Aaron Douglas - The Dangling Pointer (Page 10)

Android Emoji Isn't What You Expect

Public Service Announcement - Be careful who you send emoji characters to via text message - they may not be getting the output you expect! I was at a friend's house and she showed me her phone after getting a bunch of cryptic messages from an iOS user.

att

Verizon Wireless & Voice over 3G/LTE

A few years back I switched to Verizon Wireless here in the States which is a predominately CDMA-based carrier with a fairly large LTE 4G network. Previously I was on AT&T which is a traditional GSM network with a LTE 4G network as well. I left AT&

ADHD

I like Shiny Things

Last week I was having a discussion with my coworkers about how I think someone should feel when viewing/interacting with their site stats in the WordPress world. I made a list of things I'd expect and one of them I wrote down was definitely inspired by my

macintosh

Mavericks USB Hub Oddities

I have the strangest glitch happening with Mac OS X Mavericks and I can't find anyone else describing the same issue. I have a D-Link DUB-H7 USB 2.0 hub connected to my Thunderbolt Display which is in turn connected to my retina 15" MacBook Pro. If

Stand for MacBook Pro When It's Closed

I've been using my MacBook Pro with the lid closed and only the external Thunderbolt Display. I'm finding it helps keep focus on the task I'm working on. I didn't want to waste room on my desk with the Griffin laptop stand,

humor

How I Got Well Played Revenge

Last fall I gave a four minute flash talk at our company meetup. Everyone is required to give one and it can be on any topic. I chose to tell a story about how I got revenge on my boss. [wpvideo k15SG13b]

career

Change Your Organization

Martin Fowler coined one of my favorite phrases while on a panel at the XP 2000 Conference regarding change and if your employer isn't willing to change: If you can't change your organization, change your organization! I don't think much of eXtreme Programming but

ADHD

My Attention So Far

In the recent past I blogged about my trials and tribulations with my experiences with ADHD working at Automattic. I figured it was time to give a follow up on how things are going! Back in October last year I started on a medication called Vyvanse to help me cope

lists

Software I Use Every Day

In the spirit of yesterday's post, I'm going to list out what I use every day in terms of software. This isn't exhaustive but it's pretty darn close. General Utilities * 1Password - Probably the best password manager out there combined with mobile

New Host

I've moved my blog over to WordPress.com from my self-hosted server. I had to change the domain name to http://astralbodi.es because my old WordPress site had a funky permalink structure to match how my post links were with Octopress. So, for now, astralbodies.net will

My Desk Setup

I always like seeing people's desk setups so I figured I would post mine. I didn't pretty everything up for the photo. * UpDesk v1 * Retina MacBook Pro 15" + Thunderbolt Display * iPad Air, iPod touch 5th gen, iPhone 4 + personal iPhone 5s taking the photo * Wired

presenting

Xcode Presentation Mode

Giving a presentation with Xcode on screen? Don't forget about Presentation mode in Fonts & Colors! It doesn't help with the text size in the navigator but at least everyone will see your code nice and clear!

Programming

Checking in CocoaPods files

I've gone back and forth on the debate with whether or not we should be checking in the dependencies for a project supplied by CocoaPods. In the past I felt it was best to only check in the Podfile and maybe the lock file. I believe I'

Programming

iOS Background Refresh & Force Killing

If you've done any work with background refresh (application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler:) on iOS 7 you know that it can be a pain to debug your code with. Some things I've discovered: 1. Background refresh will start your app if it's not running. 2. If

fitness

Nerdy Fitness

Nerds are notorious for being the most disinterested in staying fit - well at least our stereotype. I've definitely yo-yoed in weight over the years, being at my best weight about three years ago. Job and other life changes got me distracted and I ended up 40lb heavier

cocoaconf

CocoaConf Chicago - Advanced Core Data

I was lucky enough to be able to speak at CocoaConf Chicago 2014 about some more advanced Core Data topics. The bulk of the talk surrounded concurrency and data model migrations but I did touch on a number of other things. Sadly the session wasn't recorded, but I

Automattic

Working at Automattic

Some people have asked me what it's like working for Automattic. Every employee of Automattic has a different perspective on what it means to work here. Here are a few things I feel are important to me. Work Wherever, Whenever Automattic is a completely distributed company. We have

Evernote

Fix ScanSnap on Mac not opening Evernote properly

Do you have a ScanSnap scanner on your Mac and scan things to Evernote? You notice that if you have Evernote running, ScanSnap can't launch Evernote properly? You might get an error message like the following: Turns out Evernote is broken. EvernoteHelper.app is an embedded application that

cable

Cable companies: Please, take my money!

I cut the cord two years ago from cable TV but am interested in using apps for the iPad and Roku to watch live cable TV. I called Time Warner Cable today to ask them if they offered a cable TV package that wouldn't require a physical installation.

blocks

NSNotificationCenter Block-based Observer

Back in iOS 4, a nifty block-based observer method was added to NSNotificationCenter: * (id)addObserverForName:(NSString *)name object:(id)obj queue:(NSOperationQueue *)queue usingBlock:(void (^)(NSNotification *))block; Super convenient, right? I love using blocks to pass simple callbacks to controllers instead of creating a delegate protocol. There is a catch

ADHD

Paying Attention at Automattic

All of my teen and adult life I realized that I perceive the world a little differently than most. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy but I never did very well in high school on exams especially for topics that weren’t science/math/computer related.

iPhreaks Show - Guest Panelist

I had the awesome privilege of being a guest panelist on the iPhreaks podcast talking about scalable cloud apps to back your mobile phone apps. We talked mostly about Parse but we did also discuss a lot of new service offerings like Microsoft Azure, Simperium, and a few others. It

Apple App Store Deprecated Version Nightmare

At first glance this news seems awesome for consumers: Apple offering 'last compatible version' of iOS apps for older hardware Finally my old iPhone 3G can download apps that I purchased after iOS 4 became obsolete! This should have been communicated to us as developers and the revenue

inspiration

Manual note-taking epiphany

I've never been able to put in words the reason why I am attached to using written notes over my iPad until today. I was sitting in a talk today by Rob Martin when I had an epiphany. When I'm holding my opened notebook, the crisp

Going Down the Core Data Rabbit Hole

I gave a talk today at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, WI USA. I'm posting my slides here so that others who didn't have the chance to go can peruse them. Hit me up with any questions or if you'd like to have audio