5 Tips for Posting on a Technology Forum

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.

Xencelabs Quick Keys Remote and Mac Automation

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.

Automation Documentation: Hooking Alfred Workflows

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.

ste-mux for SwiftBar

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.

My Obsidian Generic Meeting Template

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).

Mailmate Redirect Bundle Generator

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.

Path-based Commands in Obsidian

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.

Wrapping Text in Drafts

12 Feb 2023

Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.

Creating An Obsidian Annual Timeline

05 Feb 2023

A few days ago I published a post about a change to how I am managing my daily tasks in Obsidian. Within that post I included a bit about how I am pulling that task list through into my dashboard canvas, and this threw up a bit of interest on Mastodon with a few people asking how I had produced a timeline on my dashboard. While I provided a few pointers at the time, I promised to go through in more detail what I have in place, and that is what I will be doing in this post.

An Obsidian Daily Task List

29 Jan 2023

My use of Obsidian as a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool sees me making extensive use of daily notes. Each day I work, I create a new note and use it to keep an activity journal of all the key things I have done, link out to notes for meetings I have attended, things I have learned, etc. I also display my key tasks (for today and a soon as possible) and record any of the key tasks I have completed that day.

I have always taken to cutting and pasting to transfer incomplete tasks to transfer them forward to the next daily note. But after having tried out Roam Research a few years ago and working with their task management approach, I have always felt that my method was inefficient; but as with many things Obsidian, I found a better way utilising a third-party plugin.