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Forcing Single-Sided Printing with AppKit
I've been hand-writing GOTV postcards for two organizations1, and I decided to write a quick app to print address labels for one of them. (The other requires hand-written addresses.) It's been a long...
View ArticleQuick Notes on Printing from AppKit
Recently, while writing a quick Mac app for personal use, I had to refresh my memory on the basics of printing from AppKit. Here, for my future self who will surely have forgotten again, are the basic...
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Xcode Docs Navigator
[The following is basically a transcription of a series of tweets.] I have my wishes and druthers regarding the Xcode docs, but the Navigator pane in the docs window is pretty nice. Sometimes I want to...
View ArticleWhom
I've known for a long time that who am i prints info about the current user. Today I learned it's synonymous with who -m, though not synonymous with whoami. I also learned that the two words after the...
View ArticleUsing Xcode for Advent of Code 2017
This year I'm using Swift as much as I can for Advent of Code. After fiddling with a few different coding environments, I settled on Xcode. I have a "Command Line Tool" project that I reset everyday to...
View ArticleEnjoying Another Advent of Code
On his blog, Karthik Balakrishnan wrote: My interest in competitive programming dwindled pretty quickly and eventually I stopped doing it all together. Until I discovered Advent of Code. The whole...
View ArticleWorkarounds for Font Glitches in BBEdit 12.0.1
[UPDATE: Wow, Rich Siegel of Bare Bones replied to my email within a few hours — on Thanksgiving morning! See the updates below.] Issues in BBEdit 12.0.1: If I change the default font using BBEdit >...
View ArticlePairing in Judo and in Programming
These kids are practicing tomoe nage, one of the many judo techniques I never got the hang of: [Facebook post by Miki Simoyama] Watching this, I realized there's a relevance here to my life as a...
View ArticleQuick Thoughts on the Apple Glucose Monitor Rumors
Last year when I switched to a low-carb diet I wished I had something like Instruments for my body, where I could observe changes in various parameters throughout the day. Later I learned that's...
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Misnomers in the Docs on Swift Parameters
[I filed this as Radar #31462992. I might be overthinking things — this is a little like quibbling over whether something's a metaphor or a simile — but word choices matter to me. You should see how I...
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Cantilever Laptop Stand
I'm really liking this laptop stand. It's a bamboo cutting board clamped to a bamboo file sorter. Looks nice, very sturdy, and I can either sit or stand. When I'm sitting, this arrangement allows me to...
View ArticleIntro Notes on the Smalltalk Environment
This is a follow-up to my post about Smalltalk language basics. Here I’ll talk very generally about the Smalltalk environment — at least what I remember about it. Like my previous post, this is meant...
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Quick Intro Notes on the Smalltalk Language
[I'm posting this for some friends who have asked about Smalltalk.] "Smalltalk" refers to both the Smalltalk language and the Smalltalk environment. I've forgotten a lot about the environment, and even...
View ArticleNotes After Finishing Advent of Code 2016
I finished this year's Advent of Code. I'd love to go back and clean up my code and write notes about each problem and the process I went through and the things I learned. Maybe I'll get around to...
View ArticleSwift vs Python for Advent of Code
Lately my daily addiction has been Advent of Code. It's a two-part programming challenge posted every day at midnight from Dec 1 to Dec 25. As long as you submit the right answer, you can use any...
View ArticleNotes After 8 Weeks at the Recurse Center
I just finished week 8 of a 12-week "batch" at the Recurse Center, which is a diverse community of people who come together to help each other become better programmers. The community includes both...
View ArticleChessFidget
I'm halfway through a 12-week stint at the Recurse Center. One of the first things I did was to write a silly chess app called "ChessFidget" to help myself learn Swift. Here's more about it, including...
View ArticleThe Incredible Shrinking Docs
Wouldn't you know, I was wondering about documentation in Xcode 8, and indeed it has fundamentally changed. The DevPubs team has hugely reduced the size of the docs and apparently integrated them with...
View ArticleThe New Adventures of Old AppKiDo
I have been making progress on a reboot of AppKiDo, which is a Mac app that I wrote for browsing the Cocoa documentation that comes with Xcode. AppKiDo stopped working in 2014, during the betas of...
View ArticleCookie Monster Using Siri
This made me smile. I can't remember Apple having a more beloved spokescreature (human or otherwise) than Cookie Monster. Now if only I could get Apple to do ONLY things that I love, and not things...
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