"Evan Deaubl".blog

Markability Now a Web Service

2011-12-22T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve made small modifications to the Markability code and pushed a version up to Heroku to make it publicly accessible to the masses. Simple API: POST http://markability.herokuapp.com/u with a form-encoded body with one field, “u”, with the URL to convert to Markdown. A form is available at http://markability.herokuapp.com for convenient human use. Haven’t pushed the new code up to Github yet, but will soon.

Enjoy!

Markability: Capture Web Articles in Markdown

2011-12-12T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve thrown a little utility up on Github called Markability, which allows you to capture articles from the web in Markdown format, using a combination of Readability (actually, a port of Readability to Python) and html2text.

Haven’t written documentation yet, but it’s as simple as installing a few Python modules from PyPI, cloning my repo and running from the command line.

easy_install lxml
easy_install readability-lxml
easy_install chardet
git clone https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text.git 
cd html2text
python setup.py install
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/evandeaubl/markability.git
cd markability
python markability.py url...

Multiple URLs on the command line are combined into one document with --- (horizontal rules) separating each page (unfortunately, the Python port of Readability does not handle multi-page articles, so that is a by-hand process). Images are not saved locally yet, but that is a planned feature.

This should get one started. This is a tool I plan to use to archive things for myself, so it will grow as I develop new features for my own needs. Or receive pull requests from others. hint, hint :-)

Withings Scale and Body Fat Measurement Accuracy

2011-11-25T00:00:00-07:00

I recently picked up a Withings Weight and Body Fat Scale, because I like gadgets. :-) The reviews on it were pretty good, except for many complaints about body fat measurement accuracy. The good news is there is a very simple way to resolve this issue.

First, a little background: the Withings scale, like pretty much any of the others like it, uses bioelectrical impedance analysis to do its body fat measurement. This method is highly sensitive to things such as recent eating, exercise, and hydration. The key to stabilizing the numbers and making them useful is to make these factors as constant as possible. Here’s what I do to do that (credits to Four-Hour Body for introducing me to this idea):

Take my measurements the same time of day, about a half an hour after I wake up.
Immediately on waking up, I drink a large quantity of water (about 32oz). Right before weighing a half hour later, I urinate to get rid of any excess water.
No eating, drinking, or exercise during the half hour period between drinking and weighing.

With this technique, my measurements have come out very consistent. The only caveat I have is that the numbers the Withings scale produces are much higher than other scales I’ve used (12-13% vs. 16-17% for the Withings). This doesn’t appear to invalidate analyzing trends, though. Besides, the absolute numbers for any body fat measurement method are pretty much bogus anyway; it’s the trend that matters.

My iCloud Alternatives

2011-11-19T00:00:00-07:00

I mess around with my computing environment. A lot. Probably to the point of it being unhealthy for my productivity. So recently I have been trying to simplify that environment significantly, and that has meant moving a fair amount of my operations to cloud services. Since I was already mostly Apple to begin with, the natural choice was to start working with iCloud. That has worked so far, but I’ve found places where iCloud is, to be quite honest, poorly implemented, and of course, the platform is Mac/iOS-only, except for the web interface (one of the areas that I have found poorly implemented). I’m not as Mac as I used to be; I like to use Linux from time to time, and I have a couple of Android devices that I use on occasion, so it was time to find alternatives to iCloud services that would work in my varied computing environment. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Tasks

I have found Wunderlist to be a pretty good alternative to the Reminders functionality in iCloud. I also tend to like having a separate todo app on all my devices, rather than working with my todos through the Calendar app on the web and iCal on the desktop in iCloud. The sync is not quite as automatic as with Reminders, but I haven’t found it to be too much of a pain. If I ever do, it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other autosyncing todo apps with iOS, Android, Mac, and web functionality…

Notes

Simplenote has been my choice for simple text note syncing off and on for a while now. Its functionality is basically exactly the same as Notes under iCloud, and is supported on iOS, Android (through third party apps), Mac (also through third party apps), and the web. Yes, the web: you can actually create and edit a note through their webapp. That is an iCloud web oversight that I just can’t fathom, hence the reason why iCloud Notes lost.

