November’s through and so it is time for me to put out my usual monthly summary of what I have been up to. I’ve managed to get a bit of blogging in, and some solution updates as well as a bit of general investigation, but unfortunately the videos I had planned this month have not come to fruition. I have had a number of personal matters come up in the course of recent weeks and as I write this something new has also come up regarding a close family member that will be taking a lot of my time and attention to support them - which is as it should be. The upshot of that is that I expect to have more limited time available over the course of the next few months at least. But, with all that said, let’s take a look at what’s been happening this past month.
ThoughtAsylum
Over on my website, I’ve had three posts in November. The first one of these is about an exciting new option to embed SnippetsLab into my automations documentation workflow that utilises Hookmark (née Hook) and Obsidian. It lets me use Hookmark to link my code snippets to documentation for scripts where I have used them, and in many cases to the scripts themselves. Of course, utilising Hookmark means that the links are also bidirectional.
This relies on a beta version of SnippetsLab, but the developer, Renfei, was kind enough to consider a request I submitted that enabled this. You can read the details and get the linking script in my post.
Speaking of Obsidian, my next post was about a challenge I have had lately with moving my primary vault to using a Johnny Decimal indexing system. While the index is normally easily searchable with the standard Quick Switcher functionality, there comes a point when there can be ordering issues that mean the specific result your index might suggest is not the top match. The post covers a little bit of experimentation I carried out and what the result was - I found what feels like an ideal solution.
Finally, as you may know if you have been following my monthly updates, I recently changed jobs. However, before I left my previous employer, Zalaris, I wrote a short series of blog posts about automation (around HR and Payroll, but much of it more broadly applicable). The posts have now started to be published and the first came out in early November, with me re-posting it (but linking back to Zalaris as usual) on my website.. If you are interested in some high level thoughts around the benefits delivered by automation to organisations, then give it a read.
Forums
As you’ll see from the lists below, my activity on my usual forums has dropped of late. I think the forums have been a little quieter than usual this month, but I think the drop off is also due to the other demands on my time.
Drafts
One user had a query about sharing drafts with meta data between accounts
Having custom formatting for code snippets? is entirely possible, but not without some effort. I set out the relationship between syntax and themes in Drafts in response to the user’s query.
There was a bit of discussion on creating a time conversion action. Time zones are something I deal with a lot in my professional work, and it is non-trivial. Certainly Drafts could do it, and could do it more easily again utilising a web service, but the original poster I don’t think realised how complex it can end up being.
The saving a Tweet from Tweetbot to Drafts discussion continued this month with a text contraction issue that Greg was able to explain and offer a solution for.
One Drafts user had some problems passing values of prompt actions to next step in an email action step. They were helped out with a few pointers on their action scripting.
A user having issues between Obsidian and Drafts on mobile got a couple of tips, but we’re still waiting on an update as to if this resolved their problem.
As part of my work to prepare several of my Alfred workflows for the new Alfred workflow gallery, I posted an update on Doctor Drafts.
Automators
I suggested Home Assistant as a solution for a question about getting an alert for a HomeKit plug without power.
A user wanting to get data out of a Google Sheet received a nice little set of options.
Do you want to use Drafts to automate note taking, with a variety of specific uses? One forum user did and I gave them a bit of a pointer.
I gave a little solution on how to strip a text string from the clipboard with Keyboard Maestro.
One user was trying out some Zoom recording automation for which I suggested an approach and some options to consider.
One forum user asked how to choose a Focus mode from a list and turn it on in Shortcuts. That happened to be something I had been looking into this month for use with Alfred, and had identified the limitation and so was able to give him an answer and explanation for what was going on.
I had a bit of dialogue with a podcast listener about Alfred workflows for OmniFocus utilising, and not utilising, Python. This is a point of compatibility that has hit quite a few people in the last year or so, and always reminds me of one of my favourite XKCD cartoons.
Other
Last month I mentioned that I had been looking at updates to my most popular Alfred workflows to ready them for the Alfred workflow gallery release due in November. I have released a number of updates (including new documentation, new user managed configuration, and a few fixes and features here and there) in November and put all the updates in the Alfred sub-forum for gallery submissions.
Unfortunately, the updated workflows are still waiting to be reviewed, and the gallery has not been launched - so the Running with Crayons folks are obviously running behind schedule. Hopefully, we’ll see it launch before 2022 is out.
If you use any of my Alfred workflows and haven’t updated in the last month, I’d suggest checking to see what updates might be available.
Upcoming
I’m not sure what is happening in December right now. As I noted, I have a lot of personal stuff going on that I need to deal with. Some good stuff (Christmas-related), some necessary stuff (home-related), and some difficult stuff (a family member in hospital). All things that will take time and are important. I things are a little quiet from me in the coming weeks, that’s all it is. I still have plenty of projects and things to share and I really do want to get a few more tutorial videos put together before the end of the year - the plan is the next few will be Obsidian-related.
I’m not a massive poster on Twitter, but I do post a little, and like many others, I will be thinking about my future with Twitter. I have registered for Mastodon, but haven’t had chance to do anything with it yet. I suspect I’ll be running them in parallel for a bit to see how things go; but I’d be really interested to here what you think of Mastodon vs Twitter and if I should move/stay/split - please do leave a comment below with your thoughts.
Finally, as always, thank you so much to everyone who has bought me a coffee. Cheers!