We had a Secret Santa gift exchange at work. I got some cool things including this fantastic tater tot merit badge.
I am happy to finally have the recognition of my accomplishment.
Did you know there is one company that owns a bunch of eyewear, eye care, and vision insurance brands? Nearly 70% of the market in the world is owned by the Italian eyewear company, Luxxotica Group S.p.A.
They own:
- Ray-Ban
- Persol
- Oakley
They make frames for:
- Chanel
- Prada
- Giorgio Armani
- Burberry
- Versace
- Dolce and Gabbana
- Miu Miu
- Donna Karan
- Stella McCartney
- Tory Burch
And they own the eyecare brands:
- Lenscrafters
- Sunglass Hut
- Pearle Vision
- Sears Optical
- Target Optical
- Glasses.com
It also owns EyeMed Vision Care which a majority of U.S. companies use to provide vision coverage to their employees. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest that EyeMed only has mostly Luxxotica-owned eyecare centers as “in network” and then those stores only carry their frames.
Any wonder why eye care costs so much for glass and plastic sticks?
Do you use SourceTree to help manage your Git repos? Ever work on a bunch of pull requests and have a lot of local branches you need to delete? I found a way to delete multiple branches at one time.
- Click Repository then click Branch.
- Click Delete Branches.
- Select the branch(es) you want to delete. Be sure not to select other than Local branches unless that’s your intention.
I’m proud to say that Automattic / WordPress.com is a supporter of RED.org – the foundation started by Bono and Bonny Shriver to help prevent and cure AIDS.
Red.org recently moved over to WordPress.com VIP hosting and we partnered with them on producing an official (RED) WordPress.com shirt for all Automatticians. This is definitely my favorite piece of Automattic swag :).
Do you use a USB headset for video/audio conferencing on your Mac? Ever been frustrated that you can’t really change the volume of just the headset if you keep your main audio coming through your speakers? There is a solution – use the Audio MIDI Setup app nestled in Applications/Utilities.
- Look for the device that matches your USB device – sometimes it only shows the manufacturer of the USB to Analog converter if its a cheapie device.
- Look for the “out” device if you’re looking at changing what you hear, the “in” device for your microphone audio level.
- Slide the master control to the right if its available. If master isn’t selectable, slide the individual left/right channels. The individual channels don’t stop at any specific points along the line so you might want to manually match up the dB (gain) value so each ear is an identical volume level.
I’ve only spent a short amount of time with it so far but Deckset is impressing the hell out of me for creating Keynote-like presentations with Markdown syntax. I love creating minimalistic slides and I always feel like going from notes to slides loses something. Now I can create my notes with the slides being in-line with the content using a minimalistic design language in Markdown. <3
It’s only available for Mac through the Apple Mac App Store at the moment.
Check it out: http://www.decksetapp.com
A good friend of mine, Eric Knapp, is a teacher at Madison College in Madison, WI. He’s an awesome teacher and has a ton of smart students come through his classes. One of his students, Kathryn Sweet, guest-posted on the Anita Borg Institute’s Medium account about her experiences with being turned down for internships because she’s treated as an inferior student.
Closing off internships to community college students disproportionately affects students of color, lower-income students, and students who are supporting families.
It’s incredibly stupid to consider community college students as unqualified for internships. I started my college career off with a two-year degree at Milwaukee Area Technical College – an institution related to Madison College where Kathryn attends. I got a great education there and it jump-started my drive to go further with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Had I not attended MATC and gotten a job with an employer willing to pay for my tuition I may not be where I am today.
Read her post and if you’re in the position of being involved with hiring at your company, take it to heart.
In case you missed it – the Swift programming language is finally Open Source!
Today we launched the open source Swift project along with the Swift.org website. We couldn’t be more excited to work together in an open community to find and fix issues, add enhancements, and bring Swift to new platforms.
But also hidden in there is the news that the Foundation Framework was open sourced but with a little interesting side note –
The Swift.org version of Foundation makes use of many of the same underlying libraries (e.g. ICU and CoreFoundation) as Apple’s implementation, but has been built to be completely independent of the Objective-C runtime. Because of this, it is a substantial reimplementation of the same API, using pure Swift code layered on top of these common underlying libraries. Much more information about this work is available on our GitHub project page.
Completely independent of the Objective-C runtime. MIND BLOWN.
More: https://swift.org/blog/
I’ve fallen in love with this song ever since The Jane Doze played it at our company Grand Meetup closing party.
Have you heard about pinning tabs in Safari? If you have Mac OS X El Capitan then you have Safari 9 which includes tab pinning. From Apple’s Support documentation:
Pin Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Gmail, or any other website you visit frequently throughout the day. Pinned Sites stay put on the left side of your tab bar so you can easily get to them at any time.
I frequently keep several tabs open on my work computer – the three Gmail instances I’m in and WordPress.com’s Reader. Battling with my attention requires me to analyze my behaviors and continuously adapt to prevent problems. I recently discovered I frequently flip back over to Safari to look for the unread count in the tab titles and will derail my current thought process to read the email. My solution? Pinned tabs.
Unpinned Stabby Tabs
As you can see I have an unread count in the far left Gmail instance. I’m driven to see what’s behind that (1). Now with the tabs pinned:
Pinned, Less Stabby Tabs
I know the email is still there and I’m super familiar with what order those tabs are in. The miracle though, is, I no longer see the title of the tab and am not driven to read the unread messages. When my mind has a moment to change course during the day, I’ll check my email.