As we all know, February is a short month, and I am not generally getting as much time as I might normally to write and work on my projects due to ongoing issues in my personal life. But that being said, as I look through everything I’ve done over the last four weeks I have massively surprised myself in terms of what I’ve been putting out, and what I’ve been working on behind the scenes so to speak. I can honestly say that somehow, this has been one of the most productive months I have had in the last few years. Time for a whirlwind tour of February 2023!
ThoughtAsylum
This month I published five blog posts on my site. The last time I wrote that many pieces (well six actually), was back in late 2021. I thought I had done three or four, but I guess this month has just been a bit of a blur in more ways than one.
After getting a few requests onMastodon about a timeline that I had on my Obsidian canvas dashboard that I shared in a previous post, I wrote a post that walks the reader through the creation of my dynamically updating timeline. It utilises some scripting to build a scalable vector graphic (SVG) for the current year, and place a marker for the current date on an annual timeline. This lets me see at a glance how far through the year I am. It is heavily based on existing work, but just with a few tweaks of my own.
The next post was for something I had created for Drafts last year, in response to a query on the Drafts forum about being able to markup text for highlighting. The typical approach was to reuse some of the existing actions that wrap text, such as for bold or italic. Instead I came up with something that I hope is flexible and reusable, and deals with a range of varying markup approaches. It is an action that I think can get a lot of reuse. Smarter text wrapping in Drafts is only a few moments away if you haven’t already taken advantage of the action I put together.
The next post I am pretty proud of, or rather I’m proud of putting together the solution - I am sure my writing could still benefit from more mindful practice. In the post on creating path-based commands in Obsidian, I walk through some examples of creating new commands in Obsidian. That’s right, new commands; and I don’t write my own plugin. It all makes use of the core app and a few plugins used creatively. To my mind it provides a shift change in how people can build out Obsidian by allowing them to build automations without needing to go down the rabbit hole and overhead of building an entire plugin. In the post I also create three path-based commands to illustrate the process, and they are actually, in my opinion, useful commands. In the post you can follow my instructions to create commands to copy the full (not relative) file path of the current note to the clipboard, open the current note in another application (I chose TableFlip), and open the folder containing the current note in the terminal; where you can get up to all sorts of fantastic command line manipulations of your text-based notes.
The fourth post was definitely something that started as a need to scratch my own itch. I have recently been trying out the Readwise Reader service that is currently in beta. It is a power user reading solution that you can use to collate, triage and further process your digital content consumption. It sounded right up my street when it came out, but it wasn’t until this past month that I had heard they had added a categorisation feature it had been lacking when I looked at it last year. This categorisation was the only thing that had been stopping me signing up to give it a whirl, and now it was dealt with I’m trying it out. As an aside, I also expect to be stumping up the subscription cost for it too quite soon. But, the post was not about Reader, rather it was about getting some content into Reader from my e-mail application on my Mac - Mailmate. I wanted to be able to forward some unread newsletter e-mails using the original e-mail address (a ‘redirection’) into Reader for e-mails I had already received prior to setting up some rules on my account. Mailmate supports redirection, but rather than entering a recipient address each time, I wanted to pre-fill it and immediately archive. The solution was to create a Mailmate bundle (effectively a plugin). What I actually did was create a shell script that generates a bundle, and you can read all about it and grab a copy in the post.
The last post was another Obsidian one. Since I have been getting a few Obsidian queries recently I thought I would share one of my templates. This wasn’t about a new note taking paradigm or a perfect capture template, but rather a way for me to share some of the technical things I do with one of my templates to reduce some friction and make my notes a bit more useful to me. This one is a detailed walkthrough and it was a bit longer than I’d originally intended, but I realised in writing it I needed to explain things in a bit more detail, though I do reference back to several previous blog posts too. If you are interested in a bit of inspiration for your use of Obsidian, then my walkthrough of my generic meeting template for Obsidian is probably something you will find rather useful.
Forums
Once again, I’ve picked out the highlights and interesting online discussions I’ve joined in this month. When you look at my monthly lists, you may be surprised to know that I usually leave a good chunk of them out.
Drafts
The idea of having a tagging new drafts with workspace tags when created came up once again. I offered some suggestions including a full on templating system (crazy thing was it only took me a few minutes!!) that I believe met the requirements, but my warning to all is you cannot accurately determine the tags to apply without defining them separately. Don’t believe me? Read the thread and I explain why, and in doing so probably highlight some of the hidden power in workflows.
There was an interesting discussion about something in Drafts that may be a design fail, a bug, or neither of these. You decide.
An old thread about Evernote tags was resurrected, and I added a few details.
There was a query about sending tasks from Drafts to Skedpal - not a service I’d heard of before.
I’ve never used Ulysses, but I had a stab at helping one forum user configure Drafts to send to a specific Ulysses sheet.
