I have a two different sets of cameras that I bought to keep an eye on my porch. This was mostly there to confirm if someone did or didn’t deliver something because I had too many times issues where something was supposedly delivered to the porch but never made it. I decided to add some cameras so that I could tell if it was actually delivered or stolen. I’ve since had one example of a package stolen and been able to validate a bunch more deliveries. I’ve had some issues with Safeway’s delivery service that is it’s own blog post but in this post I’d like to cover how I convert the video files from my FDT and Zosi cameras for reviewing on my Mac.

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For a while now I’ve had a weird issue with Plex not connecting within my network and never really gotten down to solving it. I used to be able to cajole it to work through a few different methods but it was never smooth. When I used the web app, I generally had to go directly to the instance and that would work properly for me but today I tried to use Plex on my phone and it outright wasn’t connecting to any of my local Plex boxes on my network properly. It was finally time to figure out what was going wrong.
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One of the other users of TapForms had a feature request for TapForms to be able to print out the structure of a TapForms document so that one could figure out where a field was being used within the document including calculation and link references. I thought that was an interesting enough problem to solve and using the CouchDB copy I figured I’d give it a shot. Behind the scenes, TapForms 5 uses Couchbase Lite to store it’s data on iOS and Mac. Couchbase Lite also comes with support for doing Peer-To-Peer synchronisation as well as IBM Cloudant and CouchDB. I’m using synchronisation with CouchDB to get access to the data whilst using TapForms as my primary data entry system. I’ve previously written about using importing receipts into TapForms from my Mac so this builds on this by building a better understanding of the underlying data structure. Read more

For the longest time I’ve collected receipts from when I’ve refuelled my car however I’ve never had a good way of figuring out how to import them and retain the images. In 2016 I picked up TapForms to replace Bento as my personal database tool that sync’d across Mac and iOS. With TapForms 5 the data storage layer moved over to Couchbase Lite with sync options being Peer to Peer and IBM Cloudant. Then TapForms later added support for syncing to CouchDB which made it easy to quickly within my own network set up sync and then add data. This brought me to the next challenge: how do I quickly add my backlog of receipts?

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Recently I was working with a friend to get mod_mbox up and running with some of the Wikimedia mailing list archives which are on mailman. These mailing lists don’t immediately work because they’re not in the right format however it’s relatively easy to pick these up to work with mod_mbox on Debian. Read more

I’ve decided to work on doing weekly blog posts to get back in the habit of writing about what I’m doing. One of the things that bothers me about editing in a web browser is that the keyboard shortcuts never work well. As someone who spends a lot of time on the keyboard, the shortcuts not working properly can throw me backwards. The one that has bitten me in the past is accidentally trying to navigate backwards and losing what ever changes hadn’t been automatically synced. As a part of that I’ve been looking at Mac native editors to write blog posts on without having to land in the web interface too much.

This post, and a few others, have been written using “Desk 3” an app that bills itself as “Writing, Blogging and Notes for WordPress”.

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I’m a pretty big macOS user with a combination of my primary Mac laptop, an iMac desktop machine and also an ancient Mac Mini Server machine. I’m also a really heavy Terminal user with someone commenting that they’ve not seen a Mac user with so many terminal windows. There’s a secret to this: the terminal and the Mac share many keyboard shortcuts that you’d not expect.

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From time to time I buy products online via eBay or AliExpress. I use a Tap Forms 5 database to track my orders and make sure I keep track of everything from when I ordered it to when it arrives. Tap Forms 5 however doesn’t have a feature that let’s me take the value of a random field and template that into a URL (I should probably ask for that). However the Mac has a powerful framework called “Services” that allows you to hook into applications and execute code. One of the easiest ways to build a service is to use Automator.

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