Hello Curious Mints!

Streamlining Tax Season with a Simple Email Hack

Every year, as tax season rolls around, I find myself frantically looking through emails and apps to track down tax-deductible expenses. It’s always such a mess. It's like a scavenger hunt, except the prize is just getting my taxes done. So last night, inspired by the annual

Integrating Prism.js for Code Highlighting and Copy-to-Clipboard Functionality in Ghost

I wanted to enhance my Ghost blog's code snippets with syntax highlighting and a convenient copy-to-clipboard feature. For this, I integrated Prism.js - a lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter. Here's how I did it, broken down into the code for the site header and footer. Files

Deploying a Hugo Website to GitHub Pages Using GitHub Actions

After setting up Ghost for my personal website, I was looking for something a bit simpler. While Ghost is an incredibly powerful platform, it felt like an overkill for my needs—especially for a personal website. I still have a soft spot for the straightforwardness of HTML and CSS, so

Dynamically Updating Your Tidbyt Display with REST API Data

I recently bought a Tidbyt, a fascinating retro pixelated display that can do everything from showing the weather to displaying memes (h/t to Greg Baugues for the recommendation). After setting it up and exploring some pre-built apps (mine currently cycles through a Nokia Snake game, a Tetris clock I&

How to Automatically Run Shell Scripts on a Mac Using Cron Jobs

I wanted to run a shell script at regular intervals to update a greeting image on my Tidbyt device. The script had to render the image and push it to Tidbyt so that the greeting would refresh every few minutes. While developing this, I realized I needed the script to

Building a Hello World App for Tidbyt Retro Style Display

I recently bought a Tidbyt, a fascinating retro pixelated display that can do everything from showing the weather to displaying memes (h/t to Greg Baugues for the recommendation). After setting it up and exploring some pre-built apps (mine currently cycles through a Nokia Snake game, a Tetris clock I&

Automating Weekly Review Date Headers with AppleScript and TextExpander

While reviewing my week in Day One, I like to kick things off with a heading that reads something like "Week of Date 1 to Date 2." Sounds simple, right? But almost always, there's a bit of friction to this. I have to pause my reflection,

Setting Up SQLite with Flask

I wanted to set up SQLite with Flask for a simple, lightweight database solution that doesn't need a separate server process. Perfect for prototyping or smaller-scale applications. Here's how I did it. 1. Installing SQLite SQLite usually comes pre-installed with Python, so you likely don'

Quickly Cycling Through and Fixing Spelling Errors in VS Code Markdown Files

I wanted to cycle through and fix all spelling errors in a VS Code markdown file. I already had the spell-checking extension installed but couldn't figure out how to see all the errors together and fix them quickly. Here's how - 1. Open the markdown file

Changing the Number of Posts Displayed Per Page in Ghost CMS

So, I wanted to customize the number of posts displayed per page on my Ghost CMS website using the Dawn theme. The default setting was showing only 5 posts, and I wanted to bump that up to 25. Here's how I did it, broken down into simple steps,

How to Globally Ignore files like .DS_Store in Git Repos

So, I got tired of adding .DS_Store to every git repo on my Mac. I was pretty sure there would be a better way to handle this on a global way on my Mac, so I don't have to do this for every repo. Here's

My first ChatGPT app - Google Drive + LangChain + Python

I recently built my very first app using ChatGPT's API. Just followed @greggyb's super helpful guide to write my first ChatGPT app that queries a PDF sitting in a Google Drive. 🤩 Here's me querying @culturedcode's AppleScript Guide (PDF) 📚 Very helpful in finding