As I pull the glossy gift wrap off an untarnished somewhat undamaged new year, I’m taking the opportunity to take a last look at the past year. This is an unusual reflection for me on successes and opportunities in my personal and professional life. I’ve never done this, but this year left a mark on me, and it needs sharing.
Theme
In the spirit of Cortex, I’ve also always struggled with the new year and setting goals for myself. Resolutions suck. I’ll admit, Cortex has somewhat changed my mind about this, and setting a theme to the year was just enough of the fresh approach I needed. One of the most interesting ideas for me, is that a theme is both a north star, and never completed.
After a really 💀 year of Twitter, Reddit and every other goddamn social network losing their minds, my refuge has been RSS. Mastodon’s awkward, Bluesky is real weird (keep it classy weirdos) and that’s all great. RSS has always felt like my place because it has been my place since the good old days. My journey through RSS went something like this:
Man I really need to write on this blog more, it’s been far too long.
Heroku has made some questionable business choices recently, but the one thing they got dead-right straight out of the gate was ease of setup. With very little work, you could go from a working thing locally, add a couple files, and git push your way to a deployed environment. That simple interaction made so much complexity go away, I think many hosting services are still after the bar that Heroku set so early. A bunch have even gotten there, and acknowledge that it’s no longer 2010.
Updated 3/2024 ~ updated with current software
In the style of many other developers out there, I thought it’d be interesting to collect a list of things that I use throughout my day. Many of these are pretty common for a developer, but there are truly some gems in there (the command line tools especially). I spend most of my time on some kind of web development task, but that also changes to backend, administrating servers, writing Dockerfiles and interviews.
Hey there, I’m Jeremy Bunting, some people call me JB. I’ve been making browsers do stupid tricks for about 15 years. I really enjoy making tools and toys for the internet.
On the work side, I’ve written software for the entire stack, but mainly on the front-end. I’ve written things from GCode to Go for embedded systems, and the most gratifying thing I get out of work is solving all the tiny problems to make a project happen. I’ve worked with some great people all over the world to build some incredible things.
After looking for far too long for a way in the Mixpanel docs to find a way to track session-end events with the Mixpanel JS library, I tried all the usual tricks to get the tracking event to fire correctly, beforeunload, unload and similar. Nothing was firing correctly. Having heard fairly recently about the beacon API, I thought “Yeah, there’s no way there’s support for that in recent stuff yet”.
I’ve added a uses page to this site so it could be submitted to the totally excellent (and super fascinating) uses.tech. I’m fascinated with the tools that people use to do their job, and it was pretty interesting to collect a list of all the crazy stuff I use to get my job done. I spend a lot of time at my desk, and seeing how other people set up their spaces and what they use has been cool
Every once in a while I build a new theme for Alfred because I use it so much, and I do enjoy having nice looking UI around. This one is different than the last few I’ve done, and this one I think will last a bit longer because it’s using such simple typesetting, I think it’s likely to age well.
Anyway, I hope you use it and enjoy it, if you do, please do share it around.
You may have noticed a new obnoxious behavior in the JetBrains/IntelliJ series of editors when invoking the actions menu ⌘+shift+A. Instead of the normal actions menu rendered by the editor, you get this menu explaining something unrelated.
Being someone who hits this menu many times per day, this really jammed up my shit.
To disable this, and save your sanity, go into System Preferences > Shortcuts > Services > Developer and uncheck the Search man Page index in Terminal shortcut.
I came across this nice technique for keeping your markup in a Vue app nice and clean, but still inlining the SVGs at compile-time with webpack. Because SVGs are xml, you can treat them like any other piece of markup with html-loader and as a result, you get nicely integrated SVG content.
VPNs are super useful tools for keeping your information private for any reason. If you’re on coffee shop WiFi and need to do some banking (tho I’d advise strongly against doing this) you should do that on a VPN. A VPN is not a miracle solution for online security, and there are many security holes in even getting your data to the machine. If you have a virus or some other horrible thing on your machine, a VPN won’t help you. If you’re doing superduper sketchy stuff, you should probably just stop doing that stuff instead of thinking you’re crafty with a VPN.
I just put this on Twitter, but I thought it could use a more permanent home. Eventually, I’ll just add it to Toothpick. For now though, I’m sure someone is struggling with it right now.
We’ve been using the excellent Resin platform for deploying Raspberry Pi’s en masse at work. One of the issues we frequently have is the wifi we’re connecting to is either unknown, or incorrect, so we have to update the wifi configuration on a group of devices. Because this need was not met by either Resin-wifi-connect or anything else, we wrote a tiny app to pick configuration value out of the Resin environment variables.
Small update to the theme I released last year. This one is a variation on what I pushed out, but has a little bit of a typographic nod to the Palm Pre (yes, that Palm Pre). I’ve been using it for a while, and haven’t updated this repo in a bit.
Download from GitHub and give it a whirl. I’ve deprecated the ‘Day’ version because nobody was using it (including myself) and I didn’t really feel like maintaining it.
