Gutenberg -project

This is the first post I am trying to write using the Gutenberg plugin for WordPress. I am going to keep this short and sweet as I am testing it as well. You have to try this plugin demo understand the potential of this plugin. So far the demo is great. For a developer preview, this is mind blowing. These are very early stages of development and this looks very promising for the future of WordPress.

If you are a WordPress developer and you haven't tried to use this plugin to test your plugins/themes, you should start today. It is pretty stable considering it is a developer beta release.

You can get the plugin here. Don't go by the ratings on the plugin repository. The development of the plugin happens on github here and feel free to contribute to it.

Tour de france theme updated

Few years back , six to be precise, I was fascinated about chrome and its features so much that I created a chrome theme for tour de france. Now, I don’t use chrome, except for testing purposes. Safari rocks my life these days 🙂

That said, I was pretty surprised that my theme had 500 weekly users as on date. I was mind blown by the audience that the theme receives after 6 years of dormancy. Given the Tour de France season now, I thought I will give it some love. I did a minor update to the theme. Given the friendly chrome developer I am 😛 , I wanted to ensure that the chrome web store policies and other conditions are met. I made some minor tweaks to the theme and updated the screenshots.

Unfortunately, due to lack of time, this theme isn’t retina optimized yet. Yeah kinda non starter, right? If you are one of them. Sorry! The minor update was not so minor when you consider that I spent 3 hours fixing things to adhere to chrome web store standards. But optimizing is a time consuming enough that I could work on creating a new theme than change this one. May be I will get to that later one of these days. The theme still great for the tour de France season. Until the next big update, please try out the theme and let me know how it works for you.

Get the updated chrome theme from the chrome webstore here.

Hyper key on MacOS-Sierra

Have you used the caps lock key as hyper key on your mac? Hyper key is an additional key that you can create on the mac which is a combination of Ctrl +Alt+ Option+ Shift in one key. I had my Caps lock key working as a Hyper key ever since I read about it on a blog post in 2014. Ever since then, the caps lock key has always been a hyperkey on my mac until Apple decided to revamp the keyboard configuration files for touchbar support in Sierra. I dearly missed the feature for about two weeks after I upgraded to sierra and that is when I realized how interwoven the hyper key was with my workflows and mac usage. Nearly every workflow that I had broke. I was on the constant lookout for getting the hyperkey back and used the custom build of the karabiner elements here until I found this easier and streamlined workflow.

The reason why you should use this latest work around instead of the custom build is that you can update karabiner elements. Using the custom build restricts the updates. The config file (json) is pretty simple and has just the options for the hyper key, which makes life so much simpler. If you are like me, just using the caps lock key as the hyper key, the json file here will save your life.

If you haven’t tried the hyper key, you should defintely try it.

Importance of Wasting time.

Here is a intriguing read on wasting time. Guess what, you aren’t wasting time actually . 😜.

This struck a chord for me. Don’t forget to read the full article.

Wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering,” he says. Taking time to be totally, gloriously, proudly unproductive will ultimately make you better at your job, says Guttridge. But it’s also fulfilling in and of itself.

On finding your purpose & procrastination

I was reading this long letter here that was shared on my company slack account, this line stood out for me.

Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

A very intriguing letter by Hunter S. Thompson in April of 1958 when he was 22. The amount of maturity and the thought put into writing is very deep and profound. I would suggest you spend the time reading it. I would say, you may want to ponder on this even more than just reading the letter. I would like to quote a few more portions of it, but I don’t want to copy-paste the entire letter here.

The use of the word “procrastinates” surprised me a little bit. If my life is a path that I choose for myself and I am constantly learning and evolving, when or how do I know that I have procrastinated. Also if I have picked my path only at 30 does that mean I have procrastinated for 30 years? Haven’t those 30 years of experience define who I am how I how chose my path?

I don’t know if there is a definitive answer to this. If you have any, I would love to hear them. None the less, please do yourself a favour and read this letter your self.