Aaron Sumner


3 picks for February 19, 2015

Pencil

I've been having a lot of fun with this the past few weeks. The Paper app has been on my iPad for years, but I kind of got tired of it because my experiments with cheap styli or finger-drawing didn't pan out. Pencil is a few bucks more than competing models, but worth it if you're interested in drawing on your iPad. I've started themed doodles every night before going to bed–check out some of my masterpieces on Flickr.

Plex

I suspect I'm late to the party on this one, but if you're interested in home media streaming, Plex is the way to go. I'd been putting it off, thinking I needed to get some dedicated hardware for it, but after a few days of monkeying with Raspbmc I decided to install the free Plex server software on my plain old (and I mean old) Mac laptop. Sold. I was up and running in a few minutes, even streaming video to a WiiU via the browser. I do think a little dedicated home server is in my future, but I'm incredibly pleased with the results so far (as is everyone else I've ever talked to about Plex).

Pronto

This is a post I wrote earlier this week about one of my new favorite Rubygems, Pronto. Pronto helps automate some of the low-hanging-fruit aspects of code review, helping you make your commits as clean as possible before creating that pull request. I've been using it at work for a few weeks and can't recommend it enough.

. Questions or comments? Let me know what you think.