Remember, remember, it’s no longer November, and here in the UK we fly into the final month of the year with dropping temperatures and somewhat unusually, snow across the country. Usually we get snow more in February sort of time, but I certainly remember snowy Decembers in the past. Looking back though, November was a relatively quiet month for me, with my head down at both work and home. It has been a bit of a slog, but I have a couple of blocks of annual leave coming up, so I should get a bit of a break in that sense, but I know there will be a good amount of pressure to get some things wrapped up and handed over in the remaining weeks, so the outlook is certainly a little mixed.
As ever, thanks to the generous coffee contributions I have once again rounded up my activities for the past month and set them out for you to browse through. Hopefully, you will find some things of interest.
ThoughtAsylum
This past month on my web site I posted a couple of short-ish posts. The first one of these is about something you might have seen me posting about on Mastodon where I had been having some trouble with my Apple Watch. The space was filled by the mysterious and vague “other” category of content and it kept filling up with that. The most common solution wasn’t working for me and I was looking for a solution. Well, as persistence (not luck) would have it, I resolved the issue and I put the details down for what I had done in the past for this error, what the general approach is for most cases, and how I resolved things this time around. If you ever have a similar issue or are just interested in the potential causes and solutions, take a look at my fixing Apple Watch ‘Other’ storage taking up all the space post.
The second post was something I have been actively using recently as part of my not so little background project I’ve been working on this year - more on that later. TextSoap is my goto tool for automating sequences of text processing operations. It is geared up to do this quickly far better than coding it in specific languages, and while I can get by with command line tools like sed and awk, I’m not an expert in those tools and for the more complex updates I find building a solution in TextSoap quicker for me to do. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I have a large box of tools to choose from and a level of competence that allows me to switch between them to suit particular needs - but if you work with text on the Mac, then TextSoap is something you should seriously consider adding to your own tool box.
I was looking to map a number of text conversions in the project I’m working on, and I figured I would just use a list in TextSoap to do this. Then I was hit with a limitation in how I got the large volume of data I was wanting to create mappings for into TextSoap. I found a solution and that is what I covered in my TextSoap List Content Management post. So, if you are, or might wish to be a TextSoap user, then I’d recommend checking it out. You could save yourself a lot of time and frustration as a result.
Forums
Another month on the forums brought a number of interactions, and as usual I’ve listed out the more interesting ones below.
Drafts
One user had a Drafts action running twice when called via Siri. I made some suggestions as to how to identify what was going on, and while the user did resolve the issue, they were not sure as to the underlying cause. I suspect a bit more detail around the things I had suggested would have given a definitive answer.
After success do nothing on an action was still setting the draft as archived for an action being used by one forum member. Again posting the link to the action is critical in investigating what an action is doing, and once that was found, it was shown that there was explicit code to archive the draft. In the directory, there was no mention of it in the description, it seemed to be unrelated to the action being undertaken. This does highlight several things:
Do check what the actions from the directory do - if you don’t understand them, that can obviously be an issue.
Do include an appropriate description with the action that covers exactly what it does - you cannot rely on users reading comments in script blocks.
Do not put functionality in the action that is extraneous to what it says it does.
Someone wanted some advice on how to import Markdown files into Drafts and change the default workspace - there were a range of answers to these broad questions.
There was a question on how to bulk save to files without a filename prompt for every file. I found this one a little strange because this has been covered several times in the forum in various guises and yet the poster did not seem to think any of them matched their particular use case; yet to me, so many of them did. I still can’t tell which of us was missing something on that.
One Drafts user is missing actions after adding a new device. I was surprised to see that it was only actions they were missing and I am hoping the user responds to my latest questions as I would like to understand how they are getting normal sync of their other settings and drafts data, but not their actions. I do enjoy getting to the bottom of the weirder issues.
There was some discussion around sharing to Drafts via the share sheet
The usual my widgets are blank issue appeared once again, and again a device reboot fixed it. I kind of think a forum search or even a Google search pretty quickly gives the answer, so I’m always a little surprised that people take the time to write the question they could have just searched for. Maybe one day Discourse will build a search bot into the new post creation that will provide the link to an existing answer when people are typing their question.
The topic of clickable hyperlinks in drafts came up once again, and there is an ongoing development in the conversation of utilising existing functionality, and building Shortcuts, but one that ultimately ended up with the introduction of a new feature, released in Drafts v42.
Automators
I made a suggestion for emailing a CSV as a file (not as text) in Shortcuts.
I set out the components to build a shortcut to look at calendar events when setting focus modes for someone asking about how to do something similar mentioned in episode 91.
Several people posted about a background issue in Scriptable, but Simon Støvring does not seem to interact much on the Scriptable posts on the Automators forum any more, so given this was a bug, I pointed them all to the bug reporting facility within the Scriptable app.
There’s an interesting post once again on automating the Stream Deck software, a new Stream Deck software release having broken an AppleScript interaction. I don’t like the approach as it still feels very fragile to me, but I will admit it is better than nothing. I use my Stream Deck in a very different way with profiles switching per app and my definitions being within Better Touch Tool, which is highly automatable. I miss out on plugins, but I really haven’t found that a limitation as I have other ways to deal with things I was using plugins for on the Mac.
I created a shortcut to OCR a region of the screen on the Mac for someone who was having trouble with how to automate OCRing an area of the screen.
There was a request for creating a shortcut that runs 38 minutes prior to sunrise and another 25 minutes before sunrise. Obviously a very specific and niche thing, and the user was looking for a time with offset trigger. I gave them an alternative algorithm to address the requirements, and also highlighted one limitation related to sunrise - can you guess what ima suggestion and the limitation might have been?
