Recent content on Sutherland Boswell
I was recently helping someone set up a new TV and we were running into trouble with one thing - controlling their Sonos soundbar’s volume when the soundbar only had an optical TOSLINK input. The output coming from the TV this way was a fixed volume, and without a dedicated remote for the soundbar (not sure if it never came with one or if it was lost along the way) our only way to control…
For those times you aren’t sitting in front of your Bambu 3D printer watching your print intensely, it’s nice being able to follow the live activity on your home screen or dynamic island. Unfortunately it was a little difficult to find where to get this enabled, so I thought I’d share where I found my answer. Open the Bambu Handy app Go to the “Me” tab Scroll down and…
Unfortunately for now the short answer is no. The audio quality is great, but the delay is not. When selecting a HomePod/HomePod mini (or stereo pair) as your Mac’s system audio output, there is a noticeable delay between when something happens on your screen and when you hear the sound. This gets annoying quick for things like notification sounds, video meetings on Zoom or Google Meet, or…
Arc is a wonderful browser that has become my daily driver thanks to its fresh take on how we use the web, but up until today there was one feature from Chrome that I missed the most - site search. What is site search? Site search gives you an easy way to directly search any website. Just open the command bar with CMD+T then type the shortcut for the site you want to search followed by tab (or…
Raycast and ChatGPT go together like peanut butter and jelly, so here’s everything you need to know to set up ChatGPT in Raycast. Create an OpenAI account if you don’t already have one. Go to your account’s billing settings to add a payment method to set up a pay as you go plan. Also be sure to set usage limits if you want to limit how much you spend. Go to your API key settings…
Arc is a web browser on macOS that challenges the paradigm of what we expect a web browser to be. When tabs were introduced to browsers it was a welcome change, but since that first introduction I haven’t tried anything that revolutionizes the tabbed experience quite like Arc. So when the Arc Mobile Companion was released on the iOS App Store yesterday there was a lot of excitement for it,…
Phishing attempts are sadly common thanks to one of the weakest links in computer security – the user. Unfortunately it can be easy for anyone to click a link while in a panic or on autopilot, but it’s important to pay close attention to any links asking for information or claiming to be some important notification. Never give out sensitive details unless you can confirm the site or…
Big thanks to this Reddit post for helping me get Synology notifications working easily through Pushover. I wanted to share their post and preserve it here for future reference. In DSM 7 we can set up a custom webhook to trigger pushover. Once you have a Pushover account and have created a new app , navigate to DSM and follow the instructions below:
yt-dlp is a handy tool (forked from youtube-dl) for downloading local copies of content from sites like YouTube. It supports using cookies from your browser so that you can access content that requires your login or some form of verification. It supports cookies from Brave, Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or Vivaldi. This is good news for users of Arc (from the Browser Company)…
Amazon’s S3 is a great solution for storing files, and Laravel makes it easy to use. Occasionally you’ll need to force files to download instead of just showing it in the browser, but thankfully this is easy too! Rather than wasting your server resources to streaming the file from S3 to your user, we’re going to be using signed URLs .
Starting with Google Chrome v63, any domain using the .dev extension will be forced to use HTTPS. What does this mean? If you’re using .dev in combination with Laravel Valet, you should switch to .test which is reserved specifically for developer use. You can easily do this by running the following Valet command: PLAINTEXT Collapse Copy valet domain test Click to expand and view more Once…
When building an application that handles events, appointments, or any sort of data with a start and end time, you’ll eventually find that you need to do a MySQL query for events that overlap a date range. The two most common uses include: Allow users to filter events by date range Ensuring calendar appointments don’t overlap If you’ve never written a query to do this before, it…
Caution Note: This is outdated information for old versions of Laravel and Bootstrap With Bootstrap 4 now in beta, many people are beginning to switch their projects over to V4. Obviously the migration process requires changing existing markup, which you can learn more about in the official guide ), but for this guide I’ll only be covering how to integrate it in your Laravel Mix build…
Caution Note: This guide was written for Laravel 5, so the information may be outdated. One of the many useful features of Eloquent is the ability to define accessors and mutators . Mutators can help you if there’s something you’d like to do with a value (like hashing a password) every time it gets set on your model. Accessors are for doing something every time you retrieve an…
Caution This project is no longer in development, but if you’re interested in home automation I strongly recommend checking out Home Assistant and ESPHome .
The single most important class I ever took in school was typing. The classes where we played computer games were fun and sometimes educational, the classes where we learned Microsoft Office might have been good at the time and taught a few computing principles, but typing is a skill I doubt I’ll ever quit using. There are some overall concepts like critical thinking that are much more…
It’s launch day for iOS 5, the latest operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Apple claims the update includes more than 200 new features, but you’ll probably only notice 10 or so. Here are some of my favorite new features in iOS 5 and how to get the most out of them. Customizing Notification Center Better notifications has been one of the longest running demands of iOS…
Last week Apple released Lion, the latest version of their desktop operating system. Ever since the first announcement of Lion, they’ve made it clear they were getting “back to the Mac” by bringing it some of the best features from iOS on the iPhone and iPad. I won’t go into the details of every new feature, there are plenty of reviews that do that, but I felt like sharing…
I’ve been building websites for a long time, and I’m still learning. I was still in elementary school when I started learning HTML, and things have come a long way since then. Only a few years ago I started learning how to use a CMS to make regular updates easier, and I’ve recently started learning how to build web-based applications from scratch. Seeing some lines of text…
I’ve always loved solving problems. My approach is to first thoroughly understand the problem and then choose the correct tool or approach, so I’m always ready to learn something new if it creates the best solution. PHP (including Laravel, WordPress, etc) JavaScript (including Vue, Nuxt, jQuery, etc) HTML CSS (including Tailwind, Bootstrap, etc) APIs SPAs Squarespace Shopify Ghost…
These are some of my favorite things I use on a daily basis. While some links are referral links that support this blog financially, everything listed is something I genuinely recommended. If you have something to recommend (or if you find any of these helpful) please let me know! General Apps Raycast - App launcher/productivity tool Arc - Web browser (ask me for an invite!) 1Password - Password…