THE PENDING DRAFT

I ❤ Scanbot

March 18, 2015

ScanBot

Accounting is one of those things most people – me included – hate to do. And even if you have someone else doing it for you, you still have to keep track of and store your receipts and stuff somehow to hand over to your Accountant.

My process up until now was basically photographing the Receipt, getting the Photo on my Mac, making a PDF from it, possibly join some of them into one single PDF, letting OCR over it and then save it with a proper name in the right folder. This really sucked!

Today i found out about Scanbot, which is truly perfect and the price for the PRO-Version was a no-brainer. It scans directly from my phone and directly generates PDF Files. It can directly join multiple scans into one PDF. It does all the OCR and is connected to the proper folder on my Dropbox so i can just sit and wait until my receipts pop up. Yay!

If you don’t use anything like this already, you should check out Scanbot.

Scanbot

Perfmap – Heatmap of resources loaded in your browser

March 4, 2015

Perfmap Screenshot Wired

Perfmap is a pretty cool Chrome Extension which displays the loading time for a page right in your browser as an overlay using the Resource Timing API.

The heatmap colours and the first ms value indicate at what point in the page load did the image finished loading. It’s a good indicator of user experience. “It took 3450ms before the user saw this image.” The second value in brackets is the time it took the browser to load that specific image.

Perfmap in the Chrome Web Store

A Year from Now You May Wish You Had Started Today

(Karen Lamb)

Work

February 23, 2015

Paul Graham wrote this great piece about “What Doesn’t Seem Like Work“. I don’t believe that you can ever get the best you could be in something if you don’t like it. Of course we can all learn pretty much anything. But if it isn’t the thing you’re truly passionate about, the outcome won’t be as good as it could be. Maybe it will be mediocre, ok-ish, maybe even good. But certainly not the best it could be.

If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It’s not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.

I cannot believe how many people are choosing to work in positions they don’t like. We all tend to think that we don’t have much of a choice. But that’s only true for a handful of people. Most of us have a choice to do whatever we want. So start looking for the thing that doesn’t seem like work today and keep pushing in that direction.

Paul Graham – “What Doesn’t Seem Like Work”

A UX Designers take on Thailand

February 20, 2015

Most of the songthaew and tuk-tuk drivers live in villages out of the city and many of them are illiterate. But it’s not written illiteracy which is the issue, it’s map illiteracy. Many drivers have never had to navigate the city using a map, so showing them Google Maps on my phone was completely useless.

In this article, James Turner shared his observations as a UX Designer in Thailand. I had exactly the same experience with maps when i was there a few years ago. Not only in the villages but also in the city. Maps were pretty much useless to show someone where you want to go, which made coming from A to B a quite fascinating experience.

A UX Designers take on Thailand

NYT on Laptops in 1985

February 19, 2015

This article in the New York Times from 1985 with predictions about the use of laptops made me smile.

Yes, there are a lot of people who would like to be able to work on a computer at home. But would they really want to carry one back from the office with them? It would be much simpler to take home a few floppy disks tucked into an attache case.

Of course i’d love to take some floppy disks with me, neatly tucked into my attache case.

But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.

Sentences like these demonstrate very well how hard it is and how utterly bad we humans are at predicting the future. And those rare people who have big visions often get laughed at in the beginning. Today we may think it’s crazy to think about colonizing mars. But i’m pretty sure in 20 to 30 years we will look back and laugh at some of todays articles and predictions about the future.

New York Times – The Executive Computer

The database table prefix is not a security feature

February 3, 2015

There’s a common believe that changing the wp_ prefix of your WordPress database tables will protect your website. Turns out that’s just a myth.

The WordPress community is large enough to develop its own myths. One of them is about the database table prefix, the variable $table_prefix that you set in your wp-config.php. It goes like this:

“Change the default prefix to something that is hard to guess. That will protect your website against attackers.”

Well … no. That’s nonsense. Security theater. A waste of time.

Thomas Scholz further explains why in this article.

The database table prefix is not a security feature

WordPress Plugin RICG Responsive Images

January 27, 2015

Browser support for native responsive images via the srcset-Attribute is getting better and better and it’s time for WordPress to provide a native solution. Luckily there’s a bunch of very smart people, including some from the Responsive Images Community Group itself, working on it as a Feature Plugin, which i’m sure will land in core some day.

I just stumbled upon the plugin and have yet to try it myself, but it looks very promising. If you’d like to contribute to the Plugin head over to the GitHub Repo.

Basically, responsive images allow the browser to choose the best image from a list. This plugin works by including all available image sizes for each image upload. Whenever WordPress outputs the image through the media uploader, or whenever a featured image is generated, those sizes will be included in the image tag via the srcset attribute.

RICG Responsive Images Plugin on WordPress.org