Recent content on Hopefully Useful
Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together. TLDR; I built an app to return macOS spaces to its Pre-Lion Grid-enabled Glory. Read on for the increasingly…
Hi I’m Christian Inkster, an experienced software developer and father of two based in Perth, Western Australia. This blog is where I write through projects, experiments, and technical frustrations. I don’t update it often, it probably averages out to once every 2 years with some occasional 10 year gaps 😂. Career I’m currently a Principal Software Engineer at Soracom , where I lead…
Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable , I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make me want to fix it myself. While I understand that what I do next is beyond a large number of Advantage Air customers, in my investigation I found that there seems to be only software choices preventing modern…
Japan circa 2006 I stare at the strange looking symbols with trepidation. Fear mixed with equal doses of excitement, is this the time I finally do it? Yes. I gather up the courage and push what I believe to be the start button. There is a whirring noise then nothing, for an excruciating second I think I have made a terrible mistake. Then it happens, a gush of initially cool but then warm water…
For those of you coming from Hacker News wondering why I need OS X it’s because I’m an indie developer that makes this . I’m not sure if it was the after the 4th or 5th time my Macbook Air hard crashed rendering in Final Cut Pro that my planned upgrade timing would need to be brought forward. In any case, the writing was on the wall. I had been asking too much of the little 11"…
After nearly a year of hard work I finally released EasyBeats 3 Pro Drum Machine last week on the AppStore. A week before releasing the app I put a promo video of it up on youtube. It had the desired effect, there was a lot of excitement generated about the app, but there was also a good number of questions asked about the making of the video. I’ll do my best to cover the process here, but…
So I’ve decided I should probably blog about things in my life that other people might find interesting. I’ve decided this mainly because I’ve noticed that the longer I live in Japan the worse my English skills become. It could just be a case of getting older but I find myself often struggling for words or expressions that I’m sure used to come to me with ease. Since my…