I can’t remember the first blog post I ever wrote, but I do remember mis-spelling the title of that blog as Hello Wolrd and I left it that way. I always do this, I start a blog and I write the first post in it and I make excuses about how I need to re-start blogging and writing and ruminate about all the blogs I have had in the past and that this blog is going to be the one to rule them all.

This is another one of those posts!

Why?

I am turning 40 for the 2nd time Friday, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m getting really tired of the content on social media. I tend to have small things to say and I usually post on social media when I want to say it. A month ago I decided to get off social media for the rest of the year, and I’m even considering getting off it forever (or at least for a long time). But I still have things to say! Not much, but a few things. I also have said a lot in the past on all these various blogs and I do intend to port them over and back-date them to this site. Hopefully it becomes a place I can share what I think outside of social media, which has just become crazy these days. TBH the real reason I’m off social media is reels the doom-scrolling black holes of this feature of most social media really is the worst thing about social media. But, I digress…

An Update

Again, I can’t remember that last post I wrote but I currently work at AwesomeMotive after 7 years at WebDevStudios. I left WDS because I wanted to change the kind of work I was doing. They were a great company to work for and I often miss things about working at WDS. But I wanted to work on a single product or plugin, and that’s what I get to do everyday working on AffiliateWP.

What else? I’m living in Albuquerque, NM now. I lived in Phoenix for about 10 or so years and we moved back to New Mexico (grew up in Roswell, NM) to be closer to family and for our kids to enjoy time with their grandparents and great-grandparents. We moved here as a bit of an experiment, but it’s turned out to be a place we really love to live and watch our kids grow. So we’ll likely be here for a while.

Living in ABQ has really improved my involvement with the Tennis Community here. I’ve won a couple tournaments here and I really enjoy the people that make up this community. Every weekend just-about I’m playing Tennis!

So last night I decided I was going to try using Safari/Webkit DevTools. I asked myself: What is Firefox Developer Edition/Chrome DevTools giving me that Safari DevTools isn’t? I thought I’d try it out for a couple of weeks… I also asked myself the same thing about iTerm2, so I also decided to try out the basic macOS Terminal application.

Of course, I’m a stickler for UI consistency. It took some time for me to get Visual Studio Code to resemble WebKit DevTools, but I must say, I really like it!

Update: August 5, 2024 – I’ve switched back to iTerm as my Terminal. The reason? Panes. I simply didn’t like how Terminal.app handled panes, and I had a few instances where I wanted to use them. For example, I was using a command to transcribe some audio to text using Whisper, but I also needed to monitor htop because it was significantly impacting my CPU usage. I required a pane… unless I had a specific need. So, my philosophy has been to ask myself if a native macOS application provides what I require. As soon as I discover that a native app doesn’t offer what I need, I’ll consider alternatives. For instance, Raycast turned out that I only utilized 3% of its features. Since I switched to Spotlight, it has been more than sufficient.

Update: July 15, 2024 – I’ve also abandoned Raycast. I once again questioned whether I genuinely use it. In reality, I don’t think I do. I could, of course, but in truth, I only use about 10% of its features. Therefore, I disabled it (I’ll still utilize the AI features I paid for). I installed a snippet and clipboard history tool, enabled Spotlight, and moved on.

Update: June 11, 2024 – So far, I’m still using the built-in macOS Terminal and WebKit. Terminal has occasionally behaved erratically, but I always load up the application I’m working on in iTerm, and it usually turns out that the issue also occurs in iTerm. However, there are a few things I’ve had to compromise on in iTerm. It allows you to remap right ⌘ to CTRL, but I can’t do that in Terminal. That’s okay with me; I’ve simply remapped alt-s in Micro and called it a day. I don’t use panes (although panes are a pain, haha), but I’ll use tabs. So far, that’s it… I’m still waiting for a gotcha.

Update: June 3, 2024 – I’ve also been moving all my to-do lists (yes, even for work) to Reminders and using Notes more frequently. I’m genuinely enjoying the feeling of having less… less apps, less organizing!

Using automator make an app that runs this applescript:

on run {input, parameters}
    set targetURL to "https://example.com" -- Replace with your desired URL

    tell application "Safari"
        activate
        set windowList to windows
        set windowFound to false

        repeat with currentWindow in windowList
            if (URL of current tab of currentWindow) contains targetURL then
                set index of currentWindow to 1 -- Bring the window to the front
                set windowFound to true
                exit repeat
            end if
        end repeat

        if not windowFound then
            -- No window with the URL found, create a new one
            make new document with properties {URL:targetURL}
        end if
    end tell

    return input
end run

Change the URL, and save it as an application, and add that application to the dock.

This will automatically detect a window you already have open with the URL and activate it instead.