I made some suggestions for the Draftodon action group for Mastodon (by FlohGro) off the back of doing some support for a user who was having issues.
There was a lot of discussion about Drafts integration with Day One. Ultimately I think this is what triggered a deep dive on Drafts with Day One by Greg Pierce, Drafts' creator.
A discussion on using Shortcuts to search Draft by partial or multiple tags. If you haven’t come across how to create nested tags in Drafts, this will be worth a read.
There was a while spent investigating why templates were not working for a user.
I outlined my usual approach to round-tripping Draft content to a file and back in a discussion about how to open a draft in the TaskPaper app.
A question about reading from files was addressed using some of my ThoughtAsylum action group actions, that follow the same sort of principles.
I answered some questions from a new user, which were certainly not the usual sort of questions.
I helped one user change the quick capture key binding.
There were a some scripting questions I did what I could to help out with. At some point I really need to get back to a project I started a few years ago on scripting with JavaScript in Drafts. It was just a little problematic as it was broader than that.
A question about Drafts not being visible gave me an excuse(?) to highlight my Recon action. If you haven’t seen it, it effectively produces a configuration report for Drafts.
For anyone who is confused about workspaces and folders, I cap this thread off with my blog post on the topic.
I outlined a workaround for a feature request to have different action groups on iPad and iPhone. I think it is a reasonable request, but the original poster did also ask for any workarounds.
A user flagged up an issue with an action I created to help another user place text after a ## tag in an obsidian file. The issue was it worked on one device, but not another, which suggested it was not an action issue as there were no OS-dependent steps in the action. I made some suggestions as to potential causes, but as is often the case, no response was received.
There was some discussion about a Title and Links action no longer working. The issue turned out to be an inefficiency in the design of the action. I joined the fray a little later and noted some cases where it wouldn’t work and further optimisation. On this occasion I chose not to simply create an updated version, but to guide and encourage others to apply the tweaks based on the existing code. Is that mean?
Automators
I made some suggestions about using Scriptable to automatically fetch and save data locally.
There’s a query on how to get audio from Restream.io (e.g. into Auphonic) that I’m still not clear on the desired workflow for given the interpretations so far.
If anyone knows what justandhans was referring to in this episode discussion, I would love to know. I spend most days on Windows as part of my job, so knowing what’s available to me is very useful.
I share how I tend to build complex output in response to a query on options for creating dialogs and/or windows in Alfred.
- I tried to give some more Alfred advice around passing files/folders from Alfred to Shortcuts for making an archive.
After building a quick shortcut to replace a broken shortcut to show upcoming events for today/tomorrow? last month, the discussion continued and shifted to display. But the original shortcut remains mysteriously unshared … making it impossible to analyse.
I shared a few quick thoughts on why updating a post title and adding ‘edit’ details to an original post is better than deleting a post on a public forum.
Can a Stream Deck go to the previously used profile on macOS? Yes, it can, but it isn’t exactly easy to set up. If you want to know how, read my walk through in the thread.
A topic on tracking time using Shortcuts turned out to be a query about Numbers and data persistence.
There is a discussion of activating a Keyboard Maestro macro in Alfred. Having written a popular Alfred workflow that does this, I was in a pretty reasonable position to provide an answer.
A question on Shortcuts permissions for deleting calendar items was something I just so happened to know the answer to.
One poster had a problem with lists in Data Jar and Shortcuts. I whipped up a quick shortcut to show how you can use lists with Data Jar and Shortcuts, so if you don’t know, you can check it out on the thread.
The best forum ever was an interesting diversion, and I think highlights a handful of misconceptions.
An old thread I’d responded to on getting an alert from Eve plug when washer stops was replied to, but it seems a lot of the response was overlooked initially. I outlined things in more detail for the references I had made prior and the conclusions that could be drawn from them and the response. Back to radio silence, so maybe the issue is now duly understood?
I got heavily involved in a discussion on how to deploy and update an Apple Shortcuts folder for family members. This one I think has a lot of interesting points in it as we dig into the underlying need (which did not quite match the original request), and I make various proposals before I actually built a prototype to show how the whole solution could work. Definitely worth a read if you have not read it already.
I came up with a hacky way to convert a table of latitudes & longitudes to cities. What should have been a much simpler shortcuts turned out to be somewhat trickier thanks to some Shortcuts bugginess on conversions. But with some persistence and additional steps I got it working.
Someone wanted to read app notifications using Pushcut, and I ended up explaining why you don’t want apps like Pushcut to be able to do that.
Finally, there was a bit of back and forth on a communication error using Contact.persistChanges() in Scriptable. If you follow it through to my last statement and the response, maybe you’ll be as puzzled as I am how it can possibly be true. It feels like a ship of Theseus scenario to me except no fix.
Other
In terms of other things I have been up to this past month, I am left wondering how on earth I found the time to pack it all in.
