Bart talks tech of bicycles on Chit Chat Across the Pond, Caleb Fong tells us about Tabliss for Firefox and Chrome, Ed tells us about the open source mind mapping app Freeplane and I’ll tell you how Dave Hamilton helped me automation chapter marks in Hindenburg and tried to convince me that clipboard managers are a wonderful thing. Finally, Bart is back with another installment of Security Bits.
Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, August 11, 2019, and this is show number 744.
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Bart is a system admin at a university, which means there is a very wee tiny window of time during the summer when all system upgrades can be done. They can’t risk bringing down the registration system, or the system to see classes and all that sort of thing. This means that every summer Bart is positively slammed at work. I have only just noticed that this is a consistent pattern (even though we’ve been recording together for over a decade.)
The effect on you is that our normal schedule of Programming By Stealth every other week gets disrupted. Add to that my numerous vacations, and the result is that we haven’t published a Programming By Stealth since July 12th. The enormous amount of work (and mental energy) that goes into creating these lessons is simply not there for Bart during the summer.
The good news is that he has been noodling an idea to tell you guys about the technology of choosing a new bicycle. I thought that was something I knew a fair bit about, but when we recorded Chit Chat Across the Pond this week to talk bike tech, I was astonished at how little I know about modern bikes. We had fun, it flowed easily for Bart and it’s a great episode.
You can find this week’s episode #604 in your Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite feed, or in the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed, or of course you can always listen over at podfeet.com/…
Blog Posts
Let’s start off the show with another interesting find by Caleb Fong, aka @geekosupremo
Tabliss for Firefox and Chrome – by Caleb Fong
I played around with Tabliss and discovered that it works in Chrome as well as Firefox, and there’s even a web version. That sounds weird but it would make a nice home page for any browser. I uploaded a very peaceful photo of the lake from our vacation and it really makes me happy to look at it – I guess that’s the bliss part of Tabliss.
There’s no Safari extension but you can kind of make it work there too. If you go to web.tabliss.io, you can configure the web page just like the extension in the other browsers. Then set your home page to that URL, and set new tabs to the home page and you’ve got all the functionality in Safari. I don’t know if I’ll keep it but it’s looking really fun to me! This is so cool, Caleb – how do you find these gems?
We’ve got another listener contribution, this time from our good friend and NosillaCastaway Ed Tobias.
Freeplane Mind Mapping by Ed Tobias
I’m a true believer in open source tools, so I love the idea of Freeplane. I had used FreeMind a hundred years ago so cool to see the new fork of the tool be in active development. It’s so cool that you can have the automatic color-coding by keywords and such, that’s really awesome. I also love that you were able to pull in a spec and have it automatically make nodes so you could move ideas around. That’s super powerful.
After Ed sent me the audio, he sent along another thought about it.
Freeplane does not have an iOS companion app. You can import Freeplane maps into iThoughts, but it doesn’t go the other way. I don’t use the iPad for mind maps so this isn’t an issue for me. If only you could run Java on iOS – now that would be cool.
I do like a tool that runs on all platforms, which is one of the reasons I like iThoughts, but Ed makes a good point that you could have iThoughts on your iPad but Freeplane on your Mac and swap the files back and forth. That’s pretty cool. Thanks, Ed for a new tool for our tool belts.
Clipboard Managers and Keyboard Maestro
Support the Show
I know I can never hold a candle to Frank on doing my pledge break, but I’ll do my best. This week Boris Brockmann AND Caleb Fong both became patrons of the Podfeet Podcasts. I can’t decide which one of these gentlemen made me happier with the contributions. On the one hand, I’ve never spoken to Boris directly so it’s super cool to know that he’s out there listening, and getting value for the work we put in here. On the other hand, we’ve got Caleb doing audio contributions and helping out like crazy in our Slack community (podfeet.com/slack) and yet he still felt the desire to contribute to support the show financially. I’ve decided that they both rock.
If you’d like to rock like Boris and Caleb, please take a moment to go over to podfeet.com/patreon and choose a dollar amount that’s right for you and your family to support the show.
Security Bits – 10 August 2019
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.