I’ve switched to the excellent Visual Studio Code as my default editor after configuring and trying a bunch of different editors. But more on that in another post. In trying to get everything set up the way I wanted I noticed that in certain cases my external monitor on my MacBook or iMac gave me two different colors on the background. (Note that it didn’t occur when using the retina display at all) One darker set of colored squares where text or code was and a slightly lighter shade on the rest of the background.…

In case I haven’t talked about it before, I’m really into e-commerce. I love everything about it and I run multiple stores and I’m always watching for new e-commerce solutions that are coming out. I’ve tried Reaction Commerce before, but with it’s recent 1.0 release I figured it was time to get serious and build a store out with it to really explore it’s capabilites. Their install docs are really simple so I charged ahead.…

I’ve finally updated this blog. In the past I built most of the websites I worked on using the excellent Django web framework built in Python. In switching jobs a little over a year ago, I moved to an team that didn’t run any Python and instead used PHP and the Laravel framework. This greatly reduced my opportunity to work in Django on a daily basis and I instead spent most of my time working on front end code.…

Step by step instructions for setting up virtualenv on MacOS.…

Update Jan. 2017 I now use Flux to slowly dim the lights as it gets later at night. If you’re working late and find your screen is just too dang bright this little Shades utility is a beautiful thing. #UsingIt…

After switching to a new Mac recently I installed my favorite text editor Sublime Text 3. While most things picked right up because I sync my preferences through my private cloud, the Django template language snippets and highlighting provided by Djaniero were not working. I couldn’t install it again either. If you’re package for Sublime that you are trying to install is not available it’s most likely because it’s already installed (but not working).…

For the past year or so I’ve been developing locally at work using Vagrant. After making some updates to models I found I needed to be able to easily inspect my postgres database in the Vagrant virtual machine. Ideally I could use pgAdmin3 to connect to that database and luckily it wasn’t too hard. There may be a step or two in these instructions that aren’t needed but I’m including everything I did because I know that it works.…

A few years ago with my first to 3rd generation iPhones I found that I couldn’t trust the alarm. Sometimes I would set it and it simply would either not go off or it would be so quiet that it never roused me from sleep. I quickly learned that I was an idiot to trust it and always added a second alarm clock to the mix if I had anything important to wake up for.…

Finally, something cool again happening in (non-) stock photography. Remember like 10 years ago when iStockphoto was killing it. Love what Death To The Stock Photos is doing. You really should go there and sign up for their list.…

So today I took the plunge and upgraded to Yosemite. With all of the Django and Homebrew setup on my mac it’s always interesting to see what breaks when upgrading. First thing that was off was Postgres was not started, which is what I use for local dev so I can use a production dataset when testing. When I tried to run “brew doctor” I got an error: Error: No such file or directory - /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/clang From experience from past upgrades I know this is because command line tools are not installed correctly.…