Today started with a pretty good discovery in our house. Our garden has loose stones at the bottom near the door, and we’ve wanted to replace it with a patio ever since we saw the house. But after being in the garden this morning, I noticed that there’s actually a patio underneath! It’s not complete, as there are some gaps, and it’s not perfectly flat. But it may save us a bit of work, and also it’s a lot better to have a reasonably okay patio in the short-term.

We both then went to town for more home-related things. And also to have lunch in our usual cafe.

After town, we walked my girlfriends parents dog that stayed at our house overnight, and we’ve been relaxing with Netflix and TV ever since! Well I’m especially relaxed, as I keep falling asleep on the sofa.

It’s finally Friday.

I had a pretty busy day at work, which I actually prefer. But now I really do need a good sleep!

The only other thing I’ve done since getting home is cooking/eating dinner, and then sitting on the sofa falling asleep with my girlfriends parents dog, that’s staying round our house tonight.

I’m glad it was a rather simple day, because anything else and I wouldn’t have the energy to write this journal entry.

😴

A pretty mixed day today.

It stated at work with the usual stuff going on. Nothing especially good or bad.

After work, I had loads of trouble with my commute home. Specifically the train from London Euston. There was trespassers on the track, so every train to and from the station was cancelled. It took an hour an a half of waiting for any trains to start service.

Oh and then Arsenal lost 3-1.

But after that, my girlfriend made dinner, and I’ve been watching Lost! So there’s been both ups and downs.

Today at work was very much a continuation of what I was doing yesterday. I was monitoring the latest app release, while also doing a bit of work on UI testing something else!

Apart from work, my day hasn’t exactly been that much more interesting. I got home, ate dinner, did the usual mindless activities on my phone (Twitter, Instagram), caught up with my RSS reader, and then watched a film with my girlfriend!

Maybe the film should be classed as interesting. But it was something I’ve seen before. The problem was, I was enjoying the beginning as I forgot most of the storyline, but after about a quarter of the way though, my mind had already remembered the rest. So I couldn’t exactly stay focussed.

I had a very exciting day at work. As I released an app! Okay, well it was an update. But it was a complete rebuild of a very stable app, and only myself worked on it. So it was a big deal for me at least.

So, because of that, I spent the majority of my day staring at the app analytics, and monitoring how the app was going. It was getting some interaction within the first few hours, and it’s looking positive, but I’m sure I’ll know more after the app is updated on people’s phones.

At home, I also did a tiny bit of development on Text Case. I added a Rot13 format, which is something that was requested a while ago, but I wanted to postpone it as one of the extra features in the 2.0 release.

Regarding Text Case 2.0, here’s basically what’s new/changed:

• It’s been completely rebuilt from scratch (Not exactly appealing to users)
• Complete redesign, which adds some further structure to the app using sections, and also changes the approach from a simple functional utility, to what I think is a great and rich app.
• Three new formats: Base 64 Encode, Decode, and Rot13.
• One-tap copy. Previously this required a long press to open a contextual menu, and a copy button would appear..
• Much better “dialogs” in the app. For example a small bubble appears from the bottom temporarily after you’ve copied a text. It shows the format used, and the result of the format.
• Themes! There’s now a light and dark mode, so if iOS 13 adds a dark mode it’s ready.

It still feels a bit bare to me. As it’s a 2.0, I want it to actually feel like it. I haven’t got many other things on my mind at the moment, but I do know that I want to add custom app icons. That’s something I think people will enjoy. I’ve had the idea of a “text to emoji” format in my task manager for a while, that I may add as well, but I’m not 100% sure yet.

After a pretty relaxing weekend, it was back to normal at work. I was working on some basic UI interaction in an app, and that meant getting to grips with Cucumberish a bit more, as that’s what we’re using for UI testing. It took a while for me to fully grasp how it works, and how to tie in all the different actions/tests, but I’ve got the hang of most of it right now.

