Matthew Lang

Thanks to my buddy Curtis for letting me know about cleaning your iPhone’s charging port.

Solved my problem of my phone not charging.

Nightmare. I’m having to lift my lightning cable connection in order to get a charge into my iPhone now.

The master list. Have to do, want to do, dream to do, home and work. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

Did I miss the heated and crazy developer debate that the new accepted line length is 120 characters?

Joking aside, I’d like to know if anyone else has changed their coding standards to allow for a bigger line length because of changes in source code management tools.

For a long time I’ve used 80 characters as a guideline as opposed to a set rule. Sometimes I’ll go over this but most of the time I don’t.

With bigger displays everywhere though, it appears that developers are switching to a larger line length when it comes to their coding standards.

I need to find a way to retire sooner to enjoy more days like this.

Battleheart 2 for iOS looks great.

I never played Battleheart, but I’m a huge fan of Battleheart Legacy.

It’s the first day of the school summer holidays here in Scotland.

In previous years I would have dropped Drew off at nursery and then dropped Ethan off at the golf. This year though Drew is at school, as he no longer goes to nursery, and Ethan is still resting after fracturing his foot last week.

All I can say is thank goodness for golf and Fortnite. It’s the only two things that will keep them occupied for the next week until our family holiday kicks in.

It’s been a frustrating couple of days getting my laptop into some kind of order. I can’t get the following things to work:

• Connect the new Tower v3 app to my GitLab or GitHub accounts
• Connect my Fastmail account to Spark
• Sign in to Micro.blog desktop client

The list was longer yesterday but I managed to resolve a bunch of issues with a single action. These remaining items have been vexing me since.

The Micro.blog issue is out of my hands and has been reported, but the Tower and Spark issues are things I expect to just work, but I can’t explain why they don’t.

It begs the question, have I lost my tech touch?

Update: Turns out I had a keychain issue that required me to reboot my laptop to get everything working again. Thanks to @manton and Tower support for pointing me in the right direction. 👍

Anyone have any recommendations on a Jekyll theme that would serve a similar purpose as an About.me page?

I’m looking for something like a portfolio site, but more of an emphasis on who I am, what I’m working on and where people can find me.

Vivo also achieved another technological feat. Unlike Apple, it managed to incorporate a fingerprint scanner into the screen itself. The reader sits directly below the glass, and you can can just rest your finger on the front of the phone near the bottom to unlock it, with no need for a dedicated home button or fingerprint reader anywhere else on the device that would have reduced display size.

— A new smartphone found a novel way to make the entire front of the phone one giant screen

Sure, a slide-out camera is nice, but I’m pretty sure we’ll see both the camera and the fingerprint scanner sitting behind the display in the near future. Just a question of who’ll get there first.

Sometimes I struggle with the whole being online thing. The last few days has been one of those times. I skipped my usual weekly digest as a result.

Still wrestling with it.

Took a few attempts but just managed to get GitLab’s CI and automated deployment working for a Rails app. Now to apply it to my other projects. 🙌

The Micro.blog site is the only place where I can compose a reply and see what I’m replying too at the same time.

I wish more Micro.blog clients did this for replies.

Mini standards by Nicholas Bate.

Because it always starts with the little things.

I’ve been trialling Things on my iPhone and iPad for the last few weeks. This morning though, I deleted the app from both devices.

It is a great task manager and it does do lots of things (sorry 🤭) really well, I just can’t get on board with a dedicated task manager app anymore.

I’ve been bullet journalling now for well over a year and I find it a much more effective way of managing my day to day work.

Also I tend to write a lot of software, so I’ve been sticking with task management tools that tie in with my software development process. This means using issue tracking on GitLab or GitHub and using Trello for bigger client projects.

I think it’s fair to say that I’m well and truly done with task management apps.

WhenWorks is a new appoinments app that allows you to define when people can book appointments with you.

Setup is a breeze. Just install the app on your iPhone to create your free WhenWorks account, and you’ll immediately have a web page where guests can book appointments with you online.

— WhenWorks

Love the fact that it simplifies what was a somewhat tricky process to begin with. Scheduling meetings an appointments can be a pain.

WhenWorks is available from the app store.

I’ve been using Lire for a couple of days now. A great RSS reader and one that really makes a difference if you have a large collection of RSS feeds. I particularly like the Discover section of the app that splits up low and high volume feeds.

I’ve started compiling lists of bookmarks that I use almost daily. By putting them in Bear, I’m hoping to have them more readily available than trying to find them in Pocket. Also, Bear allows me to add a bit of context to each bookmark.

Boring Stuff Day.

What a bloody great idea!

Just watched The Last of Us Part II gameplay from E3. It looks fantastic. Violent, but fantastic. Shame there’s no release date yet. Might be time to dig out the first game again. 🎮

Moving a few sites over from Heroku to Netlify. Having one of those moments when I wonder why I didn’t make this move earlier.

Link rot is a problem on the Internet. When you find something great on the Internet, you bookmark the URL for later, and then you find out later that the URL no longer exists. It’s not so much of a problem if you have a copy of the web page you bookmarked, or you use something like Pinboard or Pocket’s premium plan or even the Wayback Machine. For many people though, I’ll bet that they have a few seconds of disappoint and then find alternatives to that same article.

This is what is called link rot. When a web page becomes permanently unavailable. The problem can stem from the web page’s URL being changed, whole websites being moved or closed down.

The same can be said for applications whether they are native or web-based.

The development of whole web applications that we use daily can stop. The application might still run and function correctly, but the ongoing development of the service has ground to a stop that it seems that the web application is no longer being worked on.

I’m guilty of this app rot as much as any web application owner.

While DailyMuse is still running, development on it has ground to a halt. I will resume work on it at some point, but to the careful observer, it might look like the application has stagnated and it isn’t clear if the web application is being worked on.

iOS apps have the advantage of including a version history in the App Store. I’m sure there’s a corresponding version history for Android apps as well.

What about web applications though? How do we see the version history for those?

Well, a version history page seems the obvious choice, however, not all web applications have such a page and there’s no standard for this either.

As a web app developer though, I am going to put more effort into making my web applications more transparent in when they are being updated and making it easy for others to see these changes. How I’ll do this I don’t know yet, but it will consist of a web page of some sort.

The Firefox Side View extension is already proving to be very useful. Great when using a page as a reference for another page I’m on.

I remember a similar app for iOS that did something similar to Edit. As good as Bear and Ulysses are, sometimes you just need a place to write without the bells and whistles.

I never get tired of the view from the braes. 📷