I’ve made some important fixes and handy improvements to the Marked Conductor since it was first published. I’ve made my own config available as an example. Not all of the scripts are polished, but it’s complete enough to show how I’m using it. I still need to finish breaking my … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($39.99 value each) for Acorn. If you don’t need the bulk of Photoshop but want all of the image editing power, check out Acorn. It loads up in seconds and offers all the image editing tools and flexible image processing you need … | Continue reading
So a lot of us are wondering what to do now that Toketaware has announced the sunsetting of the iThoughts mind mapping app for Mac and iOS. It’s very sad to see it go, but I expect the current version to continue working for a few years to come. That said, I tend to favor softwar … | Continue reading
I’ve completed my latest side project, the Marked Conductor. Here’s the backstory: Marked 2 offers the option to use Custom Processors (and Preprocessors) which allow you use Markdown (and other) flavors with your own commands to convert them to HTML. This is commonly used for pr … | Continue reading
The Bear giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! I’m really sorry I accidentally mixed up days and ended the giveaway a day early, but hopefully everyone who was going to sign up already has! The winners! Congratulations to: Dillon Mok Matthew R Leibowitz Chris Turner … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with NordVPN. Secure your internet browsing effectively and affordably. Google Graveyard - Killed by Google Killed by Google is the Google Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Google in the Google Cemetery. Up-to-date and … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 1-year subscriptions to Bear Pro ($29.99 value each) for Bear. Bear is a great app for note taking, journaling, and organizing information with Markdown support. It’s gorgeous to work with, elegant in its functionality, and works great wi … | Continue reading
I’ve said this before, but I need to keep repeating it based on the number of queries I get. nvALT is at end of life, unless someone picks up the reigns and modernizes the (open source) code base. As it stands now, nvALT barely functions on modern OSs. Fletcher Penney and I have … | Continue reading
The Unite 5 giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Robert Williger Angelo Machils Mike Shaffer Jim Dye Denton C Jacobs You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! I … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($49.99 value each) for Unite 5. Unite creates Single Site Browsers, self-contained apps designed to work with a specific website. You can create an SSB for Facebook, one for Slack, one for any tool you use that has a website. Ke … | Continue reading
The Photos Workbench giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Stuart Marshall Thijs Hagen Christopher Dahrén Yinan Chen Robert Gilmore You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($29 value each) for Photos Workbench. If you’ve had an iPhone or any digital camera for a while, Apple Photos is probably chock full of pictures. And you probably haven’t named, tagged, geocoded, or rated most of them. Photos Wo … | Continue reading
I’ve been blogging for over 20 years now, making websites for 28 years, and before all of that I was running a BBS that had users from all over the U.S. (but only one phone line/modem, so it was slow communication). And I’ve seen an unsettling shift over the last 10 years that I … | Continue reading
The The Archive giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Devon Greene Justin Tomich Michalis Litke You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorr … | Continue reading
I’ve been wanting to add JavaScript execution to CurlyQ for a while and finally got around to it. In case you’ve missed it, CurlyQ is my command-line web automation tool for fetching, parsing, and responding to web page content, designed to be used as part of a *NIX pipeline. It … | Continue reading
If you run a website and aren’t serving your assets from a CDN, I want to highly recommend that you do so. I’ve seen significant performance improvements simply by redirecting my image, CSS, and JS requests to a CDN instead of serving them from a server like DreamHost. I like Dre … | Continue reading
First, there seems to be a misconception that Dimspirations are generated with AI or some other such trickery. I want to assure you that, while the entire process of posting them is automated, each Dimspiration is lovingly crafted by me in Affinity Photo1. I wanted to detail the … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 licenses ($19.99 value each) for The Archive. While everyone is waiting for nvUltra to finally be released, The Archive stepped in quite a while ago to fill the gap left as nvALT (and Notational Velocity) get long in the tooth. If you’re … | Continue reading
The EagleFiler giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Olivia S Hanley Ashley Stewart You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Eagle … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanMyMac X, all the tools to speed up your Mac, in one app. N₁₀ - Attention Management App for Mac A simple, elegant Mac app that allows you to set an intention, define how much time you plan to put into it, and then just sit, q … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($59.99 value each) for EagleFiler. EagleFiler is an amazing tool for cataloging and searching all of your information, from web pages to emails and every kind of file you need to keep track of. It gives you a Mail-like interface … | Continue reading
The Flexibits Premium giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Simon Clemmensen Derek Lucas Knut Focke Norman Hawker Will Goring Ashish Bhateja Johan Romin Pedro Silva Joško Oršulić Alex Lubberts You should have received an email with d … | Continue reading
I haven’t mentioned this setup for a while and thought I’d remind everyone, especially newer readers, about a rabbit hole they might choose to go down. I haven’t updated or changed any of these scripts since posting, and they’re all still working well. Part 1: TagFiler Hazel scre … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanShot X, the absolute, hands-down best app for Mac screenshots. Get one of my all-time favorite apps here. Deckset on the App Store Just when I thought Deckset was dead, an iOS version is announced. Create presentations using … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 10 1-year subscriptions ($57 value each) for Flexibits Premium from Flexibits. Flexibits makes some incredibly useful apps. Fantastical is an awesome Calendar replacement, Scheduling makes organizing calls and meetings a breeze, and Cardhop … | Continue reading
