Category: Computers
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AHHHHHHH.
Schrödinger’s Shift Key – Allen Pike – Oh thank heavens. I KNEW something changed, but I didn’t know what. But man do I hate that shift key.
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Better Automated Flipboard Sharing
David tweeted to me the other day to point out a problem with my automated Flipboard posting.
<blockquote”>@web_goddess I reckon your Flipboard script might need some more work. Keep seeing the Personal Branding link.— dead gar (@gilmae) July 23, 2014
To be honest, I’d spotted that one myself previously but chose to ignore it simply because I didn’t think many people were still reading the blog. But never let it be said I don’t listen to my audience! His tweet was just the prompt I needed to fix up my script.
You’ll recall from before that I’ve been using Pocket as an intermediary to Flipboard. I’m a lazy coder, so I was basically just scraping the previous day’s posts from the RSS feed Pocket publishes for my account. There are two problems with that approach:
- My Pocket account fills up with saved articles, and I don’t know if there’s any limit to how many they’ll let you store. So I had to periodically go in and clean it out.
- Certain stories kept appearing at the top of my RSS feed, even though I’d saved them days ago. I believe this is because Pocket had subsequently flagged them as “trending” (which I could see with a little badge when I went to Pocket) and somehow that kept bumping them up the list.
So I bit the bullet today and replaced the RSS script with one that uses the official Pocket Developer API. Now every day my script retrieves my list of items, constructs a blog post out of them, and then deletes each one from my account. Pretty sweet, huh? That takes care of both problems. I’m happy.
Note: I’m still a lazy coder though, so rather than implement proper OAuth (when I’m the only user), I instead found this StackOverflow question with a helpful comment that pointed me to this handy tool. After you create your app in Pocket and get your consumer key, just plug it in there, authorise your app, and retrieve your access key. Easy peasy!
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Photo post
It’s She Hacks night, so I brought my friend Ada Lovelace along.
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When I Moved Abroad | Mozilla IT
When I Moved Abroad | Mozilla IT – Great analogy.
“It is not sexist to have a women-only space in a community that’s so very male-oriented and has so many men in it. It is (arguably) a necessity if you want more women to be a part of the community.”
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How to get your conference talk accepted – Chad Fowler
How to get your conference talk accepted – Chad Fowler – Thinking about doing more speaking at industry events. I like it. It’s fun.
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You Need a Budget
In the past I’ve written about the Snook’s and my budget approach and how we used MoneyWell extensively. However, a few months ago we switched to something new and the time’s come for me to enthusiastically recommend YNAB instead. The impetus for the change is pretty simple: the Snook got a Nexus 5 phone from work, and MoneyWell doesn’t support Android phones at all. (And in their now-deleted forums, they basically said they wouldn’t ever.) So I went researching, and that’s how I found YNAB. I tested it out for a couple days, which was enough for me to happily plunk down $60 for a full license.
While the basic concepts are the same as in MoneyWell, YNAB just makes some things so much simpler. The UI itself is easy to use and looks very nice. Setting up our initial budget for January was simple and quick. It’s cross-platform and works on Windows and Mac (with apps for iPhone and Android). Syncing from our various phones took less than 30 seconds to set up and works automatically whenever we put transactions into the app. It’s got a “reconciliation mode” that makes it easy to find missing transactions, as well as force a reconciliation when I just can’t work out where the last $10 in cash went. I used to spend a good hour each month with MoneyWell totalling up our wants, needs, and savings to put into a spreadsheet, but YNAB just does it all automatically. It also prominently displays our net worth on the budget screen, so when I input something frivolous like a $4 cup of coffee, I actually see that big number decrease. That’s a huge psychological incentive to cut your spending! The company has a great blog and podcast where they give you tips on using the software and on managing your finances. I love supporting a company that makes excellent software that actually improves people’s lives! (This is a totally unsolicited endorsement. I just think YNAB is awesome!)
My only complaint about YNAB – and it’s a tiny one – is just that so much of the focus of the company and app is on getting people off the “paycheck-to-paycheck” cycle, and that’s not really advice I need. It’s incredibly important though and I’m glad they do it! I just want to see more advice for those of us that are past that step and wondering how to implement longer term financial planning. Like I said though, tiny complaint.