Author: Alex

Web Developer. I also love board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and drum corps.

Better Alfred Hotkeys with Karabiner

One of the better decisions in my work was pushing as many of my workflows as possible through Alfred. My brain is now configured that if I ever think “I need to do…” it just immediately opens Alfred and muscle memory takes over from there.

Tonight I downloaded Karabiner and this is definitely going to level up my Alfred game again. The first immediate boost was mapping the nearly-useless Caps Lock key to a “hyper” key, equal to Shift+Ctrl+Option+Command.

All my Alfred stuff is now available at CapsLock+F, keeping my left hand on the home row. My frequently-used Clipboard viewer is now at CapsLock+C, a comfortable shift.

And now I’m waaaay less likely for any of my Alfred commands to interfere with keyboard shortcuts! Had that been happening to me? Yes it had. But no more!

I’m going to think through some other useful mappings (like maybe prefixing some TextExpander snippets with a weirder combo) later but even this first change is proving useful. h/t Wes Bos on Syntax

Featured Image from Caleb Woods

Another Day, Another Deadlift

Today

Second trip to the new gym. Deadlifts and overhead presses plus walks there and back.

Made some decent choices about food – the only irresponsible thing being a trip to Dairy Del in the evening.

Grocery shop, dishes, laundry folding, straightening up the house all as a matter of course.

Tons of time with Grace today since it’s the weekend and Ber had an event to attend. She’s getting a lot better at playing with toys of her own accord. We haven’t even be trying to potty train and she apparently figured out how to do that on her own to our pleasant surprise.

Podcasts

The last episode of Cortex, Minimum Viable, was so freaking good. Made even better today when listening to ATP. I audibly snorted at the reference to fanny packs.

Reading

Been re-reading a bunch of classic MMM articles recently. Also a lot of re-visiting Apprenticeship Patterns as I think I’m at somewhat of a milestone in position at Makespace and needed to remind myself what road I’m on. I finally got started on Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators and I’m not far into it but really did enjoy the section on Ada Lovelace.

Back at the Gym

UofL has a small gym about a 15 minute walk from my house. We’ve meant to join it ever since we found out just how much cheaper it is than the Y. We finally joined on Monday night.

Tonight was my first workout there and I had a blast. The walk itself is just enough time for warmup and to think through what I want to get done. Since this was my first time working out there I first walked around the place, just to feel more comfortable. Once I was ready to lift, I stuck my old favorites: squats and deadlifts. They’re never not good for you. More variety will come soon.

Walk back home was the perfect cool down and I was ready for my weekly “decompress” night.

 

CSS Grid Course from Wes Bos

I’m turning into a bit of a Wes Bos fanboy. He’s about my age, but been in the game much longer than I. His development career seems to match a lot of what I’m trying to make mine: advanced WordPress and full stack JS.

But most recently I’ve enjoyed his (free) CSS Grid course. The more I do with CSS Grid the more I like it and this course really shows off what it does well.

Stealing From Cortex: Year Theme

The latest episode of Cortex was so so good. Myke and Grey have discussed in previous years that neither is fond of New Year’s Resolutions and tend not to have personal goal setting in the strict sense. But Grey liked the idea of having yearly “themes” and Myke stole the idea from him. Now the thought technology is understood enough it deserves its own episode for 2018.

Cortex #62: 2018 Yearly Themes

It was so good I’ve decided to steal the idea. I’m working on creating a year theme for myself. Several ideas come to mind but it’s all a bit of a jumble. Maybe by the end of the year I’ll know what it was, and next year I’ll better know what 2019 should be.