Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Juggling some apps again

I’ve been juggling several app changes over the past few weeks.

Gone are the GitHub and Copilot accounts and subscriptions I used to build a product. I’ve replaced them with a GitLab account on the free tier. The GitLab free tier offers quite a lot compared to GitHub, but there are downsides, like no security alerts. However, I can manage for the moment. I’m still not sold on the GitLab Duo subscription, but I’ve covered that with the following subscription change.

I upgraded my ChatGPT account to the Plus plan over the last month, and I think I will keep it for the immediate future. It’s not quite as integrated as Copilot when it comes to assisting with coding, but it works well for diagnosing issues in my code when needed. I also use it more when searching the web for something specific. I still use DuckDuckGo for general searches that I can filter by the most relevant results, but I use ChatGPT for more targeted searches.

Finally, after a few months with Ulysses, I’m just not using it how I thought I would, so I downloaded Bear again and started moving some of my notes over to that to start using it again. Bear feels less formal than Ulysses, which is why I don’t think Ulysses is sticking for me.

We’ll see how the change goes over the next few weeks.

For the first time this year, I’m working from outside in the back garden. Over the summer, I’ll work a lot more between here and the golf club. Once all the usual chores have been done, I’ll share a picture of the back garden office.

After a much-needed lazy Saturday morning, I spent the afternoon doing a dry run of the base for my greenhouse. The bricks are lined up and level, but they need a final layer of concrete to keep them in place. I’m happy with the first run at it, though.

With all the recent activity and updates to browsers and search engines such as Brave and Kagi, I’m still happy and content with DuckDuckGo and Firefox. They continue to work well for me and do what I need them to do.

I’ve been flying under the radar for the last couple of weeks due to circumstances beyond my control. Now that everything is settling back to normal, I can follow my usual plan and get a few things back on track.

I spent the better part of a day preparing a section of the garden for the new greenhouse. Now, I’m reaping the benefits of a hard day’s work by chilling on the couch with a rum, watching golf, and doing some Rails coding on my MacBook.

Hats off to DNSimple’s contact form for support. It includes a dropdown of accounts you are logged into. Being able to select an account makes contacting them much easier and narrows down the location of the reported issue. This is a simple but effective way to improve customer feedback.

My initial experience with Kamal hasn’t been great. At the start of the year, I spent a few days at best with it, but I kept running into issues, which eventually got forgotten. I’m restarting again with Kamal, as I feel it could be of real benefit in hosting my own apps.