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01 May 2022
This is the third and final post in my introductory series for the Pimoroni Badger 2040. So far, I have talked a little about getting things set up so you can easily work with and find out about the Badger 2040, and about the physical additions I have made to turn my Badger 2040 into a functional eInk badge. In this post I am going to cover the programmable side of this eInk badge, and what (simple) revisions I have made in order to turn this into a badge suitable for my own purposes.
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30 Apr 2022
I recently wrote about getting set up for working with a Pimoroni Badger 2040, a small piece of hardware that functions as a programmable eInk badge. The basic unit is the electronics, but in order to make it a functional badge for my own purposes, I found there were a few additions required. In this second post in my introductory series of posts for the Badger 2040 I am going to briefly set out what other physical elements have been added.
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29 Apr 2022
As soon as I had attended my first external work event and been issued a cheap paper badge, I began wondering why conference organisers were not using digital badges using eInk technology. I figured it was probably because people would “accidentally” leave the conference with them and they would be more expensive than the cheap paper print out in a plastic wallet on a lanyard. But, within a few years, eInk badges began to appear, and I felt things were catching up. Roll on a few years and I began attending public and private business-related events where people were not issued badges. Again I wondered why people were not issued badges, beyond the occasional sticky label that leaves a not so delightful slightly sticky patch on your business attire?
It was around this time, almost a decade ago, I began dipping in and occasionally looking around for an eInk badge option of my own. I often saw ones available from Chinese marketplaces, but they were typically vaguely specified, only available in bulk and thus expensive for an individual to experiment with.
Then several weeks ago I spied something new that looked ideal. I purchased a Pimoroni Badger 2040.
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22 Apr 2022
Last year I released Conductor, my Alfred workflow for working with Keyboard Maestro. It allowed you to launch Keyboard Maestro macros, get information about them, open them for editing, and even the run them with a preset delay. In this new release I’ve taken things a little further and I’m going to provide a brief overview in this post.
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29 Mar 2022
Last year I wrote a post about automation with Templater for Obsidian. I showed some examples of using Obsidian’s Templater plugin to do some automation a little bit beyond what you might typically consider as the basics. One of the things in one of the examples bugged me for quite a while, and in this post I’m going to go through how I improved things for creating a link to a new page, and the correctly filed new page at the same time.
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26 Feb 2022
I write a lot of things in a plain text format known as Markdown. It provides a set of standardised ways to mark up text for processing into other formats (such as HTML), whereby formatting and other rich content elements are applied. I write all of my blog posts in this format, and also posts for other sites where I publish and contribute. One of these sites is Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC), a site where you can donate to my coffee fund if you like the stuff I do. It is also where I post each month to let everyone know what I have been up to. It regularly surprises me just how much content and support to other Internet denizens I’ve actually provided during the course of a month!
Over the course of the month I jot down notes in Drafts, and then in the following month I write these up, in Markdown ready for posting. Unfortunately, BMAC does not support Markdown, but it does support rich text.
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16 Jan 2022
Anyone who has been following my efforts over the last few months may have noted that I have occasionally made reference to migrating from Evernote to DEVONthink. As part of that move I have been taking the opportunity to sort out some of my lax filing. One of those aspects is the naming of files and specifically the inclusion of date stamps where relevant - e.g. on bills, documentation releases, etc. Fortunately I was able to bring a little bit of automation to bear on this activity, which has been helping speed things up significantly.
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24 Dec 2021
In my day job, I work on Windows, and XYplorer is my file manager of choice due to it’s configurability and extensibility through scripting. One of my most used extensions is one which will move the last downloaded file to the directory in the currently focused XYplorer pane. I have written about a very similar XYplorer script in the past that works in the same way, but rather than the last download, it grabs a copy of the last screenshot I took.
Recently I realised I was missing this functionality over on my Mac, and so I decided to redress the imbalance through a little scripting.
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17 Dec 2021
Yesterday, I was catching up on some reading and I came across something rather exciting - The Ubiquitous Linking Manifesto. This might first sound like something written for a rather out there UK political party, but it is a set of logical recommendations for something that is becoming ever more important in a world so dependent upon digital information and action.
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05 Dec 2021
With the public release of macOS Monterey, I have been trying out a few ways of interacting with Shortcuts from a number of automation tools. Shortcuts can be triggered on macOS using AppleScript or shell script, both of which are relatively easy to do with the Swiss Army knife of Mac automation, Keyboard Maestro. However, I thought it would be fun to create a convenience plugin to make it even easier to integrate Keyboard Maestro with Shortcuts.
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