1self Blog

Hi John,

We do have a privacy policy, which can be found in the footer. We’re still at pretty early stages though so it’s likely to be subject to change as we get going.

However, we’re totally committed to not giving your data to anyone else without your express permission and for you to have it all for your own use if you want it. We’ll also clear out all of your data at your request if you want to wipe the slate.

At the moment we don’t have a button to do this but we will do in due course.

In the meantime, just email us at “team [ at ] 1self.co” and we’ll sort it out for you.

TL;DR: Shift + Right-Alt + Backslash

So, I bought a Surface Book in America because they’re available and cheap. But I live in the UK so I changed the keyboard settings to English-UK.

It means that the keys don’t exactly map to what’s written on them. The most obvious examples are that Shift-2 gives me double quote (”) rather than the @ symbol that’s written on the key.

I’d managed to get on ok with the various swap-arounds - until I tried to type pipe, aka “vertical bar” -> |.

It was written on the keyboard just above the enter key.

But if I hit that key it gives me backslash. Shift + that key gives me squiggly / tilde (~).

Eventually I found it. It’s Shift + Right-Alt + That-key.

Updating fields with the Mailchimp API v3.0 is simply a matter of calling a PATCH on a specific record. Here’s an example using node.js and the Request module.

In order to get the member Id to update you can list members using a different API call.

Mailchimp have updated their API and recommended that we use the latest version as they’ve deprecated the previous versions.

At the time of writing, the documentation for the new API is a little sparse and/or difficult to find the things you need.

One thing that wasn’t immediately obvious was how to return more than 10 members in a list.

It’s pretty easy to call the API endpoint to return members in a list. Here’s some example node.js code that uses the Request module to do the HTTP request:

var requestModule = require('request'); var express = require("express"); var app = express(); app.use(morgan('combined')); app.use(bodyParser.json()); app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false })); app.post('/getMailchimpMembers', function(request, response) {  var MC_API = process.env.MAILCHIMP_API_KEY; // store your API key in your environment variables  var MC_HOST = 'us8'; // this is server location of your profile  var API_HOST = "https://" + MC_HOST + ".api.mailchimp.com/3.0/";  var username = "john"; // this isn't used by the MC auth process  var listId = 'xxxxxxxxxx'; // the id of the list you're querying  var url = API_HOST + "lists/" + listId + "/members";  var auth = "Basic " + new Buffer(username + ":" + MC_API).toString("base64");  requestModule(    {        url : url,        headers : {            "Authorization" : auth        }    },    function (error, innerResponse, body) {      if (!error) {        var members = JSON.parse(body).members;        response.send(members.length);      } else {        response.send('error');      }    }  );});

However, what we find is that we only get a maximum of 10 members returned regardless of how many are in our list.

This is because the Mailchimp members get defaults to a limit of 10.

It’s actually very simple to overcome the issue and get all of the list members you need. It’s simply a case of passing count and offset in the querystring of the request url, like this:

var url = API_HOST + "lists/" + listId + "/members?count=20&offset=20";

count tells the API how many records to return on each page and offset tells it how many records to skip (zero indexed). So, the above call would return members 21-40 in the list.

This is documented in the Mailchimp API docs but it’s easy to miss.

So, you’re getting stuck into the excellent library that is d3 for all your charting needs. You’ve worked out how to add axes and give them a scale and nicely spaced ticks (axis labels). And, all you need to do is change the color of those labels because black is bo-o-oring.

Well, that isn’t quite as simple as I thought it’d be so I thought I’d share what I found here, in case you’ve stumbled here looking at the same problem.

The tl;dr version of this is that counterintuitively you have to set a fill color on the text element rather than setting a stroke color or just the usual CSS “color” style.

So, here’s the code to add an axis:

var yAxis = d3.svg.axis()    .scale(yScale)    .orient("right")    .ticks(4)    .tickSize(5); // Add the Y Axis var gy = svg.append("g")    .attr("class", "y axis")    .call(yAxis); gy.selectAll("g").filter(function(d) { return d; })    .classed("minor", true); gy.selectAll("text")    .attr("x", 4)    .attr("dy", -4);

Once you’ve added the axis to your chart your underlying HTML will look something like this:

<g class="y axis">   <g class="tick" transform="translate(0,265)" style="opacity: 1;">     <line x2="340" y2="0"></line>     <text dy="-4" x="4" y="0" style="text-anchor: start;">00m 00s</text>   ...

Then in order to style the text labels you simply add this style to your CSS:

.axis text {    fill: rgb(169, 178, 189); }

So, there we go. To set the color of a d3 axis tick label, give it a “fill” style.

Hello.

Good question. Having done a quick bit of testing, it seems that the answer is “no”. But, I suspect that a future Chrome release will fix the problem because it’s partly working, as you can see below.

The color takes effect both in the address bar of the Chrome browser and also in the title bar of the app switcher.

If I set my theme-color to white then the result is that the address in the browser becomes entirely unreadable as it’s white on white. It is readable in the app switcher, however.

Browser address bar with theme-color = white:

App switcher with theme-colour = white:

On changing the theme color to black, we find that the address bar is now fully readable with white text on black. The app switcher appears to have a bit more intelligence and changes the text color automatically to retain contrast.

