Cloud Confusing
Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.
E-Ink Monitors: Ready for Prime Time? (2020 Update)
It turns out that staring at back-lit computer monitors for 40+ hours a week might not be the best thing for you. With this in mind, many of us have started to look towards alternate technologies, largely e-ink monitors. Large e-ink monitors are, unfortunately a nascent market with a limited number of products for sale, and new products have been slow to be released, but the e-paper display is bound to be an important technology for professional computer users.
This article is a round-up of all the information I’ve been able to find about buying an e-ink monitor in 2020, as well as lots of historic information from 2019 and 2018.
Last Update: 2/7/20 – CES 2020 has come and gone with some big news. It looks like e-ink displays will have some moment this year (finally). It might not be the banner year we wanted, but there should be some notable improvements in the available product offers. The biggest news so far this year is the 10.3-inch Waveshare E Ink Monitor.
Updated: 9/10/19 – Finally some big news! The Onyx BOOX Max3 e-reader has been announced and is ready for sale. This device is billed as an e-reader, but it’s actually a whole lot more than than. And, yes, it’ll work as a monitor. More information below.
Updated 6/17/19 – It’s summer 2019, time for another update! Unfortunately news from Q2 2019 has been very limited and the Paperlike Pro remains the best game in town. The Boox Max 2 is still a viable buy as well, but still has many flaws. This category has (un-officially) entered a stall, but the good news it that we know e-ink monitors are on the radar of some major players, like Benq and Lenovo.
Sal February 7th, 2020
Posted In: Localhost / Environment
Tags: E-Ink Monitors, Eye Strain, Hardware
Command Line Tip: How to Quickly Merge .csv Files
Sometimes you have a bunch of .csv files, but you’d like to have one big .csv file. You can merge them in Excel, Google Sheets, or something similar, but that’s slow and error-prone. Plus, you might be dealing with something like a zip code — which starts with a zero — which is annoying to deal with in Excel.
So what’s a better solution?
Sal September 7th, 2019
Posted In: Localhost / Environment
Tags: Command Line
Lighting for Developers: OS X, Desk Lighting, And More
Lighting of your computer and workspace is an important topic but not one that comes up very often. It’s something I’ve been increasingly spending time thinking about so I wanted to write down some notes and thoughts on what can be done to improve your lighting situation.
Sal April 2nd, 2019
Posted In: Localhost / Environment
Brackets Live Preview Is Not Working? How To Fix It!
Having trouble getting Brackets’ Live Preview tool to work? Brackets is an excellent text editor and the price is right (free!) but live preview can sure be fickle. Here are some things to try if your live preview tool seems broken.
It’s worth noting that there are three main issues here that might need fixing:
- Live Preview Editing (primary browser)
- Live Preview Editing (multi-browser)
- Live Preview Editing and Live Preview Highlighting break independently of one another. That is, you could have editing but no CSS selector highlighting. This is annoying, but generally less of a problem.
Sal March 22nd, 2019
Posted In: Localhost / Environment
Tags: Brackets, Text Editors
How To Increase The File Size Limit In phpmyadmin
Are you trying to upload a database to your site, but it’s getting rejected by phpmyadmin? That’s a common issue, but unfortunately it can happen under a number of circumstances and there are many places where the file size restriction can live, making the issue difficult (or at least tedious) to troubleshoot.
Recently this happened to me when trying to install a 200MB database onto a local installation of WordPress, using MAMP for the heavy lifting. My localhost setup would have no issues with a database of this size but phpmyadmin rejected it every time. I wanted to get my local environment set to match the production version, so this was a necessary step.
Sal February 5th, 2018
Posted In: Localhost / Environment
Tags: Databases, MAMP, phpmyadmin