DEV Community: Jacob

Shutting Down Marianberry

Jacob — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

Marianberry was a project I started as a way for my wife and me to more easily practice NFP with the Creighton method. It's been a labor of love over the last 2 years as it was something I really believed in. For a variety of reasons outlined below, Marianberry will be shutting down for good January 31st, 2019. Thank you for using Marianberry. It's been fun.

To see why we're shutting down, and what it means for you please read on.

God bless, Jacob Spizziri

Why Are You Shutting Down?

1. A Cease & Desist

The Pope Paul VI Institute has asked me to cease and desist my efforts on Marianberry, as it incorporates some of their work. Despite my efforts to work with them to make Creighton a better place, including offering to donate the Marianberry platform to their organization they seem intent on ensuring that Creighton never leverages the power of technology. It would be wrong of me to pretend as though this wasn't deeply frustrating for me; however, I'm sure that they have their user's best intentions at heart, albeit misguided from my perspective.

2. Increasing Costs & Growing Needs

As Marianberry has grown over the years, there's been an increasing number of users with an increasing number of needs. Marianberry is really a team of just one person: me, and as such it's been increasingly difficult to give it the attention it deserves, as it's relegated to my free time, which is becoming less and less (especially now that I'm a Father 🎉). Moreover, it actually costs money to keep Marianberry running, which has been something my wife and I have been happy to do util now, however with the growing costs it's something we've discerned we no longer want to do.

What do I do Now?

1. Migrate Your Data

Please make sure you download all your data from Marianberry before it shuts down. I will be archiving the data and keeping it stored for 6 months after Marianberry's shutdown to help anyone who wasn't notified of the shutdown in time to get their data.

2. Find An Alternative

As outlined above, I believe that the Pope Paul VI Institute will never allow for or provide a digital platform for their method, despite there being rumors or suggestions that it will happen. Their actions in this instance and numerous past instances support that in my opinion. As a result, I firmly believe that the Creighton Method as we know it now is going to be completely left behind in the next decade. My advice would be to change methods now, to a method which is going to provide such support. My recommendation would be FEMM (this is what my wife and I will be switching to). FEMM is based on solid research, is available on Android and iOS, and is, more importantly a company which I strongly believe is ethical, pro-family, pro-woman, and pro-life.

Inbox Zero

Jacob — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Want the TL;DR version? Click here. Okay, for the rest of you, here we go:

If you want to be effective in your job or even maybe your life, you need to be effective at email. But it can be maddening! You're getting floods of emails constantly, how do you keep them straight? How do you not get stressed? How do make sure you're getting everyone the answers they need? How do you make sure you don't forget something?

Enter: Inbox Zero, an email management strategy that can work with pretty much any email provider.

You before Inbox Zero

You after Inbox Zero**

**Note: inbox zero will not magically make you able to do a backflip

How Does it Work?

Inbox Zero is pretty simple. The basic idea is that at any given point in time, your inbox should contain 0 emails. That's the goal: zero, zilch, zip. We want no emails 0 our inbox! Before you freak out, the below concept will easily help you achieve this.

The first thing that we do is we start thinking about our emails in 3 distinct categories:

Emails that are actionable immediately.
Emails that are non-actionable.
Emails that are actionable, but not immediately (actionable at some future point).

Note: By "actionable" here, we mean emails that require you to do something with them (or in other words to take some action).

Then change your behavior:

Archive any email that is non-actionable.
Archive any email that you just responded to.
Snooze any email that are actionable at some future point.

Deep Dive

If at this point you get it, no need to read further. There's just more juicy details below.

Emails that are actionable immediately

Really, this is the only kind of email that you should actually be concerned with. These are the emails that require you to do something. So what do you do? Take the necessary action. Respond with the answer to someones question, etc.

Once you've done this these emails are now considered part of "Non-actionable" category. Why? Well... because you've just taken the action that was needed, and the ball is no longer in your court.

Emails that are non-actionable

These emails are done 🎊. They could be spam emails, marketing emails, or even the emails we just responded to in from the first category. We still want to keep them around for historical purposes, so we don't delete them, however we need to get them out of our inbox. What do we do?

We ARCHIVE them. This gets them out of your inbox, and out of your face!

Don't know how to archive an email? Here, this may help.

Emails that are actionable, but not immediately

A lot of the time these are the worst offenders for cluttering up our inbox and creating stress:

We get an important looking email, we open it and read through it only to find that it is important, but not until next week, or some time in the future where we need to do something (respond/perform some task and then let someone know, etc.). So now we have this email, which is marked as "read" sitting in our inbox, and slowly being buried alive. Quite naturally this creates stress in a normal human. We need to make a mental note, or some sort of note to make sure we don't forget about that email until next Wednesday or whenever.

This is where your email tool will help you out. Any modern email service will provide a "snooze" functionality, which effectively allows you to pick a date that you want that email to magically reappear in your inbox, as if it had just been sent to you.

Here's how to do it with Gmail (for real this time).