Browser address bar with theme-color = black

App switcher with theme-colour = black:

If you have an Android phone then you may have noticed the odd website where the toolbar at the top of the browser gets colored to match the style of the website.

It looks pretty cool and if you have your own website then it’s well worth doing as it’s suuper easy.

Here’s an example of our 1self website (with a sneak preview of our upcoming “life cards” functionality):

You can see that I’ve colored the address bar to match the yellow background of the page. Cool, huh?

It couldn’t be simpler to do. You just need to add the following meta tag to the <head> of your html:

On doing a Google search to try to get to bottom of a coding problem I thought I found the answer presented to me in a familiar Stack Overflow link. On clicking the link I was presented with Stack Overflow but with a huge advertising overlay on top of the page. “Ugh, what is Stack Overflow up to?”, was my immediate thought but it was so out of character I looked more closely and noticed that the page was actually being served via a proxy at 80bola.com.

You can see it in the Google results page:

The content and inadvertent back links (from unsuspecting individuals linking to the proxied version of a page rather than the original) will be giving them extra SEO points, hence their high ranking on Google.

Take care out there because if you log into one of your web accounts on a proxied sites then the proxy provider (80bola.com, in this case) will be able to see your username and password.

Presumably Google will sort this out in due course as it doesn’t look good on them in returning these duff pages in preference to the original content.

We’re building an awesome personal sensor-station using a Raspberry Pi.

There will be a full tutorial on how to build your own in the near future but in the meantime, here’s a pic of wired up Pi.

The Pi has two sensors on it for measuring temperature, light level and humidity. It also has a Bluetooth iBeacon built into it so that it can broadcast its location. Personal proximity to the Pi can then be sensed using our 1self companion app. With the two combined, you get sensor information stored in your 1self account for the exact periods when that sensor information is relevant to you (i.e. when you’re in the same environment as the sensor station).

We host the 1self blog on Tumblr, as you can probably tell. I also have a personal Tumblr blog, which is one of my go-to procrastination destinations.

It’s a pain in the ass to have to keep switching between the two accounts in order to post or browse on each account.

So, here’s a top tip:

Use Chrome for one Tumblr account and Firefox / Safari for the other. Stay logged in in each browser and just fire up the browser you need to manage the blog you’re after. No more logging in and out.

@edsykes and @chinmay185 talk d3 and design constraints to a full-house Expertalks.

My music listening seems to follow a pattern. I either listen to no music all day. Or maybe I listen to a handful of tracks. An album perhaps. Or I listen to loads and have the music on all day. It's a bit of feast or famine in a music sense.

Sometimes it's task dependent. Certain tasks such as coding really lend themselves to a non-intrusive musical background. Other tasks that don't require much mental input are suited to more involving music. This phenomenon is described in loads of detail in this blog post.

Oftentimes when it's just an album's worth of music that I've listened to it's just something to make the commute more bearable. Plug into my own world on a busy train. It makes standing, squashed up to loads of strangers just about bearable.

Then I have the glut days. I switch on in the morning and then the music is a soundscape for my whole day. This is usually when I'm working from home. I switch on some of my favourite long-running Spotify playlists and just let the sound fill the room around me.

UPDATE

I managed to keep it going for a week. But, have broken the habit again. My meditation graph in the original post looks great. Unfortunately, as i write this, my meditations looks horrible: (No meditation to display).

Hopefully, by the time you read this, things will have improved. Here is a live graph of my progress:

If you'd like to improve your meditiation, or just leave me a message to encourage my meditation, sign up to 1self, track your meditation and share your data with us!

=====

I'm trying desperately to develop a daily meditating habit. Pre 1self I could convince myself that I was actually doing ok. Doesn't revealing and acknowledging this to yourself bring pain, doubt and despair.

Absolutely not. 

It makes me more determined to achieve what I set out to do - and failed - on thursday. I'm going right now, at this late hour, to meditate for 10 minutes. And I make a pledge now - which you'll see as my data scrolls along - to meditate every single day. 

Please, write me a word of encouragement on the days when I manage it.

Ed

TLDR; Recently at 1self we ran a hackathon. We used meteor as the development platform for the hackathon - it gave us more hack and less thon.

I've been to a bunch of hackathons and one thing that always kills the fun is getting set up. It's worse in recent times with the migration from windows. Read on for how meteor works.

1. Setup takes minutes

Just curl the installation script and pipe it to shell. Even on windows, it's getting easier, since there is a very early version of official windows support. In many hackathons I've been to, the joy of learning has been crushed by the setup process.

2. Instructions can be written cross platform

The same command line across all platforms. It makes issuing an instruction to today's choose-a-funny-dev-platform developers easier. 

3. Hack straight to the web

There's something so encouraging about actually deploying what you built to the web in a hackathon. In meteor deploying to the web is as easy as running locally.

4. Hack in your favourite editor

Since there is no presumed development environment, windows users can hack in notepad; OSXers in textmate. Or use Sublime or whatever other flavor of text editor takes your fancy. 

5. Automatic reloading

This was a surprise - things went much faster with meteor's deploy to the browser on code change.

6. Great for beginners

We had a VB coder at the hackathon - oy leave him alone they are essential in banking - and he was able to participate. With no prior experience he was able to build and deploy a web app. Pretty amazing for 2 hours. Of course, it helped that the 1self api is really easy to learn and user.

WINDOWS CAVEAT