Tag: software

Weeknotes 2020.09.25

Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park

I was on vacation last week in Estes Park, Colorado, visiting the Rocky Mountain National Park. This was somehow my first trip into the mountains, even though I had visited Denver several times during college.

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macOS Local Development Setup

A couple weeks ago I decided to replace MAMP on my MacBook with free tools for local PHP development. I didn’t find a guide online that was perfect for what I wanted, so here are the steps I used, pieced together from several other guides.

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Clearing Plex Caches

Although it’s happening a bit less recently, every once in a while when I add new media to Plex, the metadata does not appear. When this happens I first try doing the usual things like manually refreshing the metadata and emptying the library trash. If it’s still not working, I’ve found that manually deleting the cache files from the computer running the Plex server seems to almost always fix the problem.

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Windows Defender Does Not Play Nice With iTunes

I recently had to reformat my Windows PC and do a fresh install of Windows 10. One of the primary uses for this PC is to run my home iTunes server, but soon after the reformat, it became clear that something was not right with iTunes.

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Virtual Host Rewriting in MAMP

While developing Drupal websites locally, I found it to be somewhat of a pain to sync all of the uploaded files (specifically images) from the server to my computer. In some cases, this could be hundreds of megabytes worth of files to download, but without downloading them, my local version of the site would look incomplete with missing images.

I primarily use MAMP for local development, and it turns out that MAMP PRO has an option to add additional virtual host parameters to each individual site hosted locally within the app. Using this feature, I am able to add a rewrite rule to have the MAMP look for photos on the live site when they don’t exist locally, removing the need to download the files onto my computer.

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The Problem With E-mail Apps

A few weeks ago I ran across an article on The Verge titled “The best Gmail app for the iPhone is now made by Microsoft”. The article talks a lot about the new Microsoft Outlook app (a rebranding of the recently purchased Acompli app), but there was one quote that really stuck out to me:

…nobody wants to just give me an email client for my phone: everyone’s gunning to reinvent the entire experience and revolutionize the speed and efficiency of my communications.

That quote really summarizes my frustration with all these new e-mail apps. I don’t need someone to “reinvent” my e-mail experience. I don’t want to turn my e-mail into a to-do list. I just need someone to make an e-mail app that does e-mail well.

I did end up trying the new Outlook app for iPhone and still found it to be lacking in one major area: it seems to only be able to add one label per message, much like standard folders. The whole point of Gmail having labels instead of folders is so that messages can have multiple labels and thus can be found in multiple locations. Oh well, the search for a good e-mail app continues.

Messages History Location

At some point Apple decided to remove the option in the Messages app to choose the location to save chat history. Ever since that change, I always seem to forget where my chat history is saved. Here is where chat history is now stored:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/Archive

Update

The location of the Messages history has moved in Yosemite. Here is the new location:

~/Library/Messages

That directory contains the Messages chat history, as well as all attachments.