Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 2)

It was driving me crazy that the quality of the songs I was streaming from a website known as Bandcamp sounded better than the quality of the songs I was playing from my iTunes (now Music) collection. In my case, I recently bought a Marian Call CD named “Something Fierce”, and had imported the songs from that CD into iTunes. But the songs I streamed from Bandcamp sounded better than the songs I imported from the CD; how could this be?

I dug into the problem and found two simple fixes, both in iTunes. In this article I'll show you how to make those fixes to dramatically increase your iTunes sound/music quality.

As I wrote in Different meditation/mindfulness practices, different cultures, and they all talk about witnessing/noting, mindfulness and meditation masters (teachers) from different cultures, countries, and styles of practice often teach the same thing in different ways: a style of mindfulness meditation known as witnessing or noting.

To me, a simple way to think about this is that as your body goes along with its daily life, all you have to do is simply narrate what your body is doing at all times, in the present moment.

If you like, you can think of yourself as being the witness/soul, watching the body, and noting what it’s doing, like a birdwatcher does when they note what birds are doing in a forest. It’s that simple.

If you’re interested in logging in a ZIO application, the following example shows a collection of different ways you can write log messages. I also show how to create your own custom log format, so the output logging from this application looks like this:

Here’s a comprehensive guide to implementing retry logic in ZIO 2 applications, using various scheduling strategies.

Please note that I haven’t double-checked that all of these examples compile as-is, but I do demonstrate many of these in my free Scala and ZIO 2 training videos. (I also added a complete working example at the end.)

“Goddamnit!”

Every so often a woman in a lucid dream this morning yelled out like that, so after the fourth or fifth time I had to ask her about it. “Why do you keep saying that?,” I asked.

“Gets your attention, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“There you have it.”

“There I have what?”

As a brief note today, here’s some skeleton code for a ZIO (ZIO 2) application that needs to run forever. It (a) does what it needs to do, then (b) sleeps for a minute, and then (c) goes back to Step A, doing whatever it needs to do, forever.

I wanted to share this code because I think it’s probably a very common pattern and need in the ZIO world — writing an application that needs to run forever, on a schedule.

Also note that the code is written using Scala 3, but the syntax can be changed to use Scala 2, if you need to. I also added a layer/ZLayer to the code to make it a little more “real world.”

All that being said, here’s the ZIO “run forever” code:

This page contains a list of my favorite mindfulness quotes. Most of these are short, concise quotes that help bring me back to the present moment, and work well with my “Just Be” mobile app.

Update: I have replaced my Just Be application — which was written for Android only — with a new application I call Back To Now, which runs on both Android and iOS.

Background: Just Be

Just Be was a mobile mindfulness app that I created for Android users. This is what the reminders/notifications look like when you receive them on an Android phone or tablet: