Matthew Ruten

In the past couple years, I’ve read many blog posts and news stories about how sitting is killing us, and we were not made to sit stationary for hours at a time. Along with that, more and more people are trying out standing desks, to avoid some of the pitfalls of sitting.

I like the idea of standing desks, but don’t really want to invest any money into it until I try it out, so I hacked one together with stuff I already have:

It’s just a table on a table, with some stuff on the ground to stand on, to reach the right height.

Some initial notes:

• Sore feet! I’ve only spent a few hours standing so far, but my feet get quite sore. Walking around once in a while helps!
• Typing feels much more natural. I think this is the first time I’m actually typing in an ergonomically-correct way, and it feels great!
• I probably need a stand for my monitor, so I don’t have to look down at it.
• I walk around a lot more, and can easily pace back and forth when I need to think about a problem.

Where to go from here?

• Standing desk or not, I need to get an actual desk. The Frederik desk from Ikea is adjustable, so it should work as either a standing or sitting desk.
• I’ll try this out for a few weeks and see how it goes! I only use this computer on evenings and weekends, so it’s not too crazy to stand for those times.

Side note: Also visible in the photo is the exercise ball I was using as a chair previously. 

First of all, I love Github. We use it at work, and it works great. The code browsing, and ability to make quick edits and commit them within Github are awesome features. I’ve been using it for some personal projects, but it quickly gets expensive if you want to host more than 10 repos.

Here’s a quick comparison of the features I care about the most:

The key is unlimited repositories, with only a limit on space. This is perfect for hosting a large amount of small projects. Most of my repos are only a few MB.

It turns out there are a ton of repository hosting sites–Codebase was the only one I found that had a limit on space, instead of number of repositories, and also had extra project features, like time tracking, code browsing/editing, etc.

So the plan for now is to move all my private Github repos to Codebase.

One last option is to host your Git repos on your own server. I looked into a few self-hosted options, Gitorious looks the most promising, but is apparently a bit tricky to install. I’m adding it to the “look in to someday” list.

Links:

• Codebase: http://www.codebasehq.com/
• Github: https://github.com/
• Gitorious Self-Hosted: http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Installation

1Password is a great program, but one thing it doesn’t handle well is multiple password databases. I use 1Password at work and at home, and sometimes I want to access my home password database. To view another database, you have to go to “Preferences“, and “Choose Another Data File…“, find your file, then repeat to switch back to your main database. Pretty clunky.

Luckily, for read-only access, you can open the 1Password.html file and view your passwords in a basic interface using a web browser (if you’re using Finder on Mac OS X, right-click your 1Password.agilekeychain file and choose “Show Package Contents” to see the HTML file).

However, if you’re using Google Chrome, you will see this:

How to Fix the “Problem loading 1Password data file” Error

A simple solution is on the 1Password web site:

The easiest way to workaround this is to store your 1Password.agilekeychain file on a web server or service like Dropbox. If you need offline access to 1PasswordAnywhere you will need to use another browser or modify Chrome’s settings by adding the –allow-file-access-from-files command line option.

A more complex solution is below.

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Moving around the terminal one character at a time is slow and gets annoying, so here’s how to move around word by word:

ctrl-a: move to front of line
ctrl-e: move to end of line
ctrl-w: delete word before cursor

By default, the shortcuts for moving left and right are Esc-b and Esc-f. It’s much handier to use Alt/Option-left and -right, so this is how you can configure terminal to do that:

To configure it to Alt + left and right:

 - Open Terminal preferences (command + ,);

 - At Keyboard tab, select "control cursor left (or right)" and doubleclick it;

      - Left: Select the combo "modifier" to "option" and the action to \033b

      - Right: Select the combo "modifier" to "option" and the action to \033f

Sources:

http://www.infoentropy.com/terminal_window_keyboard_shortcuts_mac_linux

http://snipplr.com/view/28113/config-terminal-to-move-wordbyword/

Recently, I did a full restore on my iPhone to try and fix some of the many problems I’ve been having (we’ll save that list for another day). While SMS messages are generally temporary in nature, I decided to find out if I could export them somehow. There are a few programs out there that claim to be able to do this for you, such as MobileSyncBrowser (Mac/PC, free trial/$10/$20), iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor (Mac, free), or an online tool like iphone backup sms extractor. I didn’t try any of these because I don’t want to pay, I am not on a Mac, and I don’t want to upload my private messages to some random site. Luckily, I discovered that it’s not too hard to do it yourself. Grab your iPhone, put on your techie hat, and follow the 3 easy steps after the break!

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