Updated my ‘Smoked’ theme package for the excellent Alfred. I took a bit more time on these than I did on the first release. There’s a new halo around the entire window, something that wasn’t possible in the earlier versions of Alfred.
The screenshots of these are kind of difficult because the OS X capture doesn’t render the blur filter correctly. The only real difference is that the sub-title on the non-selected items isn’t visible by default.
Update 1/11/16:
Current version of Chrome 47.0.2526.106 resolves this behavior.
I’ve been experiencing some short machine freezes while using both OS X Yosemite and El Capitan. Could not figure this out for a while and I think I found the culprit.
These short freezes last about 2-4 seconds, only appear while Chrome (production) is running, and appear to freeze not just Chrome but the entire machine.
When Chrome runs a software update in the background, it throws the following message in the console "triggered DYLD shared region unnest for map".
With the Pi 2, amperage requirements are significantly higher, presumably due to the doubling of cores in the machine, more IO, etc. I’m changing my recommendation to a different power supply that provides clean 2.5A power for the Pi 2.
Also, please note that the Pi 2 requires a microSD card instead of the standard SD card format from the original Pi, recommending a microSD card.
There are some crazy things about this video and how the NYC subway system works. Huge swaths of infrastructure are over 80 years old. They use cloth-covered wire as the means of connection between critical pieces of switching equipment. Thankfully, they’re getting slowly upgraded, but it’s going to take many many years.
OnShape is a brand new creation from the original team that built out SolidWorks. This is sort of a combination of the concepts that makes Google Docs great mated with a world class solids modeling package. We can finally do all of these things in the browser and run it on something as low power as a cell phone.
With a tool like this and the proliferation of inexpensive 3D printers, it’s hard to see this as anything except a major game changer. Collaborating on the same 3D document in real time is something nobody’s done before. The most welcome thing to me is branching and merging within a solids file. Merging changes in larger 3D packages has always been a chore and collaboration on a document like this could not exist without seamless merges.
I have an infatuation with the Alfred app. It hits so many of the nerd things that I love, last year I put a theme together for Alfred to fit along with the way I have my machine set up.
Today, I’m updating my theme significantly, and adding a brand new light theme to the mix.
Great news from Joyent about Node.js moving to break off into an open source foundation. Presumably this is a reaction to key players in the Node community breaking off to write io.js and the impact that will have on the platform’s growth. What I find interesting about this news is the stakeholders involved in the foundation, who are definitely not a small community (WalMart, PayPal, LinkedIn, Microsoft and others).
USTwo just designed 40 watch faces for the Android Wear system of wearable devices. Better yet, they open sourced a ton of the resources they used. Exciting news for wearable computing and interesting to see people gaining the ability to customize their watch faces.
When you going into multiple servers at once, it can be handy to have a little leeway when you use password authentication. Let’s say you’re SSHing into one box, then another, then back to the first box.
It’d be really nice not to have to paste that first password in again, wouldn’t it?
From my buddy Phil, he’s got a handy SSH config that will recycle the first authenticated session when you try to connect again.
Built in Flash as a screensaver, an OS X Widget and apparently adapted to the iPhone. It was a free screensaver that I loved for many years. It’s a great design.
Not that PolarClock owns this shape, but this Apple Fitness design feels like a ripoff. Even the colors are similar.
Not that Apple hasn’t made enough news this week, but this is far too disappointing to let go. Yesterday, along with the watch and the iPhone 6 announcment, Apple has made their website responsive (part of it anyway). What appears now is a totally broken design for many of their pages. Not small pages either. Clearly they thought about the product pages for the iPhone and the watch and just said “eh, that seems good”.
In the same vein as the toolbox post I put up in March, I wanted to post a list of my most-used Chrome extensions.
I don’t use many Chrome extensions, but there are a few that I completely rely on every day. I get asked occasionally what these are and if I could share the links to some of these things, so here’s a list of the best ones.
If you’re checking out Google’s Angular, I highly recommend John Lindquist’s Egghead.io for learning the framework quickly and with lots of insight.
Angular is a super powerful framework and seems to be the way things are heading for building scalable large JS apps. If you’re building out a
larger client side app, it’s worth a look.
I’m glad Netflix is taking a stand against the old model of pilot seasons and old-school television executives. It’s time they have some competition and models are challenged. Time to seize the moment.
This is a list of the things I use literally every single day, and that I would be lost without. Like a blacksmith has hammers, I’ve got these things. A lot of them are free, and some of them are not. In total, this represents less than $200 of software.
For significantly improving your quality of life, that’s a completely acceptable cost to me, especially because I make my living with this stuff.
It’s not often you hear of a new startup that’s building something in America, especially watches…in Detroit. Shinola is going for
American watchmaking with their line of pretty handsome watches. As a fan of
people going against the grain and trying something bat-shit crazy, they’re going for it in a pretty big way. They’re building their own movements with Swiss
parts and really going for it.