Data

Depending on the type of data I’m syncing, I’m using two tools. Evernote is for knowledgebase-type material, so I’m using it for a lot of web clipping and other article storage. Dropbox is for my active project content, since despite the promise of a post-filesystem world, I’m still mostly dealing with files, and Dropbox is the best things to push them around right now. There are some iOS apps capable of making iCloud push around file content (like Goodreader), but it only works between mobile devices, and only on Apple devices (and Windows… for whatever that’s worth): two strikes against it.

Things I’m still using iCloud for

I’m still using iCloud for Contacts and Calendar, because I just haven’t seen the need to move them off yet. In reality, I care very little about having my contacts anywhere other than my phone (I could probably turn off iCloud contact sync, and not notice any difference), and my schedule has never been packed enough to give it that much thought. I imagine I’ll find solutions for those too (probably Google, if I had to project into the future), but right now it’s just not a priority.

Downsides

Of course, moving away from iCloud, I lose some benefits. If Siri takes off and becomes the beginning of something big, I miss out on it because I refused the most recent helping of Apple Kool-Aid. I find it hard to believe that Apple will have a sole lock on this technology, though, and even if so, there are already published workarounds for linking Siri to services that aren’t Siri-capable at the moment (i.e. pretty much anything not Apple-published). Besides, being able to use the same tools across multiple platforms is much more important to me than the companionship of a phone. :-p

Evernote Finally Makes Sense

2011-11-13T00:00:00-07:00

I don’t know if there was something about Evernote that just turned me off in the times I’ve used it before, but just this weekend, I had an epiphany that made me realize that the personal knowledgebase I was developing was a perfect fit for Evernote. But I never would have realized it until I went through the previous iterations.

I really have tried most things: text files, Mac software (DevonThink Pro, Circus Ponies Notebook, Curio), folders of files, and nothing seemed to really stick. Finally I went for a really simplistic implementation: paper. I have always really liked the book How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think, and the author advocates using paper for everything. I figured what the heck; it’s worked for thousands of years up to this point, there must be something to it.

So I started writing down 1-2 line references to things I wanted to remember: my own thoughts, websites I wanted to archive, articles to keep track of, etc. The thought was that the paper system would be where I would keep the active stuff: stuff that I would want to have with me all the time. I would need a system for archived material. I played around with that for a while, and then finally decided that Evernote would be the system that would deal with the archived material.

I started doing that for a day, and then it hit me: my paper system was fully redundant. The 1-2 line references I was writing down in my paper notebook were the titles of the notes in Evernote. Bookmarks simply had the URL in the body (a side effect of the Evernote clipper), articles had the content in the body, and my own random notes simply have a title with no body. It could even handle my longer freewrites with ease. With this realization I actually discovered that I could have one system to rule them all (well, at least for my knowledgebase).

This whole epiphany seems like an obvious common-sense sort of thing, but something in my psyche always had an abhorrence for attaching a title to my notes. I have an aversion to too much structure, in this case to a fault! This ultimately simple solution has completely broken my block on capturing useful content, and I think I actually have a chance to create a knowledgebase that I will actually use.

Linux in a Mac World: Accessing AFP Shares

2011-11-04T00:00:00-07:00

Unfortunately, I went to access the share, and it said it wasn’t valid. Long story short, the out-of-the-box 0.8.1 version does not correctly handle shared directories with apostrophes in them (like [User]’s Public Folder… standard on any Mac from the past 5 years… sheesh). It was a simple fix, but maintenance on 0.8.1 has essentially ceased.

Cue Github…

Boxee happens to maintain a fork of the project with their own maintenance fixes, and I contributed this fix to their repo. The repo is at https://github.com/Boxee/afpfs-ng, buildable through the usual ./configure; make; make install dance.

Hope this helps at least one other person who tries stock afpfs-ng and wonders: “Why the hell won’t it access this user’s public share?” :-/

Yet Another First Post

2011-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

I decided it was time to restart my blog again, instead of the bio page I had up here for a while. Besides, it gave me an excuse to play with Jekyll.

Let’s hope it lasts for more than a month, unlike the last few blogs I started here…