Apart from work, I’ve mainly just been watching videos about aquariums. Mainly ones about aquascaping, keeping minimal/nano tanks, and just loads of setup videos. I used to keep fish before I moved out, but it was just things like Goldfish, and Shubunkin. While they’re pretty common, they make a ton of mess and the tanks took a lot of effort to keep up with.

What I’m looking into doing soon, is getting a very small tank, probably around 30x30x30cm. And then taking my time to slowly grow a minimal planted aquarium. Ideally it would have a high number of plants, low number of fish/shrimp, and therefore a much lower level of maintenance. Of course I’ll be posting any updates here, but I’m not sure when it’s actually going to happen.

Another relaxing Sunday!

I started the day with a bit of World of Warcraft and some New York bagels.

Then we had some of both mine and my girlfriends family round for coffee in the afternoon.

After they went home, I cooked a chilli con carne and jacket potatoes for dinner!

Then in the evening there was a birthday in my girlfriends family, so her whole family celebrated that.

After all the relaxing, I’m now ready to go back to work!

It was a big day for football today! Time for a North London Derby, with Arsenal playing Tottenham at “their ground”. I was watching it in a pub with friends. It was a game full of referring mistakes, and although for most of the game Arsenal were winning, Tottenham were given an incorrect penalty and it ended in a draw. There were positivities to take from it though, and we still didn’t lose, so that’s not as bad.

After getting back from the pub, I was greeted with a delivery. It was a bonsai tree that I ordered a few days ago. It’s a Zelkova (Japanese Elm) and it’s going to be sat on my desk in my home office.

In the evening, I’ve been playing some more World of Warcraft either side of dinner. I think I’m getting hooked on it again.

It was a very interesting day at work. We spent the second half of it doing listening to some internal tech talks that people made, and a few cool workshops, with my favourite being one about thinking of an idea about your first talk. I may end up doing one myself!

On the train home, I wrote a piece about a cool menu bar app I found called RunCat. It’s basically a running cat animation that syncs to your CPU speed.

When I got home I just watched YouTube for an hour, and ate dinner. But then I got invited to the pub, so I’ve been there for a few hours with friends.

Now I’m back at home again, so I’m watching the latest episode of The Instance, and I’ll probably end up playing World of Warcraft in a minute! I keep thinking to myself about the time, but then I remember it’s Friday!

There are loads of apps that track your Macs CPU usage. But only one of them uses a running cat to visualise it.

RunCat is a free Mac menu bar app that features a running cat that adapts to your CPU speed. If it’s running relatively slow, then the cat will just be running at a leisurely pace, but if it’s running really high (try building a huge Xcode project), then the cat will go crazy!

It’s really fun!

Runners

It’s not just a cat either, you get to choose from 21 different “runners” for free – Cat α, Cat β, Cat γ, Cat Tail, Mock Nyan Cat, Parrot, Human, Push-Up, Sit-Up, Rubber Duck, City, Sausage, Dots, Dinosaur, Terrier, Hedgehog, Horse, Penguin 2, Hamster Wheel, Octopus, and Steam Train.

There’s also another 21 runners if you want to pay for them – Cheetah, Dog, Puppy, Rabbit, Frog, Bird, Penguin, Dolphin, Dragon, Owl, Cogwheel, Bonfire, Drop, Rocket, Pendulum, Newtons Cradle, Sine Curve, Pulse, Coffee, Reindeer & Sleigh, and Snowman.

And if you really want to personalise RunCat, there’s a paid option to unlock the “Self-Made Runner”, which will let you create your own animation to track your CPU usage.

Options

There are a few options in RunCat to change the way it works:

• Show CPU Usage – This puts the CPU usage percentage as text next to the runner.
• Invert Speed – This means the runner will be running fast when your CPU speed is low, and vice versa. Sounds weird to me.
• Flipped Horizontally – This flips your runner, so it will run in the opposite direction.
• Launch at Login – I shouldn’t need to explain this.

Download

Check out the RunCat website, and download RunCat for free from the Mac App Store.