Doctor Drafts
First of all, thanks to D Voltz, I was able to resolve a bug in the diagnostics in Doctor Drafts (my Alfred workflow for Drafts). It turns out that when moving to Alfred 5 a few things changed, and my diagnostics worked okay for me, but only because they were picking up old Alfred 4 information. Not a big update, but an important one if you have an issue with Doctor Drafts.
ThoughtAsylum RSS Feed
The next fix was due a nudge from Dr Drang. I’ve lost track of how many plugins and amendments I had made to get my RSS feed working on thoughtasylum.com. It seems there was always one thing or another that didn’t work properly in one RSS reader or another, even though all the RSS validation tools showed it was fine. The last update I made I’d written my own RSS generator (for Jekyll) from scratch, but I think I’ve now resolved the issue that had resurfaced of HTML code appearing in the RSS summaries. If I am right, it was a case of double encoding where only single encoding was required. If you spot any issues in my RSS feed, do let me know.
For what it is worth on that one, I do know that the asset links are relative rather than absolute/permalinks, but honestly Jekyll isn’t so helpful with that in the version I need to use, and it seems from my research that “good RSS readers” (not my term) do address this internally.
ThoughtAsylum Social Media
My author information page on thoughtasylum.com has now had my Twitter accounts removed and my Mastodon accounts added. I still have my Twitter accounts, but at this point I have ceased posting. This position may change in the future, but right now, Mastodon is where you can find me on social media (or on LinkedIn if you want to connect with me on a professional level).
Alfred Workflow for Obsidian
I spent a little bit of time working on my Alfred workflow for Obsidian, continuing with some of the foundation work. I realise that there are a few other Alfred workflows for Obsidian out there and they are good, but I am hoping my take on things may be useful to others too. It will certainly be useful to me if no one else, so I’ll be getting plenty of benefit regardless.
Obsidian Vault Consolidation
If you have been following my posts for a while, you may recall that last year I started some big structural changes, and these continued this month as I finally merged my “work” and “personal” vaults into one. This was part of my plan as I found that over time there was a good chunk of content that would benefit of being linked up. Not everything got fully organised, but things were put into generally the right place, and everything is now searchable. New cross-links are being added and it feels good and right to have the two together.
This month I also migrated to using the Minimal theme for Obsidian with a custom colour scheme based on my previous custom theme. I had previously relied on the default theme and some custom CSS, but my CSS-skills are barely above beginner, and there were a couple of things that behaved oddly. Overall, and unsurprisingly, switching to the Minimal theme has gotten of most of the anomalies present in my old theme, which was one of my main goals in switching. I also wanted to take advantage of the Minimal theme’s built-in customised check box syntax. I still have to remind myself I now have it, but being able to mark tasks as partially complete/in progress is a big benefit for me in places.
Prototype Hardware
You may may recall that last month I received some prototype hardware. I have been continuing to test it, and the product has actually now been released. I have some posts in the works that will go into this, but I’m not ready to share those just yet. Maybe during March?
3D Ted Infuser
A few years ago I switched to drinking Red Bush tea (Roobios), and inexplicably I liked it, even though I can’t stand floral teas like Earl Grey, which lots of my friends have compared it to. In the UK a brand known as Tick Tock sell the nicest flavour that I found, and it has the convenience of tea bags. Unfortunately, there has been a recent shortage in the shops. However, my wife had bought me loose leaf red bush tea for Christmas, so all was not lost.
Of course, could I find a tea strainer or infuser? No. I probably have four or five of them, but somehow none of them in my kitchen. Or rather only one, but it is one specifically designed to fit in a large Contigo mug. It locks into the top of the mug making it useless for anything else.
Desperately wanting to use it for smaller brews, I decided to see if I could create a 3D printed solution. I am not a 3D designer, but one of my original career paths was to become a technical draughtsman, so I am far from intimidated by things like CAD software. After a bit of measuring, ten minutes on Autodesk Tinkercad, and less than an hour on my little Easythreed X1 printer, I had a basic holder for my infuser, and it doubles as a coaster.
You can get access to download or remix it for free on Tinkercad.
ThoughtAsylum Post Mover
My plans don’t always come out the way I anticipate, and it isn’t uncommon for me to start writing a blog post only to find it takes a new turn, takes me longer than expected, or is interrupted by something else. This isn’t a problem except that the post file names and the file names of the linked resources are all date stamped. Some of the post meta data used by Jekyll also includes date stamps. This means that if I need to change the date on a post it can take me a few minutes to update all the data, links, and file names. Or rather, it did.
