The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

Again, something thats right up my alley, combining two of my favourite things: UX design, and LEGO. Interface designer George Cave does an in-depth analysis of 52 different lego instrument panel bricks: At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of …

The code I’m still ashamed of

This post by Bill Sourour bringing together code and ethics really resonated for me. He describes working as a software developer and doing some ruthless marketing for a questionable medical drug targeted at teenage girls: Nothing that we were doing was illegal. As the youngest developer on my …

Greetings from Siberia

Some years ago, while I was still a university student, I had a bit of a creative phase and made a bunch of stylised Star-Wars-themed posters in Photoshop and put them on my website for anyone to download. Not too many people noticed, but every once in a while I get an email from somebody thankin …

Parse Bible and Quran versions with ScriptureKit for PHP

Today I am happy to announce I am open-sourcing a key component of my Devotionalium project: ScriptureKit is a PHP framework for working with Tanakh, Bible, and Quran XML files from the Zefania Project and qurandatabase.org. There are lots of free and open source Tanakh, Bible and Quran editions …

wp-toolkit – An object-oriented WordPress API wrapper

I am the developer taking care of the WordPress-based online magazine Die Eule. WordPress is not known for it’s clean and modern programming API. The WordPress coding style is relatively antiquated and there are many parts of WordPress that do not work in an object-oriented way. This makes it dif …

Reeder for Mac 3.0 Review

I have been using Reeder for Mac by swiss indie-developer Silvio Rizzi ever since the very first beta and bought it right on its first day on sale. Back then it was the most well-designed RSS reading app availiable for the Mac and with this week’s free 3.0 update, it still holds that title. 3.0 …

Passing text to your applescripts with Alfred Workflows

The great thing about Alfred, the awesome Spotlight replacement for OS X, is that – unlike Spotlight – you can run applescripts and shell scripts right from the launcher. This makes it a great tool to quickly run all sorts of actions and services1 – just type the first few letters of the name of y …

How to create a custom LaTeX build system for Sublime Text

My text editor of choice on the Mac is Sublime Text. I use it for taking notes in class, writing in Markdown (I am writing this post in Sublime Text), programming and – really important for my student work – making LaTeX documents. Once you get over the hump of having to manually edit your prefere …

WWDC 2015 Keynote recap

This year’s WWDC keynote brought no new hardware announcements. But with the announcement of new versions of OS X, iOS and watchOS, there was still lots of new stuff to cover. El Capitan appears to be a sort of “Snow Yosemite,” bringing few new features an instead focusing on speed and stability. …

Dropbox Sync for Heroku

As I wrote before this blog is hosted on (the free tier of) Heroku. A couple of days ago the hosting provider announced a great new feature for deploying apps and websites to Heroku: Dropbox Sync. This is a huge feature. It means that with Heroku and a static site you can build your own (free!) D …

Apple Watch

On this week’s event Apple – as anticipated – announced its upcoming wearable: the Apple Watch. But it did not solve the problems smart watches are facing. The Apple Watch's inductive charger. It turns out that I was wrong in hoping that Apple would actually solve smart watches. They simply anno …

Smart Watch

A few weeks ago I started wearing my good old wristwatch again. It’s a cheap analog metal watch, but with a sapphire screen, which appears to be all the rage these days. Plain old wristwatch – great at telling the time. There is one thing that watches do incredibly well: tell the time. I can alw …

Fancy footnotes with bigfoot.js

Footnotes on the web are a pain in the ass. You click on a tiny number, get transported somewhere near the bottom of the page, find the footnote you were looking for, and click on a link to go back to where you were on the page. This script looks to make that whole process painless. bigfoot.j …

Boot to Bootcamp with AppleScript

Ever since I got my first Mac I also had a Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 installed, because there are some programs that just don’t run on Macs and besides, I like to play the occasional video game. Booting from a Bootcamp partition is a little convoluted. You restart the Mac and keep the opt …

Switching from WEBrick to Thin

One great thing about Octopress is that you can always preview your site in your browser locally with the rake preview command. This is a great feature for fiddling with the design without making every change public.1 But ever since I updated to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, accessing localhost:4000 was n …

A Fantastical plugin for Alfred

I wrote a new plugin. It’s a Fantastical plugin for the excellent Spotlight replacement app Alfred. I use Fantastical every day to quickly input new appointments. Its natural language parser is the best and quickest way to enter calendar data. I had Fantastical set to ⌥ Space because I would use …

Typography is for everyone

I just finished reading something that had been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a long time: Matthew Butterick’s Practical typography. The foreword is written by famous german typographer Erik Spiekermann, so you know there is some authority behind this book. You are a typographer! Butterick’ …

Anatomy of a Jailbreak Trojan

Highly disconcerting: Ryan Hileman has discovered a jailbreak tweak that is a part time trojan. The tool was continuously downloading invisible advertisments in the background, earning the developer ad revenue every time the device was used in any way. In his post, Hileman explains in detail how i …

A Mail.app plugin for Sublime Text 3

I wrote my first plugin for Sublime Text. It is quite simple. It takes the text of the current document and turns it into a new Mail.app message. The first line of text is used as the subject line. Originally I wanted it to use converted markdown text, but Mail’s AppleScript interface has no prop …

Free blog hosting for nerds with Octopress

The point of this post is to briefly explain the technical solution I found for this blog and how I found it. At first I had moehrenzahn.de hosted on Wordpress.com. That was free, easy and quickly set up. Why Wordpress isn’t enough for me The premium features of Wordpress.com are pretty expensi …