I wanted short urls for Dimspirations, and I wanted a custom domain name (dim.moi), but didn’t want to pay the somewhat exorbitant prices to do so with something like Bit.ly. So I set out to build my own URL shortener. PHP/mySQL seemed like the path of least resistance on my curr … | Continue reading
The Bike giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Christoph Schneider Albert Willis Nicholas Foley You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorr … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 licenses ($29.99 value each) for Bike. Bike is a deceptively simple outliner. It uses plain text files (HTML, but also supports OPML and text) to store structured data that maintain simplicity while offering a ton of functionality. Add ro … | Continue reading
The Things for Mac and iOS giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Ada Panzier Aaron Ferkenstad Bart van der Pot Daniel Doron Nathan D Myers You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear a … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 (sets of) licenses for Mac, iPhone, and iPad ($80 combined values) for Things. Things is a task management solution that I love for its elegance. Display your todos alongside calendar events, see exactly what you have to do today, see upc … | Continue reading
I’ve created the initial round of merchandise for the Dimspirations Store. I know my sense of humor isn’t for everyone, which is why this whole project is on a different site. I’ve started with some of my personal favorites as tees, mugs, and a 2024 calendar. The collection will … | Continue reading
The Black Ink giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Wil Chow You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Black Ink is still worth … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Backblaze. Back up everything. Cluster (for Bunch) Cluster is an Alfred workflow for use with Bunch, written by Stephen Millard. Closely integrates Bunch functionality with Alfred to make life even easier. I’m not an Alfred use … | Continue reading
Thanks to Sanebox for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! This one is longer than the usual sponsored post, but full of great tips whether you use SaneBox or not (but you should!). Effective communication is key i … | Continue reading
On a whim I’ve put the new Dimspire.me site up on Product Hunt. I’ve been putting a lot of love into it and even if I were to stop now, I think it’s a great collection of nihilist inspirations (and wallpapers), enough to last quite a while. I’d love it if you’d take a second and … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a license ($29.95 value) for Black Ink. Red Sweater software is back again with Black Ink, Daniel’s app for crossword puzzle lovers. It can load any puzzle file designed for the Across Lite puzzle format, and offers a beautiful way to solve … | Continue reading
I’ve added (well, fixed) the RSS feed for Dimspire.me. You can now subscribe via your favorite feed reader at Dimspirations RSS (or just enter https://dimspire.me in your subscribe field, the feeds are discoverable). The feed is available in XML and JSON flavors, and each entry j … | Continue reading
The TaskPaper giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! Sorry for the delay in getting the announcement out, I had a rough day yesterday. Thanks for your patience! The winners! Congratulations to: Mark Horlbeck Arktika Damon Albert Street You should have received a … | Continue reading
I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m not manic, I’m just going through this months-long bout of insomnia. At least I don’t think I’m manic. It doesn’t have any of the characteristics of my usual mania. And up until last night I wasn’t even getting out of bed when I couldn’t sleep. Bu … | Continue reading
Thanks to Keep It for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! If you’re looking for a way to keep all of your information at your fingertips, readily findable, without locking yourself into a database-based system like Evernote, Keep It is a great solution. … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 licenses ($24.99 value) for TaskPaper. TaskPaper is a task management solution based entirely on plain text. It offers a familiar interface to work with files in the TaskPaper format, with tagging, projects, due dates, and all the things … | Continue reading
I recently purchased some Cerakey ceramic keycaps for my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. When I mentioned the purchase on Mastodon, I got a few replies asking for a review, as multiple people had been considering the purchase. So here it is. Note: I have 3 cats. I tried to clean the … | Continue reading
The FastScripts giveaway has ended, and I have a winner to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Juan Alejandre You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but FastScripts is s … | Continue reading
I’ve started creating Dimspirations again, my depressing-but-actually-realistic collection of “inspirational” posters. You can follow the hashtag #dimspirations on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, or Instagram for new posts. I’ve also automated the process of creating wallpaper-forma … | Continue reading
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with MindMeister, the best collaborative mind mapping software out there. Find Any File I’ve mentioned HoudahSpot plenty of times, but there’s an app that’s been around since about 2005 that has been continually updated and only cos … | Continue reading
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a license ($39.95 value) for FastScripts. FastScripts puts all of your scripts in your menu bar, accessible with keyboard shortcuts and instant search. It even improves the efficiency of scripts by executing them in their own processes in p … | Continue reading
The HoudahSpot giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Neil Hart Floris van de Sande Dennis Misener Markus Struck Evan Grote You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I d … | Continue reading
I’ve been working with a former nvALT user who stored all of their files in RTF format. Ideally, people switching from nvALT to another app — be it nvUltra, Obsidian, or anything Markdown-based — would already be storing their notes as individual text files. If nvALT is still wor … | Continue reading