Monthly Archives: February 2014

Any major dude with half a heart surely will be at WordCamp Connecticut on May 10

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at the WordPress Stamford Meetup, organized by Clint Warren. I musta put a bug in his ear or something, because I got a follow-up email last month letting me know he was organizing the very first WordCamp Connecticut. I’ll be giving a talk about BuddyPress.

The organizers are still looking for speakers, so if you’re a WordPress person in the CT vicinity (Stamford is an easy Metro-North ride from NYC), please consider applying to present! And if you’re just looking to nerd out for a day, add yourself to the mailing list so you’ll know when tickets are available. DO IT

Garmin Forerunner 310XT hacks

I’ve been running with a Garmin Forerunner 310XT for about eight months now. I like it pretty well (running with a HR monitor has totally changed my running for the better, but that’s a subject for another post), but there are a couple really annoying things about it, which I’ve been forced to hack workarounds for.

  • For me, the plastic that houses the transponder on the chest strap caused pretty severe chafing. I think this is something that Garmin is aware of; my wife has a previous version from the same series (the 305, I think), and the strap design does seem improved. But for me, the first month or two was pretty terrible. The chafing was awful, and running four days a week, I never had a chance to heal. I tried all different kinds of lube, tried different ways of positioning the monitor (around the center of my chest vs just under my armpits), played with different levels of tightness. What ultimately ended up working for me was this. I wear it around the narrowest part of my chest, with the strap fairly loose. When I’m running more than five or six miles, I use a bit of runner’s glide. And – this has made the biggest difference for me – I wrapped the big hunk of plastic in a couple layers of athletic tape. It still irritates me a bit, but there’s no more bleeding.

    2014-02-16 15.11.17

  • The watch has this cool feature where you put a little USB nub in your computer, and it’s supposed to auto-download your latest activity as soon as the watch comes into range. This has worked for me maybe five times, tops. Typically, the software doesn’t recognize the watch at all, and for the first few weeks I owned it, I struggled to find a workflow that’d let me store my workouts on my computer. The only way I could make it work consistently is by re-pairing the watch + computer every time I want to download. Here’s what I do when I get back from a run (I use a Mac for this):
    1. Close the Garmin ANT Agent program in the toolbar
    2. Delete the local Garmin data folder: rm -rf ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin
    3. Start the Garmin ANT Agent application
    4. From the Garmin toolbar menu, choose “Pair with New Devices”. Within a few minutes, it’ll start re-syncing

    Aside from the general fact that this it’s Extremely Stupid, the annoying thing about the process is that it takes progressively longer to complete the more workouts you have on your watch (because you’re deleting your local cache, it’s got to download all of them each time). So, every few weeks, I delete all activities from the watch. But before doing so – because I don’t trust Garmin’s “Garmin Connect” online service – I make sure to copy the .tcx files from my local directory to some safe location. That way, I have offline access to my running history if I want it. cp ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/Devices/xxxxxxxxxxxx/History/* /some/other/location (where “xxxxxxxxxxxx” is your device ID).

Recommendations for per-project time tracking tools

I don’t bill by the hour very much anymore, but I still like to keep rough track of time spent on individual client projects, for my own purposes. I currently use a simple spreadsheet, with tabs for each project/client. Yesterday I asked on Twitter what tools people were using for this purpose:

Here are some responses I got. I can’t personally endorse anything on this list, but it might be a helpful starting point for others.

Recent Anthologize updates

Anthologize, you are neglected, but not forgotten!

In the past week or so, I’ve done two maintenance releases (0.7.2 and 0.7.3) for Anthologize. A few highlights:

  • Fixed some issues with the way TCPDF saves image files in a temporary cache. This should help to avoid the dreaded “TCPDF ERROR: Can’t open image file” fatal error when exporting to PDF on some server configurations.
  • Fixed some issues with the way that Anthologize’s JS and CSS files are loaded, for better compatibility with other plugins and with SSL wp-admin.
  • Fixed a bug that gave non-admins the ability to change settings on some multisite configurations.

Speaking of not forgotten, I haven’t forgotten my friends who supported my Anthologize campaign back in 2012. This post goes out to Eric A Mann, an outstanding WordPress developer and blogger. Thanks for supporting Anthologize, Eric!