At work today I needed to force a new line break in a PDF that I was generating using Reportlab at work today. I tried just adding a newIine using the standard \n, like you would in python, but it seems that the Paragraph class in reportlab swallows the newline character. I found that just entering a standard html break tag worked though. Something like this: header_row.append('MSRP <br />($USD)') In this case the output is…

So there is all sorts of posts out there on how to resize a virtualbox disk when you start getting errors that Windows is running out of disk space. I found most of them to be very confusing. It’s really very fast and easy, so let’s get this done. The first thing to do is open Terminal and switch to the directory that holds you Virtualbox machines. On Mac’s this will usually get you there:…

Upgraded to OSX Mavericks last night, with a little apprehension. Past upgrades have usually broken all sorts of things with my development environment so the next day is spent trying to get my local Django, Python and everything else straightened out. I couldn’t afford to have a bunch of downtime right now though as I have a huge project going on at work that is going to launch in a few weeks.…

So I recently spent a good while recording an incredible screen cast for some documentation I need to create. After finally finishing the recording I was dismayed to find that iShowU had recorded nothing but a GREEN SCREEN. That elicited some colorful language, even if it was just in my head. What the heck happened??! Well, it turns out that this fabulous Macbook Pro I have has 2 graphics chips. 1 of them happens to be more power hungry and so if you have taken your laptop into a quiet room away from your wall charger (which is what I did) that it automatically switches to the external, less power hungry processor to save energy, which means you record green.…

Recently I went looking for an alternative to Dropbox. I wanted something that was a little bit more in my control. As I’ve mentioned before I use Webfaction for most of my hosting needs. There are, in a word, awesome. You may think that Owncloud would be the logical setup step here and I did try that for a while. At first I thought it was great, then it would only connect off and on, then all the files in my internal folders were deleted (luckily I have backups via TimeMachine) and then it wouldn’t connect at all.…

Take a look at this picture over here of the new iMac beside an old one. I’m working on a 21.5” iMac right now and I can’t get spending a bunch of money to save an inch that I never see. Work gets done while your looking at the screen. Maybe they will truly be tons faster but I somehow doubt it.…

Update: Feb. 1st 2013 - It appears they have finally cleaned up all the fraud posts. Living in the Salt Lake City area is fabulous and around here the main market to buy and sell stuff - along with Craigslist - is KSL.com. I’ve sold and purchased several vehicles via the used cars section of their site. Its at ksl.com/auto/. While its a great resource its also absolutely filled with fraudulent postings trying to get people to send money for cars that don’t exist.…

A lot has been made of the train wreck that has been Apple maps but this result showed up for me recently on Google maps making it abundantly clear that sometimes good old common sense is better than the best computer results. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not where its located……

So, I’ve been a Mac guy for a while now. Switching way back in 2007 to a Macbook Pro with Tiger on it. Every update since has gone smooth. I purchased a Mac Mini for my wife in 2009 and its been a great machine that we use at home. A few weeks ago I thought, I know, I’ll update this thing from Leopard to Lion and she’ll love it. Uhh, no.…

My wife gave me a Nook Simple Touch this past Christmas and a few months back I decided to mess around and root it since it seemed like having it be a full fledged Android tablet would be pretty cool, but well, it wasn't that cool. At least I didn't think so. It slowed it down, wore down the battery life and most apps I tried didn't work very well. Turns out I really just like it for reading books, which its awesome at.…