March 16, 2021

Disk Drill to the rescue on yet another crashed WD drive

I’m not sure what it is, but I haven’t had very good luck with Western Digital drives. This weekend was no exception as yet another WD drive has crashed, and in the middle of a file copy. I’ve been using a portable WD Elements 3TB external drive on my MacBook Air for about a year now. By use, I mean about 100 hours of use, if that. It’s basically a way to transfer files back to my other Mac. In fact, the drive hasn’t actually been connected to anything for at least 8 months. Further, I haven’t used it as a portable drive so it hasn’t been jarred or dropped. Over the weekend, I started a file copy of 50GB. After 5 minutes of successfully copying files, the drive was no longer recognized as connected. And that was the end of it. The drive wouldn’t show up in Finder, couldn’t be seen in Disk Utility. It was on and spinning, […]

March 15, 2021

Adding WordCounter for Mac to my back of tricks

Yes, I have a lot of writing apps. And now I’m taking WordCounter for a test drive. There is nothing new about counting words, but WordCounter goes a little bit further. It can track the number of words written across multiple apps. For example, you can see how much you write in TaskPaper, Scrivener, Slack, DevonThink Office Pro, Hemingway Editor, Email and Notion. That can be very useful from a statistical point of view. I have Time Sink showing how much time I spend in each app. WordCounter will now show me how much I actually type in each application. How much of my day is actually spent writing something? It’s meant to help writers achieve their daily word count. If have you a 2000 word goal, but use 4 apps, did you hit the mark? This would certainly answer the question. It can show which apps you are most productive with. Are you writing massive outlines, but only a […]

March 15, 2021

Some fun YouTube content creators I’ve been watching

I’m not sure if more content is being created or I’m simply paying more attention, but I’ve “discovered” some really creators on YouTube as of late. I think a lot of videos are merely done for shock value, but these guys make content that is amusing and educational. For the Mac, I like these channels: Luke Miani/Noah Rubin/Neil Parfitt/Constant Geekery For some musical interludes: Davie504/Ichika Nito/Charles Berthoud/Daniel Thrasher I don’t and can’t play the bass or any other musical instrument, which makes these guys all the more entertaining. For topics related to writing on the Mac: William Gallagher For gaming, especially in the City Builder genre: Raptor/The Spiffing Brit

March 12, 2021

DevUtils from BundleHunt is a solid purchase

One of the tools I picked up from BundleHunt is DevUtils, and it’s a solid purchase. I wasn’t aware of this tool before, but will certainly take advantage moving forward. DevUtils is a series of tools and formatters that can help in a variety of situations. For example, there is the Unix Time Converter, which can help with tools like JMeter. The log files are in Unix time. Next is the RegEx Tester. Even though there are online testers, it’s always good to have one that isn’t dependent on the Internet. Another good tool to have is the Text Diff Checker. I use this quite a bit when checking form text on a site. I paste the text from the site and the text from source and make sure they match. Saves huge amounts of time. I’ve been using DeltaWalker, also a BundleHunt item. Other checkers include, XML Beautify, JSON Formatter, HTML Preview, and Lorem Ipsum generator. The “lorem” tool […]

March 12, 2021

A full year of working remotely

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve circled around to complete a year of working remotely. I’m sure many are coming up on the same “anniversary.” Again, the reasoning behind all this is terrible, but I’ve been shockingly content to work from my home office all these months. Many would say I’ve been preparing to work in isolation for decades. The reason being, I have strong introvert traits. I’m not a big fan of crowds either, which could easily be social anxiety. I’m not going to add “disorder” since I haven’t been “diagnosed” nor do I think it’s a disorder. I’m very content to work on my own. If we keep the crowd to under 5 people, we’re all good. Just to make the point, social anxiety and antisocial are NOT the same thing. Anyway, here’s a few benefits I’ve gotten from working from home: I get more exercise now that I’m not stuck in traffic. My work from home computer […]

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