Category Archives: technology

Technology for Learning Vocal Music

My typical method for learning new music is something like this: Get the music and look over it for general patterns in the music like repeats, etc. Find a recording if possible and familiarize myself with the music Learn the music by singing/playing through it with a keyboard Make clips of the music and listen/runContinue reading “Technology for Learning Vocal Music”

Converting Audio Files to MP3 in Nautilus

If you’re like me, you didn’t always make good decision growing up when choosing what tools you used to rip music onto you computer. I have a lot of music, much of which is a smattering of mp3, ogg, flac, wav, m4a, wma, etc. formats. Unfortunately, the stereo in my car only understands a smallContinue reading “Converting Audio Files to MP3 in Nautilus”

Setting up a Development Environment for Shopify Themes

I recently started looking into designing a custom theme for a Tekbell, an shop with kettlebells for sale online, running on Shopify. Turns out getting started is a bit more complicated than it should be. Getting started, I figured my options (in order of best to worst) were thus: Find some way of setting up a localContinue reading “Setting up a Development Environment for Shopify Themes”

Online Tools for Learning Spanish

This is more a list for my own reference, but it might be useful to others, feel free to make suggestions as well and I’ll update it. Flashcard Program: I use Anki. It’s available on Linux/Mac/FreeBSD/Windows/Android/iPhone/maemo, so there’s no excuses here. Also if you set up an account you can sync between different machines orContinue reading “Online Tools for Learning Spanish”

A Swift Kick in the Joulies

Edit: As noted in the comments, I’m testing these under a situation which is not the recommended method from the Joulies company. I am, however, testing them in the real-world situation in which I would most likely use the Joulies. I wanted to add this disclaimer to be fair to the guys struggling to turn thisContinue reading “A Swift Kick in the Joulies”

Creating a Celery Periodic Task on Gondor

I’ve recently been using Gondor as a hosting platform for a business I’m starting. I needed to set up a task to update my search indexes every 30 minutes, so I thought of Celery. Asking in #gondor on freenode, I discovered that the Gondor guys had recently gotten whatever backend was needed to make CeleryContinue reading “Creating a Celery Periodic Task on Gondor”

Converting Django Tests to Use Factory Boy

I heard about Factory Boy this last summer at a Django meetup in LA and figured I’d give it a shot. I ended up using it on a small project and intending to write a post back then, but I got distracted and never finished the project. I’ve been working on another Django site theContinue reading “Converting Django Tests to Use Factory Boy”

Fixing Postgres on Mac 10.7 Tiger for Django

I’m currently in the process of downsizing my number of computers to a single laptop (or maybe two… I mean who doesn’t need at least 2 laptops these days?), so I got a used macbook pro from a friend and have been trying to make the conversion to developing on it. So far I’ve spentContinue reading “Fixing Postgres on Mac 10.7 Tiger for Django”

What’s an API? An explanation for the layman

So working as a web developer, I work with a lot of APIs. I’m also frequently asked things by non-coders about our API and the APIs of other sites. The concept of API seems to be that of some magical coding device that solves problems. However, while this is an amusing concept, it’s not entirelyContinue reading “What’s an API? An explanation for the layman”