Tuesday 6 August 2013 – View from the Potting Shed

Matching Google Chrome’s developer tools theme to your text editor theme

My main coding text editor is the excellent Sublime Text 2, my favourite theme is called Tomorrow-Night by Chris Kempson, and my go-to browser is Google Chrome.

Being involved in web design I use the Chrome web developer tools all the time for debugging JavaScript, identifying HTML classes and tweaking CSS. It looks like this:

But as you can see from the screenshot above, the default view is rather dull: white background, uninspiring syntax highlighting. It’s a shame that you can’t match the Chrome developer tools code panel with my text editor of choice.

User StyleSheets

Well, it turns out you can! Chrome provides a “User StyleSheets” directory into what you can drop a Custom.css file.

Windows: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/
Ubuntu: ~/.config/chromium/Default/User StyleSheets/

A number of people have also done the hard work for us and made available ready-to-use CSS files for various themes. These are my two favourite dark themes:

Tomorrow
Monokai (UPDATED: This version works better when editing code in the Elements tab.)

Having saved the code to your Custom.css file and saved it, Chrome updates immediately:

Google Chrome developer tools with Tomorrow theme

Copy – could this draw me away from Dropbox?

Copy - announcing fair storage and 15GB for all — Copy – announcing fair storage and 15GB for all

I’ve blogged before about choosing a cloud storage provider: Dropbox vs SkyDrive vs Google Drive. There’s a new option on the market now: Copy, and I’ve been giving them a spin this week.

One of the immediate attractions is that their basic, free account offers 15GB of storage space, compared with 2GB on Dropbox, for example. As a limited time offer they will also give you and me an extra 5GB if you sign-up from this referral URL: https://copy.com?r=SJuusn

So far I’m impressed. The software does everything I want it to:

Windows and Android applications
Easy Web access
Selective sync
Ability to share files and folders
Bandwidth throttling

Of course, I need to look into the privacy issues but this may be a contender for moving me away from a Dropbox subscription.

Surfing giant waves in Portugal

When I was a boy, growing up in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders (about 40 miles from the sea), I was given a Hang Ten t-shirt from my American cousin Charlotte in California. She grew up in Hawai’i and told me the significance of the name:

Hanging Ten is a surfing maneuver and is considered one of the most impressive and iconic stunts one can perform with a surfboard. Hanging ten is when the surfer positions the surfboard in such a way that the back of it is covered by the wave and the wave rider is free to walk to the front of the board and hang all ten toes over the nose of the board.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Perhaps in an ideal world I would then say that wearing my green and white striped Hang Ten t-shirt, as an eight year old, inspired me to learn to surf and I became one of Scotland’s finest surfers ever.

But it’s not. And I didn’t.

But isn’t that video just incredible, and beautiful and terrifying.

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