‘One Dark’ Theme For TextMate

By digitalpardoe

After over a year using Atom and putting up with its high resource usage and inability to open large files I’ve switched back to TextMate – it’s fast, stable and doesn’t kill my battery (even if it is missing some of the niceties of Atom).

However, after the switch I started missing the ‘One Dark’ theme from Atom, I find it to be far better than anything TextMate includes nowadays (even my old favourite ‘Blackboard’) so I created a very basic port.

The port includes both standard and ‘bright’ versions (previews below). If you’re interested you can get it as a TextMate bundle from GitHub: https://github.com/digitalpardoe/One-Dark.tmbundle.

iPhone 7 RAW Test Shots

By digitalpardoe

I’ve often wanted more out of the iPhone camera, the images produced by Apple’s processing were good but it felt like the camera had more to give. Fortunately, with the introduction of iOS 10, I’ve had a chance to experiment with all the camera has to offer.

A few of the results I’ve had are included below, you can click on any of the images to view a full resolution version.

Recoverable Shadow Detail

Original JPEG:

The original JPEG photograph from the iPhone 7 of the Palace Hotel in Manchester, UK showing massive underexposure and dark shadows.

Lightroom processed RAW:

Lightroom processed RAW photograph of the Palace Hotel in Manchester, UK showing the ability to recover shadow detail.

Fine Details

Original JPEG:

iPhone 7 native JPEG image of tram tracks in Manchester, UK.Crop of the native JPEG image showing terrible smoothing and loss of fine detail.

Lightroom processed RAW:

Lightroom processed RAW image of tram track in Manchester, UK.Crop of the Lightroom processed RAW showing more noise but far, far more detail across the image.

Difficult Lighting

Original JPEG:

Original JPEG from the iPhone 7 with difficult lighting conditions showing muddy detail within clouds.

Lightroom processed RAW:

RAW image processed in Lightroom showing much greater detail in cloud regions.

Laptop Downsizing

By digitalpardoe

My Laptop Setup

From 512 Pixels:

Currently, I’m using a Mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It has an 2.5 Ghz i7, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB of SSD storage. It’s the fastest, most capable Mac I’ve ever owned.

…

I went with the 15-inch because I thought I’d be using it as a notebook way more than I actually do.

(http://www.512pixels.net/blog/2016/2/the-notebook-dilemma)

I fell foul of this when I started remote working, I bought a maxed-out 15″ Retina MacBook Pro thinking I’d need something powerful for at my desk and something I could carry around for when I needed to get out of the house.

Unfortunately, due to the size of the rMBP, I never took it out and ended up with the same ‘tied to my desk’ feeling I would’ve had with a desktop Mac.

The best thing I did, for my productivity (and my mental wellbeing) was trade the rMBP in for a far, far less powerful 12″ MacBook. Yes, it’s slower, which can be especially noticeable when I’m coding or photo editing but now I feel like I have far more freedom and I work in other (more interesting) locations more often.

I don’t regret the decision to trade down, all I had to do was swap some power for a bit of patience, which was worth it in the long run. It’s something I’d definitely recommend considering if you have a large laptop but still feel ‘stuck’ in the home office.

Cloning Permissions And ACLs On OS X

By digitalpardoe

Sometimes permissions get messed up, it’s normally easy to fix, but if the problem also breaks your access control lists (ACLs) then the fix can be much more time consuming (especially when external drives are involved).

Most of the time, for a quick fix, I use the commands below to clone the permissions and ACLs from a known good folder to my broken folder. Usually, this is all I need.

Either set the environmental variables as you need to or replace them directly (liberal use of sudo may also be required depending on the folder being updated).

I can’t take credit for the above commands, I discovered them on StackOverflow a good while ago and added them to my useful snippets – if I come across the original I will add the necessary credit.

Giving Up On Google

By digitalpardoe

I don’t hate Google, that would be a silly thing to do in public. After all, in the last twelve months they purchased an organisation that developed some of the world’s most impressive (military) robots 1 and have always developed impressive AI systems of their very own 2 – what could possibly go wrong 3.

But that hasn’t stopped me from giving up on them.

The main reason I’ve given up on Google’s services are the ever increasing feelings of becoming locked-in. More and more services coming from Google seem to be Chrome-only, or at least work far better in Chrome than anywhere else and I think this speaks to the future of Google.

There’s no denying that Apple products are a kind of lock-in, but I feel that Apple don’t rely on my data as a source of revenue so I’ll always be able to get it out if I need to – I don’t feel this way about Google.

Whilst this feeling has been building up over time due to factors like requiring a Google+ profile to make full use of YouTube, or Gmail never quite playing nicely with other mail clients; it came into focus more recently with the introduction of Inbox. There’s no denying that Inbox is a great service, it’s innovative and genuinely useful, but I can only access it though Google applications.

This particular lock-in isn’t fundamentally a problem in itself, I can still get at my data, but it leaves me fearful for the future of my email. In the future I imagine Google turning off all POP & IMAP support – access to my email will be via Google (or maybe an approved API) only and my email, my data, will be more ‘stuck’ where it is than I would like – and I imagine the same will be true of all of Google’s other services.

None of Google’s recent behaviour strikes me as ‘open’, Apple is hardly an open company either, but I at least feel like Apple is open with my data on a closed platform rather than, like Google, closed with my data on an open platform.

I’d quite happily pay Google to have better access to my data, but they don’t seem to have much interest in that – so I’m moving all my data elsewhere.

  1. http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/14/5209622/google-has-bought-robotics-company-boston-dynamics ↩
  2. http://research.google.com/pubs/ArtificialIntelligenceandMachineLearning.html ↩
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator) ↩