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26 Aug 2023
Whether I’m at home, or travelling, I often find I want to access my home-based Mac Mini from my Macbook Pro. I have several options at my disposal for doing this, and when I want to access the graphical user interface, then I want to be able to use all my usual tools. One of these is the launcher utility, Alfred.
By default, if I were to have Alfred configured the same across my devices, then it would be very difficult to know which device Alfred should trigger on, and it would default to my local device. For a good while, I used different triggers on different devices but I found it a little frustrating to have to switch up what was effectively muscle memory depending upon the device I was using.
In the end, I came up with a little automation to help me with this.
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23 Jul 2023
Writing blog posts is something that I generally struggle to make time to do. I have always got several parallel activities on the go and writing everything down takes time and slow down progress. Things also come up and disrupt the flow, providing further challenges. I feel writing blog posts is useful as it allows me to share thoughts and solutions that others can then build on and utilise for their own needs, but I don’t have a way to set a structured regular time to do this, so it is an ad hoc activity. This frequently results in me starting writing up a post to be published on one day, but it getting delayed. Because my blog posts and assets utilise the publish date, this can lead to a bit of remedial work to line things up again prior to publishing.
After doing this manually a few times, I created an automation to allow me to quickly shift posts and assets to a new publish date. In this post I am going to outline how I do this to give you some ideas of how you might accomplish something similar with your own similar scenarios.
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25 Jun 2023
Drafts, by AgileTortoise, is my ubiquitous note app. I use it for capturing ideas, drafting content, shopping lists, general note taking, and more besides. The content is often temporary, but when it isn’t, the content gets reflowed off into files (such as in one of my Obsidian vaults), social media posts, e-mails, or some other channel. Last year I also began using another note app - Tot by the IconFactory.
Tot has a very different view of notes. It is a much simpler app and is opinionated in how complex it can get. But, what it gave me on the Mac was a free menu bar app that I could keep snippets on for short periods.
In real world terms, I think of Drafts as my ubiquitous pocket notebook, and Tot as the pad of last few sticky notes on my desk. There is undoubtedly overlap, and I am sure I could make Drafts provide near identical functionality to Tot. However, having a distinction between them works for me, and having Tot as a separate app to fulfil a niche requirement in my workflows has stuck.
The only friction that occurred is where I wanted to transfer information between the two apps. But I’ve been able to smooth that over and I’m going to explain how in the remainder of this post.
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28 May 2023
An online forum is a great place to ask questions and generally seek advice on what you want to do with technology. I spend a bit of time each day catching up on the latest discussions across maybe a half dozen or so technical fora. On some of them I am a heavy contributor, and on others I generally lurk, just gleaning insights and keeping up with the latest conversations. Having been involved with technical forums for the past thirty years or so I’ve seen plenty of good and bad practices, and in this post I am going to share five tips on what I think are valuable and practical considerations for posting queries to technical forums.
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15 Apr 2023
I was listening to a recent Automators podcast episode on hardware launchers when a device was mentioned that caught my interest. The Xencelabs Quick Keys Remote. Currently I utilise an Elgato Stream Deck at my desk and my Macbook Pro’s touch bar when I’m on the go to trigger various automations I have put together. While I also utilise keyboard shortcuts, conflict palettes in Keyboard Maestro, and of course various Alfred keyword triggered workflows, having single touch buttons that carry out named functions as I switch between apps helps reduce that cognitive load of trying to keep track of all the possible keyboard shortcuts I might wish to employ.
The reason it caught my attention was that I know at some point I will update to an Apple Silicon Mac and have to say goodbye to my touch bar. While I do have a carry case for my Stream Deck, it is bulky, and after reviewing the Quick Keys Remote, I figured it might just be something that would work as my portable solution. However, enabling it for my use involved being a little creative.
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09 Apr 2023
Last year I wrote several posts about using Hookmark (neé Hook) to link to automation documentation. At the time I was a little frustrated in that I had several complex Alfred workflows that I was unable to use Hookmark for to link back and forth between the workflow and the associated notes. However, Vitor of Running with Crayons replied recently to my feature request on the Alfred forums, and with the latest Alfred beta (v5.1 build 2130), I now have a working solution.
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31 Mar 2023
Since I began using Jekyll as the static site generator for my web sites, I have been hosting locally while I modify structural changes and write the content prior to publishing. Serving the sites locally involves me running terminal sessions that run the web server. Unless I am actively working on something where I need to check what the web server is doing, I always wanted it to be out of the way, ideally tucked under some icon on the Mac’s menu bar. A menu bar terminal app kind of felt like what I was after.
Recently I was reading a post that made reference to “bitbar” an application that allowed you to put text and menu items into your menu bar based on a script. I’d come across this and similar apps many times before, but never had a reason to use them. Until now that is, as I realised I might just be able to create my own solution for my out of sight, but still accessible local web server management.
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26 Feb 2023
In many of my posts I share solutions to technical challenges I have come across. In this post there is certainly an element of that, but it is building on some earlier work and is perhaps more about sharing a real view of what I use day to day, as a way of providing a bit of insight or inspiration into how you may be able to employ something similar. Specifically, in this post I am going to share some details of my “general” meeting template in Obsidian. Oh, and that’s “general meeting” template as in a generic template for a general, run of the mill, ad hoc meeting, not a general meeting as in governance (e.g. AGM, EGM).
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20 Feb 2023
With a relatively recent update around views in the beta of Readwise’s Reader service beta, I am now getting deeper into its use and building it into my various workflows in an aim to help me better manage and process the various feeds of information I have coming in. The Reader service includes an option to accept input via e-mail for newsletters, etc. While I plan to set up a number of e-mail redirect rules in my personal Gmail account to push some newsletters into the service, I also have a backlog of newsletters I want to pick from and pass them to Reader.
I didn’t want to blanket forward sets at this point and drown my Reader feeds, so I decided I wanted to redirect on a per e-mail basis. Fortunately, I use Mailmate as my Mac e-mail client of choice, and I ended up scripting something I think provides an easy way of adding this sort of functionality for yourself.
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18 Feb 2023
While Drafts is my ever present information capture app, Obsidian is the destination for a large amount of that information as I build the content into cross-referenced, meaningful notes. Much like Drafts, Obsidian has a framework through which people can develop plug in solutions (literally “plugins” - core and community), which in many ways mimics Drafts’ actions.
While some of my own work on Drafts actions has yielded libraries and reusable actions that others can build into workflows, the nature of some of the amazing plugins in Obsidian takes things further and uses plugins to open portals to allow you to interact directly with the underlying Obsidian API. As a result you can build some quite useful commands without having to build your own plugin.
In this post I am going to share the construction of some simple ‘path-based’ command examples to illustrate how you can take advantage of this.
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