If your email provider doesn't have a "snooze" feature, well... I'm sorry, you're pretty much out of luck. When we have caveman tools we have to live like cavemen. I'd suggest switching email providers at this point.

TL;DR / Conclusion

Think about our emails in 3 distinct categories:

Emails that are actionable immediately.
Emails that are non-actionable.
Emails that are actionable, but not immediately (actionable at some future point).

Then change your behavior:

Archive any email that is non-actionable.
Archive any email that you just responded to.
Snooze any email that are actionable at some future point.

Baby Cams & Nest

Jacob — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My reflections after 7 months of using a Nest Indoor Cam as a baby monitor solution.

Problem: I need a baby cam... but they all suck.

Baby cams are one of the many things that seem to still be stuck in the early 2000's technologically speaking. Moreover, who want's to spend $50-$100 on grabage hardware in software that has such a limited use-case you're just going to throw it away in a few years. So naturally, as a new father who is a tech professional, the standard baby cam products on the market weren't going to cut it.

Here's the requirements:

Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
A corresponding smartphone app to livestream video
2 way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
Great Security (no creepers please)
Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older

Solution: Smart Cams

Not a problem, a minimal amount of creative thinking and problem solving yielded the obvious answer. A smart cam.

Alright, I'm already bought into Nest ecosystem at this point with some Nest Protects and a Nest thermostat; so a Nest Cam it is. It's a solution that seems to check all the boxes. So here's what we'll get:

Nest Indoor Cam
My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
Spigen Kickstand

Sure, it's a little more expensive, but for a solution that can be reused to solve other problems, it's a small price to pay.

The Con's

You can't take them with you

Ok. So you can take them with you, it's just not super convenient.

The first time the grandparents want you to stay over at their house the panic sets in: "How will we make sure she isn't screaming? We can't easily take our smart cam with us?". My recommendation here is to just buy a super cheap audio monitor. It's good enough for a night or two here and there.

Bandwidth & Service Outages

The Nest Cam App is apparently not built for continuous video streaming for extended periods of time. After about 45min of streaming on the app, there's an error which takes you out of the stream and you need to click back into it. The big problem with this is that if you're not paying attention and restart the stream when this occurs, your device thinks that it's not being used and goes to sleep. This means that you might think you're monitoring baby, but actually your device is sleeping, so if there's any screaming or movement going on, you're going to be completely unaware of it.

It's possible that this is a network connectivity issue; however, we have average internet (a mid-grade cable package). When you're downstairs streaming Netflix because baby is finally asleep and your monitor keeps going out because of the you apparently don't have enough bandwith to support both video streams and whatever else is randomly going on on your network, it kind of harshes the let's-finally-spend-some-hang-time-as-a-couple-vibe that you just had going for you.

Additionally, Nest goes down... a lot... (looking at you Google 😠). Perhaps this has been a particularly frustrating 12 months for Nest & Google, but they've had a pretty significant service outage at least once a quarter if not more, and quite frankly, I'm over it.

This has been probably the single most frustrating thing about using the Nest Cam in this capacity.

Internet Dependency

That's right, it needs a connection to the internet. No internet. No worky. No monitor.

So that means when your electric provider decides to do some work on the power lines or there's a storm in the area and screws up your cable: No monitor.

This leads into my second largest beef with the Nest Cam.

Cloud Storage Only

If you want to access historical video with your Nest Cam, your out of luck unless you want to pay a ba-gillion dollars for their cloud storage service. So that means you get realtime only with a some occasional completely useless still images when it detects activity.

Nest does not give you the option to stream your video to a local storage device on your local network. Which again, is not only frustrating because they want you to take out a second mortgage to get video streaming, but it would also greatly alleviate the issues mentioned above with the bandwidth and internet outages.

If I Did It Over Again

If I were going to do it over again I'd add 2 requirements to my original list:

Modern Hardware & Software that'll last several years
A corresponding smartphone app to livestream video
2 way audio support (we can hear baby, we can talk to baby if needed)
Great Security (no creepers please)
Do I need CCTV or a non-wifi enabled device? No. those are just security measures. If we find a camera that we can trust the security of, then we should be good to go.
Something that can be repurposed and isn't pointless when baby's a little older
Local streaming & Local Storage
Get a cheap audio monitor for travel

The local streaming would solve bandwidth issues, and provide a better service where I could scrub to earlier in a day and see exactly what was going on without having to pay Nest every month.

This is what my shopping list would look like:

Nest Indoor Cam
My old iPhone 6 (for the stand-alone monitor)
Spigen Kickstand
A Synology
Probably something from their "Value Series" like the DS418play or DS218play
Something Like a FosCam or an Amcrest Cam

The Synology is a little expensive sure, but they're awesome, and multi purpose. They can be used for network file storage, computer backups, a dropbox replacement, aaaand they have something called "Surveillance Staton" built into them, that'll record video streamed from an IP cam.

I'd connect my IP cam up to my Synology, and I'd be off.

Hope you found this helpful!

Angular + Cordova

Jacob — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lets port a new angular project to Cordova without using Ionic or NativeScript. Why? Because those frameworks can sometimes be too opinionated and constraining. By the end of this article, you'll have a functioning angular/cordova project which will be as loosely coupled with Cordova as possible. You'll be able to conform to the angular style conventions, and install whatever plugins, frameworks, or libraries you desire. (e.g. bootstrap, ng-bootstrap, pug, etc.)

First, I'd like to give credit to this post as it's what got me heading in the right direction however I found it to be a little incomplete.

You can find the demo source code here

Ok. Lets Get Started.

1. Setup A Vanilla Angular App

First we're going to create a vanilla angular 6 project called hello-cordova with the following command: ng new hello-cordova.

Some things you may want to do at this point would be to install and configure things like bootstrap & ng-bootstrap or any other angular library's you're interested in working with.

2. Basic Cordova Setup

Now that we have a basic angular app running with npm start we're going to create some basic scaffolding to setup our cordova build.

First let's make sure we have the cordova cli installed: npm install -g cordova.

Now let's create a basic cordova app. We're going to create the cordova app in a cordova subdirectory and give it an id of com.hellocordova.www and a name of Hello Cordova.

cordova create cordova com.hellocordova.www "Hello Cordova"

Now let's add some git tracking files to ignore some build files and keep directories:

touch cordova/.gitignore
touch cordova/www/.gitkeep

And add the following to cordova/.gitignore:

node_modules
www/*
!www/.gitkeep
platforms
plugins

Finally, let's add the iOS platform. To add platforms (and plugins) we'll want to make sure we're in the cordova directory and then run the following:

cordova platform add ios

3. Add Scripts

In the root directory of our project (not the one in the cordova folder), lets add some basic scripts to the package.json to automate a few things:

"clean": "rm -rf dist cordova/www/* && touch cordova/www/.gitkeep",
"build:cordova": "npm run clean && ng build --base-href=. --output-path=cordova/www",
"cordova:prepare": "cd cordova && rm -rf platforms plugins node_modules && npm ci && cordova prepare && cd ..",
"cordova:build:ios": "npm run build:cordova && cd cordova && cordova build ios && cd ..",
"cordova:emulate:ios": "npm run cordova:build:ios && cd cordova && cordova emulate ios && cd ..",
"open:xcode": "open $(find ./cordova/platforms/ios -name '*.xcworkspace')"

We're also going to modify the build script to be the following:

"build": "ng build --base-href=/"

This will give you the following utilities:

npm run cordova:prepare - Other devs should be able to run this script to initialize the Cordova app in their environment.
npm run open:xcode - Run this to easily open the project in Xcode
npm run cordova:build:ios - Run this to rebuild the iOS project
npm run cordova:emulate:ios - Run this to run an iOS emulator of the project

4. Performance Improvements (400ms delay)

Yes. Now let's remove the infamous 400ms delay that iOS defaults on webview clicks. We're going to add FastClick.js to our angular app.

$ npm i fastclick

Add the following to the top of your src/main.ts:

import * as FastClick from 'fastclick';

// attach FastClick.js
FastClick.attach(document.body);

Note: this should be added to main.ts as close to the top as possible so it executes immediately.

5. Initializing Plugins

Now if you want to install other plugins you'll need to configure them. This can be done in the ngOnInit() of your app.component.ts:

// src/app/app.component.ts
import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
import { CordovaService } from './service/cordova.service';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent implements OnInit {
  title = 'app';

  constructor(protected _cordovaService: CordovaService) {}

  public ngOnInit(): void {
    this._cordovaService.initialize();
  }
}

// src/app/service/cordova.service.ts
import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';

@Injectable()
export class CordovaService {

  protected hasBegunInitialization: boolean = false;

  constructor() {}

  public initialize(): void {
    // listen for 'deviceready' event in case it hasn't
    // already been fired during application bootstrap
    document.addEventListener('deviceready', () => {
      window['isDeviceReady'] = true;
      this.init();
      console.log('deviceready fired after bootstrap finish');
    }, false);

    // check if 'deviceready' has already fired during
    // application bootstrap.
    if (window['isDeviceReady'] === true) {
      this.init();
      console.log('deviceready fired before bootstrap finish');
    }
  }

  protected init(): void {

    // lock initialization
    if (this.hasBegunInitialization) {
      return;
    }

    this.hasBegunInitialization = true;

    // do init stuff here
  }
}

Make sure you add a provider for the CordovaService class.

Troubleshooting

Error: Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined run cd platforms/ios/cordova && npm install ios-sim

- Images/assets not showing up?

Whitescreen of death?

Cordova doesn't like <base href="/"></base>, instead use <base href="."></base> for your cordova distributions. This typically isn't what you want for your web distribution however as it can mess with your routing.
If you're having this issue please take a look at the Add Scripts section and take a look at the --base-href flags.