Tag: Apple
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Breaking away from the Apple Ecosystem
I’ve recently come to a crossroad with Apple and it’s ecosystem. I’ve had an iPhone 4S for the last 2 years and I was itching for a new device. Giving the current iPhone lifecycle, it makes more sense to hold out for the next iteration of the iPhone than jump…
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Using Keyring Access on the OSX Command-line
If you’re like me, you probably have a private dotfiles that supplements your public dotfiles repository. It contains private values like API keys and [hopefully not] plaintext passwords. There’s even a good chance you’re using git submodules or a setup script to manage the inclusion of the private stuff. Well…
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Apple iOS 7 Beta Review
Like many people, I went ahead and upgraded my phone to the Developer Preview of Apple’s latest iOS, version 7. Days later, I’m wondering if I will be downgrading next week because of a handful of issues that I would consider to be critical defects for my own usage. It’s…
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Command line website uptime checker using the OS X Notification Center
Honestly, the title of this post covers all the bases of my pre-Turkey consumption proof of concept turned full on project. Just a simple Ruby script that parses a configuration file and checks to see if the site is up (returning 2xx or 3xx code). If the site appears down…
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Apple Fanboy-dom – 3 month recap
Been exclusively using Apple products for my computing needs for 3 months now and figured it was time for a recap to discuss what I’ve liked and disliked thus far. Likes I’m still loving the ease of use and especially loving the way all of the devices work together and…
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All it took was owning an iPhone for a week …
… to completely sway my opinion of the brand. The Friday before Father’s Day I broke down and bought a 27” iMac to replace my 4 year old Dell PC with absolutely no intention of running Linux on it. Since then, I coerced my employer to upgrade the dev team…
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Dumping Android for an iPhone
This should probably be accompanied by a formal press release, but I’ve dumped my Android phone for an iPhone 4S. As of late, I’ve been comparing Android to Linux in the mid-to-late 90s. It’s great if you like to fight with your system and constantly deal with adapting to it’s…
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My Search for the Perfect Desktop Environment Part 2: How I spent 2 weeks attempting to be an Apple Fanboy
In case you missed it, here’s part 1 of this series. So earlier this year I got my hands on an 11” Macbook Air that we had laying around the office. This was around the same time my 14” Dell “Black Friday” laptop starting giving me shit (cheap system, over…
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Spell & Speak
One thing that I really enjoy about OSX (possibly the only thing) is the text to speech capabilities. The command line application say sounds good and doesn’t seem nearly as buggy as some of the open source counterparts. Now what I’ve been doing recently to help get my daughter acclimated…
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First Impressions of the iPad from an Android fanatic
If you don’t already know me, let me just preface this by telling you an a staunch Linux user as well as advocate, I prefer my Android phone to my wife’s iPhone and after recently giving OSX a full-time shot for a week, I’m no closer to switching. Now that…