Manipulating text with BBEdit

January 20, 2019
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Manipulating text with BBEdit

But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe—something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word.

Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML.

BBEdit has been my go-to text editor, notepad, and “text munger” since I started using a Mac as my primary computer, I think around 2001-2002.

I depend on it many times daily, and similar to Snell, just last week used BBEdit to migrate blog posts from a broken Movable Type installation by transforming its static HTML files into XML for importing to WordPress.

Related reading: learning regex via BBEdit.

Sweet Darkness

January 14, 2019
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A colleague recently sent me this poem, by David Whyte, as a way of encouraging a new perspective. It helped.

When your eyes are tired
 the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
 no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
 where the night has eyes
 to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
 you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
 tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
 further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
 The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
 except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
 confinement of your aloneness
 to learn

anything or anyone
 that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

“Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte by On Being Studios is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

You Should Meditate Every Day

January 11, 2019
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The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind.

I started meditating for 5-10 minutes per day around October of last year (inspired by a talk from Dan Harris), and while I’ve faltered a little along the way, I do feel better when it’s part of my daily routine. I had been put off by the apparent spirituality of meditation, but Dan’s talk helped me understand that I can enjoy the benefits of practicing mindfulness without the spiritual…baggage.

If you’re looking for mindfulness app recommendations, check out Oak—it’s simple to use and free; a good place to start.

“Call with iPhone” for macOS

January 2, 2018
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call-with-iphone

Six years ago I made a little utility to right-click a phone number on my computer and dial it using Skype. I’ve used this daily for years, but it broke recently with Skype’s redesign.

I don’t otherwise have a reason to use Skype regularly these days, and ever since Apple introduced the ability to make phone calls from macOS via FaceTime (and your iPhone), I’ve been meaning to explore using that instead anyway.

FaceTime supports the tel protocol, so adapting my AppleScript to use that was easy.

You can download it here. Double-clicking the file should open Automator and prompt you to install it (or install manually by putting the file in ~/Library/Services/).

Now you should be able to right-click any phone number (including international formats) in most applications and “Call with iPhone” using FaceTime (it does make a “real” phone call, not FaceTime or FaceTime Audio). If an application other than FaceTime launches, you probably need to go to FaceTime > Preferences and set FaceTime as the “Default for calls”.

Time Maps

September 23, 2017
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Neat concept from Mapbox: maps designed specifically for travel-time-based decision-making.

[O]ur decision-making around places — where to go for lunch, if a certain day trip is feasible, and yes, whether a commute is practical — have shifted toward how long it takes to get there. But we still rely on traditional maps to do that: eyeballing straight-line distances, and running that through some alchemy of guesswork and firsthand experience to how long that trip would take.

What would a more directly useful visualization — indeed, a map of time — look like?

Check out the demo.

Your Human-Size Life

June 5, 2016
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Your Human-Size Life:

One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. You can own an NBA team and a MLB team, and you get to sit in the nicest seat in the house at games, but you still can only sit in one seat. In other words, your humanity doesn’t increase just because your wealth did. You don’t get bigger.

via Phil and just about everyone else.

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained

March 23, 2016
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How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained:

If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.

The Walk of Life Project

March 13, 2016
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The Walk of Life Project:

Even if you don’t know the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life” by name you’ll recognize it immediately when you hear it. Fun fact: It’s the perfect song to end any movie.

At least that’s the contention of the Walk of Life Project, the brainchild of Peter Salomone, a freelance video editor and writer. And I’m inclined to agree with him. Slap “Walk of Life” to the end of any movie and it immediately becomes 400 percent better. That’s just science.

Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You

February 29, 2016
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Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You:

I think you and I can both agree that meetings are kind of the worst. And, on the surface, you do totally obviate the need for a ton of them. I can definitely think of many times in which a quick Slack whip-around has saved me from all kinds of interpersonal tedium. So thank you for that.

However, I’m wondering what the cost of it is. Specifically, I wonder if conducting business in an asynchronish environment simply turns every minute into an opportunity for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday.

tl;dr:

Five Years at Automattic

December 15, 2015
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Earlier this month I celebrated my fifth(!) anniversary at Automattic, where I lead our WordPress.com VIP team (and occasionally serve as its mascot).

Famously, Automattic is a 100% distributed company: we don’t have a central office, and instead everyone works from where ever they happen to be—home, coworking spaces, cafes, parks, planes, trains, and automobiles.

For me, when I’m not traveling or invading the offices of the country’s largest publishers, that’s my home office.

And I’m lucky to have two great kids who know when I’m working and will give me the space (and usually, silence) I need to do that. Once in a while though, they sneak into my office and we’ll take some silly pictures together. I hadn’t noticed, but we now have hundreds of these pictures spanning the past five years.

Many technology companies are generous with their salaries, employee benefits, and perks—Automattic gets all of that right, and so much more. The value of these little moments together is immeasureable.

If that sounds interesting to you, we have a few positions open on my team—and many more elsewhere at Automattic. Join us!