Videos

Finally! Part 2 of my series on learning how to play the drums, based on teaching I've been doing for the past 18 months or so. If you've never played the drums before and want to learn, this series will help you get playing beats quickly. In this second video, I look at how to hold drumsticks, the characteristics of each drum and cymbal and how to hit them, and look at three basic grooves you've heard in countless rock and pop songs.

In this video I share 8 tips to help you write more effectively. Mostly for those looking to up their game with academic, scientific, and technical writing, but there's also plenty for creative writers too. Based on this blog post: https://go.chrischinchilla.com/8tips

macOS has an inbuilt default autocomplete… Kind of… It's quite sporadic, hard to customize, and is inconsistent. From the same developer as Timing, the awesome macOS time tracking tool, comes Cotypist, a locally running, AI-powered autocomplete tool for macOS that offers context-aware suggestions and learns more about your writing as you use it.

Interested in trying AsciiDoc, that flexible and standardised alternative to markdown for documentation, technical content, presentations, and more? In this video, I cover the syntax you need to know to get you started with the markup language, using a new macOS and iOS editing tool called adoc studio.

I take a look at @aquavoice_ , a new Mac Native application that lets you dictate notes, instructions, corrections, and much more. https://withaqua.com

I speak with @awesomekling about his history building browsers, how the Serenity Operating System helped bring peace to a crazy period of his life, and how now the @LadybirdBrowser aims to bring diversity and standards to the world of web browsers. Formed the basis of this article: https://thenextweb.com/news/serenityos-creator-building-ladybird-browser

Databases are one of the core components of a business. Well performing, well tuned databases mean faster transactions, better experience and better profits. Most of the popular databases offer several built-in telemetry features. But as companies grow, workloads evolve, it is crucial to centralize all application and infrastructure telemetry into a single location.

This video shows you how to use Falco to detect potential risks and then log them to different Parseable log streams depending on their severity using Fluent Bit. Security threat hunting by nature is extensive. You’d ideally want to capture everything you can - with least amount of instrumentation. This is where eBPF shines. You can capture OS level metrics, events with zero instrumentation with eBPF based systems. eBPF is now one of the widest-used options in the cloud native space.

Mermaid is a popular Javascript-based diagramming tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically. Mermaid enjoys widespread popularity and adoption in toolchains, but the text-based nature has often made it complicated for non-technical people to use.

Like many of you, I use Git regularly. Some of us use the terminal and other tools built into our IDE. Whereas I, and many others, like to use a dedicated git graphical user interface (GUI). For many years, I have used Fork, but the good folks at Tower sent me a license to take their well-known and venerable git GUI for a spin.

Are you a guitar player who wants some flexibility with your playing but always thought MIDI pickups were slow, unreliable, or expensive? I take a look at the Tripleplay Express from @Fishman_Music and find that now, MIDI guitar pickups, with a few caveats, are a quite usable and effective way to may your music more creative.

Learn how to setup Parseable as the audit logging and debug logging target for your production MinIO cluster. Read the related blog post here: https://www.parseable.com/blog/minio-audit-logging

A new macOS virtualisation tool from @macstadium makes creating, running, and sharing macOS virtual machines easier. Even better, it's free! Orka desktop lets you push and pull images from OCI-compatible image registries, fitting right into developer and DevOps workflows.

We all love our text editor or IDE of choice, but sometimes it's too easy to get stuck in a rut using the same one because it's comfortable, and it might be worth challenging yourself with something new. In this video, I look at seven alternatives, old and new, macOS-native and cross-platform, feature-packed and more focused, to see if there's anything I might consider to wake myself from my VSCode-shaped hole.

JetBrains is well known for its IntelliJ family of IDEs and has always bundled smart assistive tools. Now, like other vendors and tools, the company has added a privacy-first AI assistant to its full suite. How does it compare to competing tools like Copilot? Does quality suffer for privacy and data sovereignty? I'll take a look!

Kicking off my series on learning how to play the drums based on teaching I've been doing for the past 18 months or so. If you've never played the drums before and want to learn, this series will help you get playing beats quickly. In this first video, I look at what a drum kit is and a brief history.

My highlight of IFA 2024 in Berlin was the PocketDrum Plus 2 that has audio and MIDI out for silent air drumming… https://www.aeroband.net/products/pocketdrum2-plus

In this tutorial, learn how to set up a CDC (change data capture) pipeline on your machine to capture and analyze real-time database changes with Parseable using Postgres, Debezium, and Redpanda. When data changes are needed, update easily and without errors + store the data on Parseable for deeper insights.

It has a strange name, but a few of you asked me to take a look at this simple but clean online tool for creating HTML-delivered interactive fiction. I'm not sure of its maintenance status, but it's well-suited for creating simpler stories requiring a little programming logic.

In this video we explain how to extend Temporal to send application and workflow logs to Parseable. You can use this integration to capture audit logs, debug failure, analyse user behaviour and more. #tutorial #logging #temporal #observability #security #audit #opensource

@Ableton #live quicktip on creating groups of tracks, so you can apply devices, volume, and other aspects to multiple tracks at once.. #shorts #abletonlive #abletontips

I've been using @parallels Desktop for a while, but with @vmware making Fusion pro free for personal use, I thought it was time to look at alternatives for running #windows #linux and other operating systems on #macos In this video, I look at Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, UTM, QEMU, Crossover from @Codeweavers-Ltd , Wine, and Whisky.

Automated processes and tools have been reading our content for some time, building humongous databases of our carefully crafted words so people can actually find them buried across the vast swathes of the internet. And now, even more automated processes and machines are reading our content, packaging it into large models that make sense to few but bring sense to so many.

#abletonlive quicktip on creating device presets so you don't have to recreate the same settings every time you use a plugin or other device. #shorts

My first book of the year! "Technical writing for software developers" on Packt publishing. https://bit.ly/3Xn3px8

#Git may be the source of many developers' productivity and frustrations, but its branch concept is fundamental. @gitbutlerapp wants to change this, allowing developers to easily create and switch between changes on virtual branches. It's a slick new desktop app written in #Rust and #Tauri. How well does it work? Do we need it? I take a look.

Almost every time you install an audio plugin for a DAW you end up with multiple copies of it as a vst2, vst3, and au file. If you’re like me and want to maintain a clean and tidy computer, all these duplicates that basically do the same thing probably irritate and annoy you, staring at you and teasing you every time you scroll a plugin list.