Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs several YouTube channels and websites, and he's also live on Twitch sometimes. To support him on his mission to make the world a better place, you can support him on Patreon or buy him a coffee.

How to fix the Disappearing Mobile Header in TwentyThirteen

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I’ve recently changed themes on this site, from my own development of P2 Categories to Automattic’s TwentyThirteen. P2 Categories was not mobile friendly by default, and TwentyThirteen gives all my major notebook sites a cohesive look, making maintenance easier for me.

One thing I’ve noticed about TwentyThirteen is a small bug that’s been discussed several times around the web: when no header text elements are shown (under Appearance – Customise – Site Identity), a graphical header image disappears on mobile devices. Or more accurately, when the screen width changes to anything below 767 pixels.

If a site title and description are shown, the bug does not present itself, and instead the theme resizes the header image as well as the text without issues. That’s the behaviour I’m experiencing on both my 3D Dev Diary and my iOS Dev Diary.

I did some digging and found a suitable solution for this problem. Let me share it with you here.

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How to build an Amazon link efficiently

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When you want to share a product on Amazon with someone else, the easiest thing to do is to copy whatever is in the browser bar at the time and paste that elsewhere. While this works, it’s not an efficient way to link to a product.

The URL is often extremely long and contains additional parameters that tell Amazon’s systems either how the product was found or referred, or what else to display on the current product page. Most of that additional information makes the URL longer than it needs to be.

In this article I’ll show you how to build a short and efficient link without additional parameters, such as tracking information.

All we really need is the regional Amazon domain and the ASIN of the product and add these two together, separated by the letters “dp”.

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WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg: What does this mean for you

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In this episode I’m explaining the implications of the new default text editor in WordPress 5.0. It’s called Gutenberg, named after the man who invented the printing press (and hence revolutionised how printed books were duplicated and distributed at the time). I’ll also show you how to test drive the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 4.9 … Read more

How to take pictures with Photo Booth on macOS

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In this episode I’ll show you how to take pictures with built-in and external USB cameras using Photo Booth on macOS. Photo Booth is the equivalent of the Camera application in iOS. I will also explain how to export your images, where they are stored on the hard disk, and what you can do if … Read more

How to turn text into an audio file on macOS

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Ever since Lion, Mac OS X 10.7, there has been a great and very underrated feature built-in to every Mac: the ability to highlight some text and have macOS turn it into an audio file.

This is a wonderful way to listen to written text while you’re on the go, or if you want to skim through text you or others have written while you’re occupied with another activity, such as walking or driving. I love this feature!

I’ve seen the option in the context menu many times, but I’ve never dared to use it until today. Perhaps I held off for so long because the option reads “add to iTunes as Spoken Track” – and I’m just not a big fan of iTunes.

Turns out, this text-to-audio option bypasses iTunes altogether. It doesn’t open automatically and we won’t need it to transfer tracks to our iPhones either. What a relief!

Let me show you how to do it in this article.

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How to find the URL for your own YouTube Playlist (2018)

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I’ve seen a lot of web interfaces in my time. YouTube’s has got to be one of the worst ever. Fact! I am frequently shocked how unintuitive the simplest of things are, and how cumbersome and ugly the whole design is.

Take something as simple as sharing your own Playlist. There’s this unbelievably unhelpful Google article that apparently explains how it works.

Which it doesn’t. At least not at the time of writing.

Here’s how to find and share your own YouTube Playlist’s URL (with screenshots, as of August 2018).

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How to transcode an AFIC file with macOS Finder

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Yesterday I had to transcode some audio files recorded with Quicktime on macOS. Quicktime works great for that, but it only stores files in its native AIFC file format. That’s the Audio Interchange File Format, a format developed by Apple in 1988, storing audio data as uncompressed PCM data. Sadly though, AIFC is not commonly … Read more