The true measure of a new best practice is how painful it is to return to projects that don’t use it.

Screeny Green Screen Revisited

I was certainly not alone in my problem with Screeny recording nothing but a green screen. Interestingly I got the same results from Quicktime, which made me think it was a system issue rather than an app issue.

When experiencing the issue, I was on my (retina) MacBook Pro disconnected from an external monitor. I had been previously connected to a Dell monitor multiple times between then and my last reboot. Based on some tips I saw online, my first step was a reboot which restored Screeny to normal operation.

To test the “external monitor as cause”, I reconnected to my monitor and tried recording on both screens:

- laptop screen: success
- external monitor: success

Then I disconnected from the external monitor and tried again on just the laptop screen: success.

So I have no idea what happened, or how it got “fixed”, but I recommend trying a reboot if you see this issue.

100 App.net Invites

If you’d like to join App.net for free, this link is your huckleberry. There are 100 invites attached to that link, so sign up quickly if you’re interested.

I’ve been finding App.net making it’s way into my social stream more and more these days. With the folks I’m following, I’ve seen engagement ramp from around 5 posts/day to 25-30 posts/day – seemingly overnight. It definitely has that “early Twitter” feel at the moment.

I’ve been looking into some of their technical bits too because I’ll probably create an App.net Tools plugin for WordPress to enable the same “post here, participate there and my data is my data” workflow I use with Twitter and Facebook.

The recent implementation of two-factor authentication is quite nicely done and my experience asking questions in the developer Patter room was extremely positive.

Give it a try, see if it’s for you.

My day always brightens a bit when the API I’m talking to will send back JSON data.

GistBox – Organize Code Snippets →

When people talk about using Capsule for code snippets I think that’s fine, but that’s not what it’s designed for. GistBox is beautiful (appears to be free – no idea how they plan to support it) and finally provides the ability to tag Gists. This is great for code snippets, lousy as a developer journal. That’s the difference between Capsule and Gistbox – both look to be great tools for different jobs (though you certainly can put code snippets in Capsule if you’re also using it as a journal).

What is a simple screen recording app for the Mac that works with retina? Screeny (my previous go-to) fails, as does Voila. #lazytweet

Software is Like Legos

Writing software is a lot like building things with Legos; the really cool part is you get to invent/mold/create many of the Legos you’ll use to build your thing.

If you create them wisely, everything fits together neatly and you have a lovely creation you can build upon and adapt in the future.

If you create them foolishly you can still mash them together to create your thing, but it will be a real bear the next time you need to make an adjustment to it.

GameTonight, now with Event Times

I’ve updated GameTonight to show the time of the event. This is also included in the JSON API and Status Board output. No guarantees that the event times are correct, but they are faithfully represented from the data feed. This is something that I put off for three years because I was having all sorts…

Your first step when you think “I want to do a project that involves dates, times and events.” should be to slap yourself in the face.

That feeling when you know you’ve written this piece of code before but can’t remember what project it was for or where to look for it.

@cfree I’m only one data point, but Time Machine has failed for me 100% of the time and SuperDuper! has succeeded for me 100% of the time.