As you may have noticed, I wound down my freelancing business at the end of 2011 in order to dedicate some time to building my own product. For a long time now I've felt there's been a need for another Agile planning app that caters to those of us who practice Extreme Programming and Scrum.

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If you use the wonderful Ack search tool (it's a bit like grep) you may be wondering why it doesn't search your .coffee files.

You need to tell it that .coffee should be treated the same way as .js files, like this:

$ cat >> ~/.ackrc
--type-add
js=.coffee

For more info on configuring Ack, see my post on using Ack with Haml.

Nine months ago I realised I was spending my life keeping up with "crap on the Internet". I ditched my iPhone, bought an iPod Touch and a cheap Nokia phone, and loaded up Instapaper with interesting things to read. There was enough interest in how my experiment would work out to warrant a follow up, and this is it. Am I more productive? Am I happier?

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I read a lot of great articles in Instapaper on my iPod, but I don't remember all the lessons I learn. I need a way to get these ideas into my todo list so I can act on them later. I need a good workflow. Instapaper and Things integrate nicely, but the feature is well hidden.

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In the past I've written about how important it is to be a considerate driver while you have control of the keyboard, and how navigators can become better communicators. What else can you do to improve your pairing?

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Manning have been kind enough to allow me to give away a free extract from Kyle Banker's new book "MongoDB in Action". The PDF contains the section entitled "Building a Mini-Application", in which Kyle shows you how to build a small Ruby application (using MongoDB and Sinatra) to search Twitter and display the results in your browser.

Get the PDF

Applying GitHub pull requests can be very easy if the patch is obviously good -- you just click the green "Merge pull request" button and get on with your day. If you need to get the code into a local repository before you can push it up to your project's master branch (as I always do) things are a little more involved. But we can speed the process up...

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I recently had to make a trip to Apple's genius bar to get technical support on a faulty cinema display. While interacting with Apple's support staff (both at the genius bar and on the telephone) I realised that Apple are not able to provide adequate support to business customers. Update: They can do it, but don't advertise it well. Check the comments...

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