Funding Open Source Software as a Third Party?
In a Discord chat, we’ve recently talked about how well funding for Blender turned out. At the time of writing, they get $137k per month for development. I cannot say if that’s enough or too little. But it’s not nothing. Being crowd-funded comes with its perils. Especially with free open-source software like Blender, developers tell that it’s not easy to know which user base to focus on, which UI/UX compromises to make, and how to figure out if the project backers are satisfied with the result.
The Archive 3rd Anniversary Giveaway
Our note-taking app for macOS, The Archive, turns 3 years old this week. To celebrate, we wanted to do something nice to all the people who supported us during that time.
The thing we came up with is a giveaway. But every customer of the past 3 years wins automatically. The price is 1 free license to freely gift to someone else.
The only condition is that you purchased the app before I uploaded everything today, and that’s it. And that you enter before April rolls around, because then we’ll take down the Claim-O-Matic.
Go to the give-away page and enter your email, then you get a link you can share with the ultimate recipient!
It was really fun to create the website for this giveaway. I also find myself staring at the confetti because it’s so soothing to see how it travels downward. I hope you enjoy the experience, too, and that you know someone who would benefit from a tasteful note-taking app in 2021 with no strings attached.
The Beauty of Hacking Swift: Make Union of Set Algebra Types More Obvious
I found it weird to form the union of two CharacterSet instances by calling the union method on one element: This chains nicely, but what pops out to me looking at the line of code is the CharacterSet, then something about URLs, and then I scan the line to see what kind of statement this is – some lengthy stuff that looks like chained method calls at first glance due to the length and the many dots.
MacSymbolicator: Tool to Symbolicate Your Crash Reports
I am not good at reading crash logs of my apps. Some errors are obvious, like index out of bounds exceptions. Others require actual symbolication of the crash log to reveal the symbol aka function name in the stack trace. You can do this in the command line and interactively explore the crash reasons like a caveperson.
Refactoring Case Change Code to Idiomatic Emacs Lisp
I asked Xah Lee for feedback on my case changing functions. He’s fluent in Emacs Lisp, so I figured if he wanted to, he would’ve used my approach years ago. So there must be something I miss. The factoring of the small helper functions don’t seem to be bad, but there are other reasons to design the text editor you use every day in one way or another:
Change Case of Word at Point in Emacs, But for Real This Time
At the moment, I’m proof-reading and editing the book manuscript of my pal Sascha for the new edition of the Zettelkasten Method book. As with most things text these days, I’m doing that with Emacs. Something that continually drives me bonkers is how Emacs handles upcasing, downcasing, and capitalization of words by default. The functions that are called for the default key bindings are upcase-word, downcase-word, and capitalize-word. These sounds super useful to fix typos. The default behavior is odd, though: They only change the case of the whole word when you select the word first. Otherwise they change the case of the remainder of the word beginning at the character at the insertion point. The docstrings say as much: “Capitalize from point to the end of word, moving over.” Why?
#CamelCaseHashtags Could Improve Accessibility
If you’re using hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, or in your Zettelkasten – consider CamelCasing 1 the hashtags if there’s more than one word involved. That acually seems to help screen-readers with pronunciation.
How to Add Backlinks in Nanoc Static Site Generator
Since I’ve added backlinks to the bottom of posts today, I figured I might as well share the code. I’m using static site generator nanoc. It has a preprocessing section in the compilation step where you can add new items and modify items that are read from disk further. I got the basis for this code from Denis Defreyne, creator of nanoc. (Check out his code.)
Backlinks Added to the Blog
Everytime I mention, think of, and link to Andy Matuschak’s public notes, I really like how each note displays a list of backlinks at the bottom. In my note-taking, I don’t want backlinks to be added automatically into the content. I can get by with other means just fine to figure out what links to the current note.
Emacs Org-Mode: Automatic Item TODO/DOING/DONE State Transitions for Checkbox Changes
In Emacs org-mode, you start with two states for your outline headings by default to manage tasks: TODO and DONE. I recently introduced a new state in between: DOING. That helped me come back to stuff I had to let lie for a while. In code, that means at least: I actually have multiple sequences, but these don’t matter for this demonstrations.
