I finally moved from Sequel Pro to Sequel Ace. Sequel Pro hasn’t been updated in years. It mostly worked but did have some annoying problems. During a recent OS and app reinstall, I found that Sequel Pro was no longer available on Homebrew, so I went for Sequel Ace, a fork that is still maintained. It is very similar but improved. I like it.
Continue reading post "Sequel Ace"Computers & Tech posts
Recently, I gave in and set up my work email on my phone. I had gone the first 15 years at Cogneato only getting my email from my work computer, wanting to separate my work and home life.
Continue reading post "#4616"New phone: Minimal Phone
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I got a new phone, the Minimal Phone. It is an e-paper phone with physical keyboard, both rarities in current smartphones. My Samsung S24 is a bit over a year old, pretty much new for me, but I’ve been wanting an e-paper phone for a long time and the S24 was somewhat disappointing in some ways. I’m hoping the e-paper display will reduce eye fatigue, reduce screen time, and help with sleep issues. I haven’t switched over and won’t until I get a case for it, plus there are some issues that I’m hoping get fixed with an upcoming software update.
Continue reading post "New phone: Minimal Phone"Openrsync issues resolved (I hope)
I think I have finally worked through and fixed the issues caused by Mac OS 15.4 switching from rsync to openrsync. With the switch, many of my backup and other rsync scripts broke, throwing errors and not finishing the sync. As of that last post, I had gotten things mostly working, but had to disable incremental snapshotting and still sometimes had failures that I had to deal with.
Continue reading post "Openrsync issues resolved (I hope)"Got a smartwatch: Bangle.js 2
I bought a Bangle.js 2 smartwatch from Adafruit. I haven’t ever owned or played with a smartwatch, and haven’t even worn a dumb watch in 15 years or more. But I got to thinking that I look at my phone a lot for time and notifications, and this could reduce phone use and simplify that behavior at the same time. An e-paper screen could make it less like looking at a mini phone on my wrist. It also could do some other things like step counting, sleep monitoring, and heart rate monitoring that might be useful, and timers, alarms, and stopwatch so I don’t need to reach for my phone for those either. The Bangle is open source, lightweight, and seems feature filled enough to fit what I’m going for, cheap enough ($89) to not worry too much if I want more later.
Continue reading post "Got a smartwatch: Bangle.js 2"Looks like my Macbook Air (2020 Intel) will not be supported for the next major MacOS update, Tahoe. I knew that was coming at some point when they switched to ARM architecture. Luckily, Sequoia should still receive security updates into 2026 or 2027, and that’s all I really care about. By that point, I will probably transition to a Linux computer for my main, and if I need a new Mac for other stuff, may just get a refurb Mini.
My main email app (Fastmail) on my phone logged me out without me noticing for two days. I’ve been trying to not pay as constant attention to my email as it is, so it just seemed nice, but I didn’t even really think about it in that period. Happened to have more than the usual amount of emails when I got back in, though luckily, nothing important. It’d be nice if I could have it only notify me immediately for email from certain addresses or something like that.
Mac: 15.4 rsync issues
After running into some problems with some rsync scripts recently, I discovered that in Mac OS 15.4, Apple switched its built-in rsync command from standard rsync to the BSD project’s clone, openrsync. It is apparently not 100% compatible, because my backup and deploy scripts that use it were failing.
ZSH regex capture groups
In writing a script for the ZSH shell, I wanted to extract some bits from a string. I looked for a regex solution, using capture groups. I could not figure out how to do it with sed but I found that the [[ ]] format of the test command allows this with the =~ operator. If the test returns true, values are stored in a $match array and can be accessed like $match[1] and so on.
Finally got the One UI 7 / Android 15 update on my phone (Samsung S24) today. 15’s been out on Pixel devices for six months, but it took Samsung a long time with this one. I had bought this phone in part because Samsung is supposed to be quick with releases. Hopefully, this doesn’t become the norm.
Not a lot has changed noticeably. My most liked change is that I can have most app icons match my chosen accent color (green) which makes my home screen and quick app drawer look much nicer. There’s also a feature which separates the notification drawer and quick settings slide down, where swiping down from the left shows one and from the right, the other. I’m still getting used to that but may find it results in less swipes. There are a few other aesthetic tweaks. I think there’s a bunch of AI stuff, but I’m not that interested in that.