Howdy! I’m Devin. I’m sensibly impulsive, consistently non-committal, and passionately impartial. I’m a technologist living in Denver, Colorado.
My lock screen message on OS X Lion
Thursday, August 18, 2011I added a “screen is locked” message (new to [OS X Lion](http://www.apple.com/macosx/) under System Preferences > Security & Privacy) to my laptop since I’m traveling. It says:
WordCamp San Francisco 2011 wrap up
Monday, August 15, 2011WordCamp San Francisco is now the official, annual “WordPress conference” hosted by Automattic and the WordPress Foundation. This year the event was structured as a three-day, dual-track conference which is nearly a 200% increase in sessions with a very modest ticket price bump. The overall value is unbeatable if you’re a member of WordPress community. I had the opportunity to volunteer and help emcee the developer sessions on Saturday.
MailChimp and Crowd Favorite release ‘Social’ WordPress plugin
Thursday, August 11, 2011We at [Crowd Favorite](http://crowdfavorite.com) have been working with [MailChimp](http://mailchimp.com) on a slick new plugin for WordPress for a bit now. In short: it allows you to broadcast new posts to Twitter and Facebook, pulls in replies, mentions, comments and retweets, then allows visitors to log in as Facebook/Twitter identities and leave comments. This is a nice compliment to comments because it allows folks to continue the discussion elsewhere (like on Twitter, a la [Cognition](http://cognition.happycog.com/article/is-this-thing-on)) while allowing your site to remain the center of focus. You can see [Social](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social/) in action here on [my site](https://devin.rea.ms/?p=2095#comments).
Email: “unread” should mean “I have not yet read”
Saturday, July 30, 2011I’ve been trying out the new version of [Apple Mail](http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/mail.html) in OS X Lion and it’s really nice. I would say it’s 90% of what I want in a native (e.g.: not web-based, like Gmail) email client. One thing [Alex](http://alexking.org/) and I noticed was that the new two-column view (view the message alongside the list of messages) forces a new problematic workflow.
Married!
Saturday, July 23, 2011It’s been an amazing couple of weeks here in the Streams (Stephens + Reams) household. Much to follow…
Google+ Project invitation system is broken by design?
Thursday, June 30, 2011I have a few observations about the introduction of [Google+](http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/) to the social space. A lot of people are clamoring about it but, even as of last night, not nearly enough of my “friends” are on it yet. So what’s going on?
DigitalOne raid by FBI: Instapaper vs. Pinboard
Sunday, June 26, 2011I couldn’t help but compare the two reactions to the (potentially overreaching) raid by the [FBI on DigitalOne’s datacenter in Virginia](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/sites-rebuild-after-f-b-i-raid-on-data-center/). In short, the FBI ceased a bunch of servers in a bust on Latvian crime rings in which two unrelated web services were affected.
Interesting open source incentive
Tuesday, June 21, 2011Want your name in lights on the new “Credits” page in [WordPress 3.2](http://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/wordpress-3-2-release-candidate/)? This page shows up in all WordPress.org blog dashboards (but interestingly enough, not on WordPress.com). If you use WordPress every day it’s pretty easy to get involved testing, filing bugs, and submitting patches on [Trac](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/). I found two small bugs in the new Twenty Eleven theme in about 30 minutes and submitted patches in just as little time.
The Heist: iOS game from MacHeist
Thursday, May 26, 2011The team behind MacHeist has released a $0.99 iPhone/iPod touch game. MacHeist has raised over $2 million dollars for charity in the past by creating fun mission-based games and selling bundles of Mac software for heavy discounts. This new offering, an iOS game has four classic game types (like one similar to soduku) with varying degrees of difficulty. The best part: you can ultimately unlock what I presume to be a download code for Steam’s very popular Portal game called Eets (via GigaOm) For only 99 cents, it’s a beautiful game, innovative, very well done, and worth a download.
Add missing file extension to file names
Thursday, May 26, 2011For Mac users: if you ever happen to download a bunch of similar files and they’re all missing extensions (like a directory full of photos crawled using wget), here’s a quick one-line command to add the extension to all the files: for i in * ; do mv $i $i.txt; done;