech leaders. You know, the people that write and influence the rest of the heard. How can you not make money on the data Google gets by their reading habits? You want me to have to spend all day reading assorted ramblings on Google+ or Twitter to find some nuggets? I don’t have the time for that. ...

I want to be able to share interesting web pages on my Wordpress blog using iOS directly from Safari using a bookmark and a Pythonista Python script. The script takes the URL of the page, any text you copied and the page title, formats it in Markdown and creates a new post in Poster App automatically. ...

Comparing iPad calendar apps at a glance | iMore.com: Most are pretty good. One looks like no designer really cared to do much design. As with the iPhone versions, that might be because there’s a split between apps designed for iOS users, and for users who prefer functionality over form in the best old Windows Mobile sense of the word… I’ve been trying to find a good Calendar replacement. Finally there is an Mac, iPad and iPhone version of Fantastical App.

External Wordpress editors like MarsEdit doesn’t show categories or tags I just installed Varnish Cache on my website to speed up load time with great success. But after loading my favorite Mac blog editor MarsEdit, when doing a refresh, all the categories and tags disappeared! I realized that it must have something to do with Varnish blocking the requests between the external blog editor and Wordpress, but I haven’t had time to really learn all the intricacies of vcl. As usual Google came to the rescue, and I found [this post in Swedish that solved the problem]). I’d thought I might regurgitate the solution here in English for other with the same problem. ...

Pythonista, finally programming workflow automation for iOS? I’m doing most of my writing on my iPad or occasionally on my iPhone, and I write everything in Markdown. There are some great scripts in my current favorite language Python out there for doing Markdown conversions, image manipulations, etc., but unfortunately, Apple rules regarding programming apps on iOS devices are pretty stringent. But an app for programming Python on iOS called Pythonista have some smart ways of getting around some of Apple’s restrictions. And one of the wonderful things you can do is home screen shortcuts, making your scripts available directly from the home screen of your iOS device. All you have to do to create a Pythonista home screen shortcut is to go to a web page and enter the script name and optional arguments. After that, add the page home-screen with Safari’s bookmarks button. Another way of starting your scripts is directly as bookmarks in Safari or another web browser. I found the app from this article about making life easier by scripting with Pythonista, a great read of all the functions available in the app. Because they added a Python library for managing the clipboard, you can copy pictures or text to it, then start your script that reads from the clipboard and then put the new modified text/picture back to the clipboard, ready for pasting into any app. Very handy! ...

I love my music playback setup that consists of a couple of Squeezebox V3 players in different rooms so I can listen to music in lossless format wherever I am in the apartment. With the iPeng HD app on my iPad, I have a nice interface for controlling the players with album art and other nice features. But the best part is that I can playback high resolution audio directly on my iPad using the Camera Kit USB adapter and an HRT HeadStreamer DAC portable USB headphone amplifier. But I wanted a small, cheap and eco-friendly server for hosting my music files and wondered if I could use the Raspberry Pi. And here’s my findings. ...

Check out my article on using Qrq with a Google Cloud Storage Nearline. It’s cheaper than Amazon Glacier. Being a photographer, I have a lot of pictures on my hard disks. Using a Canon 5D Mark II with it’s 23 megapixel sensor shooting in RAW doesn’t help. My main backup is two different NAS servers doing alternating TimeMachine backups every other hour, a feature added in Mountain Lion. This is great, because if one backup unit breaks down or gets stolen, I still have another copy on the other NAS. But what if both got stolen? Imagine the horror? So I’ve been searching for an offsite backup solution that’s cheap and just works. And now I think I found it. ** ...

iPad and MultiMarkdown Supported Apps Updated 2014–07–06 Since I originally wrote this article, much has happened. The Elements app looks like it’s been discontinued because I couldn’t find it in the AppStore, so I have removed it from the comparison table. I’ve added my new favourite iOS text editor, Editorial which is an amazing app for configure your text workflow just the way you like it. IA Writer has added support for MultiMarkdown so I added it to the list as well. ...

After getting my Raspberry Pi I used the one built-in on my MacBook Pro, but the SanDisk SDHC-card showed up as read-only in finder on my mac, and Disk Utility refused to format it. The write protection switch on the card was correctly set, so that made me a bit baffled. But it seems that the internal card reader on the MacBook Pro is a bit finicky. [ ...

GeoTagr To be able to tag your DSLR pictures with GPS information is both fun and practical. But to date, most DSLR cameras don’t have GPS built-in or is an expensive hardware add-on option. That includes the Wi-Fi iPad you might own. The last couple of years I’ve used a lot of different solutions to track GPS data while I’m out taking photographs. My first way was to use a Garmin GPS unit and then transfer the information to my Mac, but now, with mobile phones like iPhone and Android, there’s no reason to tug along yet another device. My weapon of choice now is an app for iPhone and iPad called GeoTagr, a universal app for logging GPS tracks while you photograph, and then tag images with location data. For me, the pictures I want to tag are the RAW images that I import into Adobe Lightroom 4. And with this app, it’s straightforward to accomplish. ...