Always be Catching Up
Busy days here, which is not really anything new. I have found in my spare time that I have been quite happy to work on my growing catalog of toddler photos and spend lots of time biking and jogging — summer has come to 7,000 feet and it’s time to soak up the outdoors.
But there have been a bunch of bits and pieces bubbling along that I have wanted to share. Here are a few of them.
Here’s a Drafts action that sends entries to Day One along with a tag for my son’s name. This one is for capturing and saving bits and pieces of things he says and moments that catch me off-guard — which, as he gets more remarkable, are most days. Replace TAG twice in this to use it with a different tag; nothing complicated here, but I had to tweak it a bit to get what I wanted (specifically, to get the right urlencoded newline strings so that Day One would handle the tag correctly.
drafts://x-callback-url/import_action?type=URL&name=Day%20One%20%23TAG&url=dayone%3A%2F%2Fpost%3Fentry%3D%5B%5Bdraft%5D%5D%250A%250A%23TAG
My friend Alice has started up a podcast called Educating [Geeks], with the premise that, “At some point in our lives, we’ve all been on the receiving of the incredulous shock and horror when a superfan realizes that you’re not a member of the club.” They find inspiration in this great XKCD strip that celebrates bringing people into the things we love and excited or fascinated by. I’ve been stewing on a longer post about this and some perhaps interesting thinking, but just can’t seem to get it out the door, so check out the podcast in the meantime. I think you might enjoy it. It’s fun.
Here’s a guy who has really thought about notebooks (among other things; Sean has a great set of outliner based pages about all kinds of things that are interesting).
The National Day of Civic Hacking looks cool, much more practical than a lot of change-the-world-with-technology enthusiasm. I missed the actual event this year but will watch to see what comes of it.
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Note that per this long thread it’s still not always straightforward to figure out the last step in the API setup. ↩︎
Text editors in The Setup
I dusted off and started to update my data from The Setup this weekend. Here’s a plot of some selected text editors that people discuss over the past few years. I’ve cut the 2013 data because there’s not much information there, yet, and it makes it appear as if the frequencies of all the editor mentions go way down.
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For all the noise about fancy new-generation editors, respondents at The Setup seem to hew old school, or at least talk old school, as the data reflects mentions rather than actual use. (Seriously, this is just about as unscientific as it gets. But it’s fun.) Will TextMate return to prominence in 2013, or will Emacs continue its ascent? Can Sublime Text outpace vim? Time will tell.
Bonus update, mobile devices. I was having fun, so I updated to include a swing at mobile devices. This may be an incomplete count of the various Android devices. Rather than filter out the devices with just a single count, I included them to show some of the variety (which also tends to highlight just how dominant the iOS devices are).
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You may be saying, “hey, what about Windows Phone?” Well, here are the current counts:
Mobile Devices:
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iPhones: 190
iPads: 132
Androids: 72
Windows Phone: 1
Now you know.
[Previously, on Arrested Development](http://apps.npr.org/arrested-development/)
This was a labor of love:
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New Fitbit Dashboard
The fitbit folks have improved their dashboard quite a bit. The new display has moveable tiles and is pretty nice, but the most substantial improvement is that the data displays don’t require Flash any longer. Finally, that information is usable on iOS.
And they revamped their sleep record to be much more useful:
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Looks familiar!
Integrating Runkeeper with Day One via Slogger
(Updated March 23, 2014)
An annual exercise challenge rolled around again at my workplace, so naturally I found a project in it: Wondering if I could hook Runkeeper up to my Day One journal. The result: The Runkeeper plugin for Slogger
Getting up and running with the Runkeeper API was tricky; I never quite got the hang of passing parameters to it, which still puzzles me. When I figured it out, I put together a quick walkthrough for the API startup and posted it as a gist (Also embedded at the bottom of the post). The gist provides some instructions, but users new to Slogger plugins and working with API authentication may also want to check out Sven’s writeup that uses this method and includes a couple of additional screenshots.1
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One note about configuring your Runkeeper application: The Runkeeper folks don’t want to appear to endorse any applications or have them potentially be confused for official Runkeeper services, so avoid identifying your app with anything that uses “Runkeeper” or “Health Graph” in its name or description to save yourself from receiving a polite email requesting you to make a change.
I built the Runkeeper plugin for Slogger with a fun option to save its data additionally to a text file. I plan to do some stats or plots or something with that data, perhaps akin to my fitbit visualization, one of these days.
Enjoy!