Wow, this week I posted every day! Most of it consisted of “spontaneous” posts, outside my planned project-posts and series.

I postponed some of the planned posts I prepared in favor of the more “timely posts” of this week. There’s an interesting distinction between “timely posts” and “timeless posts”. It wasn’t explicitly clear in my mind before thinking about it this week.

I try to write mostly “timeless posts”. Posts that I consider to have value now as well as in the future. Posts of this kind can be published now or next month, and it wouldn’t matter much.

On the other hand, “timely posts” usually have short shelf-lives. They may be super relevant today, and completely useless next week. I don’t specifically object those. I assume that my potential contribution to topics of transient short-lived value is limited. I’m not a large tech-site with a team of (pseudo?) geeks constantly looking for the next buzz.

This week was interesting, because almost daily I had something to say on some transient subject (Google Inbox buzz, OS X Yosemite upgrade, etc.). Did you notice the difference? What kind of content type I produce you enjoy more, and why? I’d love to know, so drop a comment, or tell me personally!

In case you missed it, I started this week a new series, dubbed Shell-Foo. I’m excited about it! I love “elegant” (read “brutal”) ways to do complex things from the command line! It’s something I wanted to learn more about for a long time, and a similar new internal mailing list in DayJob helps a lot. It’s nice that I can shamelessly rip off that mailing list.. 🙂

Also this week, I finished “reading” my first audio book from Audible. It was Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (also available on Amazon as a real book), at total play time of 10 hours 18 minutes. I didn’t like it much, but I can’t say if it’s the story or the format. I guess I’ll see how it goes with the next books.

The Weekly Review is (hopefully) a recurring summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

Blog posts from the last week

1. Shared a quick WordPress tip on escaping Shortcodes in posts.
2. My how-to guide on local WordPress sandbox with Bitnami on OS X.
3. Shared my impressions after 3 days of using Google Inbox.
4. First ShellFoo post, on random log sampling.
5. Ran into issues with Homebrew after OS X upgrade.
6. Shared more Inbox feedback.
7. The previous weekly review.

In the coming weeks, I plan to continue writing on the website side project, and the SCons series. Hopefully, I will be able to squeeze in some Mac training as well. The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

Backblaze published a report on HD reliability. It was interesting to see how enterprise-grade drives don’t really add value over consumer-grade ones. At such significant price points, I’d expect significant value-add! Guess it’s another example of marketing labels that are meant just to generate revenue…

MPS YouTube is a terminal-based YouTube player. It can search and play audio/video from YouTube via the command line. That’s great!

Lifehackers Eric Ravenscraft ran a nice writeup on Inbox.

Adam Dachis posted Mac Automator apps to automate disabling distractions (beyond just Do Not Disturb mode) for enhanced productivity.

This Gizmodo article by David Nield on OS X Yosemite bugs and fixes goes well with my Homebrew issues.

Side project updates

As you can imagine, I’m still elbow deep in the website project. As expected, a new site comes with new technical issues. Please, do report issues that cross your path.

This week I fixed a bug in the Syntax Highlighter that caused a offset in the line numbers on Firefox. h/t @GilD for spotting and reporting it! Here are some details on the bug & fix if you’re curious.