It has been happening so frequently that I decided to create an automation for it this past month. I created a Keyboard Maestro macro that takes my current file in Sublime Text and allows me to change the date for it. The macro uses a custom key binding to copy the file path for the current file, pops up an input box (populated with the current date stamp) to capture the desired data stamp, then utilises a command line script to do all of the updates. Command line scripting is designed for file management, so as soon as all the user interface interaction is done, Keyboard Maestro switches to running the lower level commands to do the updates,
It took me a couple of hours to put together and convince myself it was working everywhere it needed to, but now I have it, it is going to save the tedium involved in doing it manually and potentially missing changes. I don’t know why I didn’t automate this sooner.
Readwise Reader
This past month I joined the Readwise Reader beta. Reader is a read-it-later app with super powers. I am still getting to grips with everything it can do and how I want it configured, and I expect to be signing up to it shortly. I had taken a look at it in 2022, but the RSS feed management was lacking a way to segregate them into groups. this was a deal-killer for me, but equivalent functionality was added either later in the year or early this year and now I am digging in just to make sure it fits everything I would want it to do in my research and review workflow.
Last Month’s Mystery Project
My little side project I mentioned last month is progressing, and all the automated processing finished on time. I started the manual effort, but this is going to take a bit of effort on my part, and while I have not progressed it quite as much as I would have liked, it is progressing.
A New Alfred Workflow
No one has seen this yet, but I created a new Alfred workflow to scratch an immediate itch I had while working on a few other things. It is a relatively small workflow, but it met my immediate needs, so I’ll be putting that out in March in case others would find it useful.
As an aside, back in October 2022 I was invited to submit Alfred workflows for inclusion in the new gallery for Alfred 5. Currently my workflows remain in the submitted list. They are not quite the oldest unprocessed ones in the list (there are three earlier submissions), but I am disappointed that three to four months after launch my workflows have been left languishing while other later submissions have been moved to completion. As a result, I won’t be submitting any further workflows to the gallery, including the one above, until such time as the outstanding five workflows have been processed. This is because submitting the workflows and answering questions about them (which I have been doing previously) can take a non-trivial amount of effort.
Swift Bar Plugin
I recently saw something mentioned mentioned about xbar that gave me pause for thought. I’d come across apps before that can put text and menus in your menu bar, and I had never identified a need to use one. However, an old itch, and some new ideas all came together and I dived in on making something I’ll be writing up for a blog post in March.
I actually chose to use Swift Bar over xbar (both owing heritage to bitbar) due to it receiving more active development (looking at the GitHub repos), but you can find some discussion about the comparison of them both our there, and if you have the need, I think either would be a good choice.
Quick Keys
In Automators episode #121, Rosemary Orchard makes reference to a hardware launcher by Xencelabs called Quick Keys. I had actually looked at this in the past and dismissed it due to my use of the generally more versatile Elgato Stream Deck. However, with travelling more frequently of late, access to my Stream Deck is limited to when I am at my desk. While I did put together a case for it, it is a little bulky for if I need to travel light. That is generally the case at the moment, so the Stream Deck stays on my desk.
I still have an Intel Mac with a touch bar strip, so that is in effect my Stream Deck on the go, but I do miss the tactile feel, and sometimes I do forget it is there. Particularly because I do travel with a Keychron K3 keyboard, so it isn’t just above the keyboard I tend to use.
Given that I will inevitably switch to a Mac with no touch strip, and my desire for a more portable (but reasonably sized) Stream Deck, I thought I’d give the Quick Keys a shot. The result is something delightful. The Stream Deck is by far a better device, but the portability of the Quick Keys is perfect for me.
Now, it is not without some effort to optimise it, but I managed to nail that down within a few hours, and I will definitely be covering that in a blog post in March.
Upcoming
March I cannot imagine will be as productive as February, but I have several things lined up. Certainly some posts on Swift Bar and Quick Keys. Probably something related to the prototype hardware, and of course the Alfred workflow I mentioned earlier. There will be some work on other projects too, but the additional travel to visit multiple hospitalised family members means that my time continues to be constrained and fragmented.
This month I also have some plans to travel to London to spend the day at the HQ of my employer. Nothing unusual about that, except that there’s some things going on with VR, and curiously, VR is an area I’ve not really had an opportunity to see hands on. My kids have spent more time around VR than I have, but being part of a learning technology team, it is time to dip my toe into the world of extended reality rather than just sitting in meetings talking about where and how it is being implemented, which is what the last few months have involved.
That’s the March plan, and that was February. Thank you of course to everyone who has bought me a coffee. It is truly appreciated, and I’ve been working on my projects in a variety of coffee shops over the course of the last few months. It has been so nice to sit down and focus with a cup of coffee that I know someone was kind enough to buy for me for the help and support I have given.
Finally, for those who may be wondering about my newsletter query from last month, the results were generally in favour of me writing something. However, the volume of respondents was low. Single digit low. For now, that’s not enough interest to divert my energies into that, but perhaps I will revisit this later in the year as my following and the discussions over on Mastodon seem to be gradually increasing.