IPv6NAT in Unraid’s Docker Containers Behind a Reverse Proxy to Make Outgoing IPv6 Requests Work
This tip is a bit out of context, but will make sense once I write more about the NAS I did set up. The NAS I have runs Unraid. It’s a Slackware-based Linux operating system that provides a bit of redundancy/recovery from drive failures without the RAID setup overhead and performance penalties. More details will follow later.
When Code Signing of Frameworks Fails During macOS App Distribution, Make Sure ENABLE_BITCODE=NO
Back in December, I whipped up a test project to demonstrate why distributing a Mac app with RxSwift using Carthage failed. Building and running worked well, but I couldn’t upload the app for notarization at all. The signing step just failed.
SOLVED! Looking for Docker Reverse Proxy & IPv6 Setup Help (Paid)
Update 2021-02-16: I accidentally solved the problem myself, with help by Docker specialist @cwrau using a IPv6 NAT container I need help with a NAS (running the Unraid operating system) and Docker containers (Docker v19.03.5 at the moment) for various services.
Disable NSTextAttachment Action and Sharing Services Menu Drop-Down
By default, NSTextView will show the NSSharingServicePicker button when you hover over an image inside the text view. That’s true even for custom image-based NSTextAttachments in the attributed string. The default menu item is limited to “Markup” and a “Services” submenu, I believe. Apps can register to be shown in this menu, and users can customize the menu in System Preferences.
Create Custom Org-Mode Links to Open My External Zettelkasten App
I’m a fan of linking into my Zettelkasten. I usually do this via a convention: when a 12-number digit is used to signify a timestamp with accuracy to the minute, like 202102101025 for 2021-02-10 10:25, then I expect this to be a note identifier in my note archive. When the timestamp is accurate to the second, I expect this to be something else outside my note archive, like invoices I filed away. To utilize this information, in the worst case, I have to copy the ID and paste it into Spotlight to get to the note.
A Short Note on Voice Assistants and Very Old People Who Don’t Hear Well
In reaction to my post about the hyperlegible font, from earlier this week, people on HackerNews kindly pointed out that voice-assistants might be a fix. Thanks for all the ideas and comments, folks.
Atkinson Hyperlegible Font May Be Pretty Good If Your Granny Can’t See Well
My grandmother is 91 years old and, for about 2 years now, her sight degraded to almost-blindness. She barely sees milky shapes in her central field of vision. It’s supposedly better in the corners of her eyes, but I couldn’t get any reliable confirmation out of her regarding that. So using a telephone is a problem.
XCTestExpectation via NSPredicate Is On a Slow Interval, Use This Instead
You and I are probably pretty familiar with the XCTestExpectations helper expectation(description:) that we can .fulfill() in an async callback, and then wait in the test case for that to happen. When you have neither async callbacks or notifications handy from which you can create test expectations, then there’s a NSPredicate-based version, too. Like all NSPredicates, it works with key–value-coding, or with block-based checks. These run periodically to check if the predicate resolves to “true”.
WordCounter v1.6.4 Released
WordCounter v1.6.4 is just released and comes with mostly Big Sur compatibility fixes and a fix for the calendar view: January 2021 in Gregorian calendars was displayed oddly, because the maths for the week calculations accidentally produced January 2022 and not 2021. Calendar arithmetics are still hard.
NSSavePanel Crashes on Big Sur for public.csv UTI When You Don’t Have a CSV Editor
Was working on an export sheet today and during testing on Big Sur, I noticed that the button that would bring up the save panel would produce a beachball for a while, and then I’d get an error dialog telling me that the panel crashed. I changed the NSSavePanel.allowedFileTypes property to ["public.csv"] during this update, and that trips up the save panel on Big Sur. Note that ["csv"] works just fine.
DuckDuckGo Site Search in Vanilla Forums Templates
Over at the Zettelkasten Forum, we are using a PHP forum software called Vanilla Forum“. (Vanilla is free and open source if you host it yourself, but the creators also offer managed hosting with some additional features. I like it, it works well, and is pretty well-worn by communities all over the web.)