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A Fully Automated Home Office DND Solution
It was almost two years ago when I created a custom “Do Not Disturb” button for my home office that allowed me to tell my family that I’m in a meeting and please don’t casually pop in. I wrote a post about it, but the up shot is that I cobbled together some parts I had around, 3D printed a case, and wrote some code that so that the button, connected via USB to my computer, would act as a keyboard and fire a keyboard shortcut.
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Glanceable Time Zones With Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck
We’ve really embraced working remotely within my Studio71 Technology team, to the point that now I have people that I work with every day across seven time zones. There are challenges and benefits of being a distributed global team, but I wanted to solve a quick challenge today and that is to quickly glance and see who is available right now.
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Rethinking My Email Workflow
My previous email workflow sucked and I’ve been working to find a new system in 2022. I knew the old workflow sucked as it was based entirely on unread status, a notoriously shaky foundation. In short, if I forgot to get back to you about something last year, I tried my best but it was probably my workflow’s fault.
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QR Codes Are Bad
We were done with QR codes (pretty much). Do you remember 2019? I think I saw one or two QR codes the whole year, but then 2020 hits, COVID comes in hot, and all of a sudden QR codes are back from the dead in every restaurant. Now, everyone’s talking about that damn Super Bowl commercial.
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Peloton Doesn’t Need to Sell
Friday, The Wall Street Journal ran a report that Peloton, the COVID darling work from home company, was exploring a sale. Peloton Interactive Inc. PTON 1.44% is drawing interest from potential suitors including Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 13.54% according to people familiar with the matter, as the stationary-bike maker’s stock slumps and an activist urges it to explore a sale.
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How a Developer Fell in Love with Keyboard Maestro
You may have heard that I’ve been getting more in to automation recently, specifically automating more of my work and personal macOS environments. There are countless apps and tools and plugins and widgets for this on the Mac and over my 20 years using the Mac I have ignored all of them.
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My Bat Phone Holiday Project
With three kids I don’t need a holiday break project to give me something to do like I used to, but I do still like to find something on my list and give it a time limit so I can use the time to accomplish something fun and improve some non-day job skills.
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I Fell in Love with the Stream Deck
I shift gears a lot throughout the day both at work and at home between various projects as things pop up, and while I miss the days when I could just put headphones on and chip away at a single project all day, it’s just not an option for me in any of my roles (CTO, Dad, etc).
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Apple’s App Store Policy Solution is Staring Them in the Face
Apple has a problem with their App Store. It’s potentially a big problem if it turns in to an official antitrust case, but at best it’s a problem with developer relations and looking like a bunch of greedy jerks. You may say that Apple has lots of problems, but this is problem I’m referring to: Payments on the App Store and the forced 30% cut of purchases.
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DEFCON 28 Wrap Up
DEFCON, the world’s largest hacking convention and always one of the highlights of my year, was last weekend and, of course, remote. I missed being in Vegas with tens of thousands of hackers, but there were still some fantastic talks and conversations over Discord. A quick “Top Five” highlights: If your password is eight characters or less, you essentially don’t have a password.
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A Home Office DND Button
I’m extremely fortunate that I have a true home office at our house. It’s my favorite room in our whole place with an both an internal door and a door to to the back yard, and it affords me plenty of room to store my various projects and geeky collections. Of course, the most important aspect of my home office is that it’s a room where I can get some time work on…well…these days I work on work in there.
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The Infosec Cold Call
I get asked occasionally about ways to improve corporate information security or what kinds of things get easily missed, and while I’m no expert, and there are an endless number of little things you can miss these days, there’s one way I rarely hear mentioned and I like to remind technical leadership about:
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