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Spotify Tools

29 Oct 2019

Discovered two new handy tools for Spotify:

Tool for bulk adding songs to playlists: playlisttools

Tool for removing duplicates from playlists: spotify-dedup

Back to Windows Redux

03 Oct 2016

In the months since my last Back to Windows post I’ve had a few additions to my toolbox

Visual Studio Plugins:

Save All The Time - automatically save, all the time
Productivity Power Tools 2015 - lots of useful helps

Windows apps:

WinDirStat - Disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool

Back to Windows

22 Apr 2016

I’ve been coming back to Visual Studio and Windows development after a 5 year stint with web developement on OSX. Definitely feeling some friction in Windows:

  • cmd window doesn’t resize or copy/paste, can’t clear with shortcut.
  • no package manager [not sold on chocolately]
  • Visual Studio is big and heavy
  • TFS is slow and merging across branches loses history.

So, here’s some things I’ve found that make the transition a bit better.

Visual Studio Plugins:

Fix File Encoding - automatically strip UTF-8 signature from html/js
Code Compare - a better code compare
File Nesting - handy for managing partials by nesting them under their ‘parent’ in a VS project/solution. Build Monitor - Show how long builds take
Web Analyzier - Incorporate ESLint, TSLint into Visual Studio

Windows apps:

Diffmerge - great for comparing files/folder
ConEmu - great command shell replacement (supports, cmd, bash, etc.)
AstroGrp - FOSS gui grep
AutoHotkey - swiss army knife for windows keyboard shortcuts. I currently have shortcuts for volume up/down and found a script that lets me Ctrl+L to clear cmd!
Launchy - Like Spotlight/Alfred
Robocopy - built in windows command for better, restartable copies. There’s a GUI to help navigate all the knobs.
LICECAP - cross platform animated gif screen capture.

Blog Refresh

19 Dec 2015

I’ve been meaning to come back and put a little refresh on the blog, make it a little more responsive, etc. I found I had some extra time With Christmas break upon us and was inspired by Joshua Lande’s post.

First step was to update the github-pages (20 -> 40) which brought along lots of goodies including Jekyll (1.5.1 -> 2.4.0). One happy surprise was support for SASS, though I’m a fan LESS. Ot was an interesting exercise to make the coffee stain logo responsive using SASS.

Next was to get Google Analytics set up which was pretty easy once I understood the difference between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

Next steps:

  • try to get my daughter off wordpress and blogging with markdown ;)
  • blog more (angular2, gulp, react)

New Mac essentials

01 Sep 2014

First

  • Xcode via App Store
  • Dropbox
  • pwSafe

Configure

  • generate SSH key, save off passphrase in pwSafe, and configure in github
  • git config --global (user.name, user.email, core.excludefile)

Download

  • brew
  • oh my zsh and update .zshrc for: download theme wedisagree_nadig symlink common files to profile ln -s ~/Dropbox/Development/profile/zshrc .zshrc and any others.
  • Google Chrome - sign in to bring over bookmarks, apps (ghostery, clear cache, batarang, js errors notifier).
  • Alfred zip and change shortcut to cmd + space after changing Spotlight’s to something else (F5) FAQ

Development

Disable TextEdit’s smartquotes.

Rails

  • redis brew install redis
  • MySQL & MySQLWorkBench download dmgs from mysql.com. cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/MySQL/Workbench/connections.xml ~/Dropbox/Development/ to save connections for MySQLWB.
  • Jetbrains stable: RubyMine, WebStorm I like to periodically export my settings from each of these to my ~/Dropbox/Development folder.
  • RVM & bundler gem install bundler.

Mobile

Both

  • Node brew install node

Non-essential

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