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This year I changed my day job from working in a school where I took my beloved 13" MacBook Air in with me every day, to a school where we were provided with Microsoft Surface Pro 3s. Initially, I wasn’t too happy about this state of affairs since I’ve put together some great workflows in OS X that I still haven’t managed to replicate to my satisfaction in Windows, but this has mostly been alleviated by the fact that the Surface Pro 3 is a really nice machine when you get used to using the touch screen for all the important things and only use the still quite terrible trackpad for all the edge cases where the Windows UI still isn’t designed to be used well with fat fingers (or even the pen). ...

We were recently in Tasmania for a holiday and hired a car rather than relying on my dad to drive us everywhere, which meant that a lot of navigation was done via Google and Apple Maps (not sure if Apple Maps being rubbish is still a thing, but there was no appreciable difference between the two in a week’s worth of driving everywhere by GPS directions, with the exception of the roundabout stuff below, and Google completely failing at returning us to the airport, which was fine because our plane was delayed by almost two hours anyway). ...

The day after I go and look at writing an operator to mimic ‘in’ in Python, I read a blog post on undocumented Swift functions and come across the ‘contains’ function, which does pretty much that (although it doesn’t work quite the same way for dicts and for strings it only works for character elements, so I guess I like one consistent operator better). contains("happy", "a") // true contains([1: "A", 2:"B"].keys,2) // true contains([1,2,3,4,5,6],4) // true As you can see the dictionary context of the function doesn’t work without referring to the keys component of the dict. If you use a substring rather than a single character for the string context then you get an error since it doesn’t conform to the generic used to define the function. ...

Like a whole bunch of people I was quite interested to learn about Apple’s introduction of their new language Swift, at their WWDC event this year. I’ve been trying to come to terms with ObjectiveC for a couple of years now without much success and this seemed like a good opportunity to learn something new and at the same time finally get around to starting to write some iOS and potentially OSX software. ...

I got around to updating (I say update and I mean totally rewrite) my twitter script this weekend to clear out all the manual cruft that made it so painful to use when I first wrote it. I got a Twitter API key for it a while back so I didn’t have to depend on someone else’s search tool and can get mine to automatically store tweets via a cron and a SQLite database, and bolted on the really quite pretty pygal graphing library (seriously, go look, it’s super nice) so I don’t have to fiddle around with CSVs and Excel to make graphs. ...

(I’m going to prepend this with the premise that stuff like TeX has probably been able to do all this stuff for ages, but this is looking to do things in a more automated fashion.) Over the last couple of years I’ve been listening to more techy podcasts and it’s been interesting learning a bit about some of the tools which people use to get things done. A lot of it is productivity software which I just can’t use since I’m a fundamentally disorganised person, but there have been some interesting editors that have been promoted which has gotten me thinking about where that could go. ...