Tag: ruby

I recently decided that I wanted to make a series of solid colour backgrounds for my laptop. The reasons are nominally grounded in productivity¹, but given that the whole exercise sent me down a rabbit-hole of writing code and then this blog post, let’s just call it a little experiment to see what we can do, shall we?

Step 1: Making a solid colour PNG

Our first step will be to create a solid colour PNG of the right size. I’m going to use the ruby gem ChunkyPNG to do all the heavy lifting. Let’s get started!

The past few weeks, I’ve been looking at zines in a new light. I’ve always liked the idea of printing out little books at home, but given we’re all trapped indoors right now, it seems like a great time to do a little craft activity.¹

I got interested in a more-then-theoretical way thanks to “writer who draws” Austin Kleon, who posted this post on making an eight-page zine from a single sheet of A4 paper, but then he posted this video from autumnthing on how to make a fourteen-page zine, and it blew me away:

A ramble about my teenagerhood, followed by a guided tour of how to mass-download entries from LiveJournal.

Guard is a cool ruby library for automatically performing tasks every time a file changes. But if you’re not sure what to expect, it can be hard to set up. Here’s the quickest possible setup for Guard.

Use case

In this case, I’m making a quick website prototype in haml. I want to make sure that, whenever I modify one of my haml files, ruby immediately produces the equivalent html file for me in the same directory.

Rubyfocus is a pure ruby bridge to OmniFocus. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while, and I’m finally able to release a version that, at the very least, functions without crashing (as far as I can tell) anywhere along the way.

Rubyfocus started as a natural offshoot of a previous project, JROFBridge. JROFBridge is an objective-C/Cocoa library that accesses OmniFocus through ScriptingBridge, collects data on projects, tasks and folders, and outputs it to an SQLite database. It’s a handy way of collecting everything you need to know about an OmniFocus document, working through OmniFocus itself. I used it for a web-based Kanban frontend to OmniFocus, which let me view all my projects (and my current workload) at a glance.