There was a strange farewell to Pushcut post from someone who hadn’t posted in three years on the forum. I highlighted some news that I guess they had somehow missed from the podcast. I mean, everyone using the podcast forum is a podcast listener. Right?
There was a post about which word processor do you use, and how do you automate it to format text?. Can you guess what I use?
There was a post about text matching in a daily planner shortcut, and once again the shortcut was not posted and even the text examples that were posted were just little examples and did not necessarily cover everything. I put together a shortcut to demonstrate how it could be done and expanded upon the examples provided with additional variations. Was it fit for purpose? Well, maybe. So far it is another post that was answered and then left without follow up from the original poster to feedback the results.
A topic on can I run a Terminal command via Shortcuts on MacOS? was resurrected and yet again a screenshot was used rather than an actual shortcut. The solution to their issue was provided, but I think they missed some of the nuance of their own approach and again, I don’t know if this actually work out for them.
I really do need to write a blog post about why it is important to share links to share actual code so I can send a link to people to educate them on it. I did it a little in tip #4 of my Tips for Posting on a Technology Forum post, but I think some people require more clarity on this particular one.
Tip #5 on feedback would probably be worth a read for most folks too.
One user was looking for an alternative to Dropbox (since they broke it), in relation to a change in what Apple’s OS now allows in terms of where Dropbox can place its sync folder. The issue being that the events on an external drive are not monitored for changes in the same was as an internal drive (I use those terms loosely as I do in fact run my older Mac Mini permanently off an external SSD). I didn’t have a solution, but I could at least point out that one suggested solution would not work.
Passing a file to Ulysses from a shortcut run on the command line was a challenge posed by another user. I have never actually used Ulysses, but once they shared some details of their shortcut (just a screenshot of course - but as a non-Ulysses user, that was actually more helpful for once for me), I could see an issue. I made some suggestions, and once again wonder if the guidance helped? Maybe if you are a Ulysses user you could try it?
Other
In other activities, I have tweaked one or two of my Alfred workflows where I spotted things were not quite working as I wanted. Just minor tweaks, but at some point in the next few months I’ll probably roll other updates into them and release them.
I have also been continuing to build out my home automation, with mixed results.
The first thing I attempted to do was to replace my kitchen bulbs. No problem I thought, they were obviously GU10 bulbs and I could get some Zigbee bulbs to swap them for. After getting the bulbs, removing one of the light sockets from the ceiling, trying to extricate the bulb, and then finally doing a visual lookup of the unit discovered they were Elite downlights, and that you have to replace the whole unit, not the bulb. This lead to me taking a different tack and ordering a Zigbee double light switch, the kitchen light switch controlling the kitchen light and an exterior door light. After deciphering the existing wiring (consistent wire colouring seems to have been a nice to have option when the fitting was put in) and translating it to the entirely different set up for the new fitting I discovered that due to some existing cable joining blocks and it being a shallow wall box, the new switch would not fit. After getting a not quite deep enough pattress box, and then another much deeper one, and after stripping down a monitor power cable for some extra wiring to make a bit of extra distance for a now much better cabled earth wire, I finally got a smart switch for the kitchen. With a bit of Home Assistant magic, we can now not only manually manage the lights, but also manage them via our Amazon Echos and Home Assistant automations. No more finding someone has accidentally left the kitchen lights on all night.
The GU10 bulbs are not going to waste though. A couple have gone to my temporary office, and once we refit our garage in the new year, we plan to remove the existing strip lights and replace them with GU10 fittings - there is not a great deal of height available and I’m relatively tall, so making the lighting safer for a tall guy office environment was always on the cards.
After a lot of faffing with the Hue app, and one subsequent reset and re-addition, I also added a set of Ewelink E14 bulbs to the living room.
My previous house only had standard UK bayonet fittings, so this switch to so many bulbs of different types did throw me a bit.
I also tried setting up a WLED unit for use with Home Assistant. The last several years I have done something similar with a pair of BBC Micro:Bits, but I figured I should switch to something more integrated this year. After purchasing a dedicated unit in the UK along with a new LED strip and a power supply, I was ready to go. Setting up the unit was easy, but nothing happened when wiring in the LED strip. Eventually I decided to order a basic controller to confirm the strip was working. It was indeed, and so after some checks I figured out the strip wasn’t getting enough power from the specialist ESP32 unit. The WLED software was set to limit the voltage, and the unit could cope with a higher voltage, so I figured I’d up the supply for the unit and it would handle the delivery to the strip. “Handle” it did. The strip lit up, though not as I had expected. The LEDs lit seemingly randomly and the same each time … even when the basic controller was used. The strip had been overpowered. I was not at all impressed.
I have a new WLED unit on order from overseas (which looks to have more reviews that the other one I ordered in the UK) along with a new LED strip, so I will see if I have any more luck with that once they arrive.
I also managed to lay my hands on an M5 Stack ATOM Echo Smart Speaker development kit - a tiny ESP32 device that Home Assistant have been showing off their Year of the Voice progress on. While it certainly works, and it was straight forward to set up, I have found the responsiveness to be relatively poor. Even though it is local only, the responsiveness for me is far outpaced by my Amazon Echo devices. But, I am optimistic that the Home Assistant team will improve upon this. It is early days, and having the ATOM Echo set up means I can join in and try things out. It also makes the big kid in me smile that I can now use “Hey Jarvis” to trigger things , albeit often very slowly.
My ongoing, not so little, background project took a turn for the worse this past month. I was pulling out all the stops and making good progress when I began a new and related task. Originally I had expected this would take me three to four hours. It turns out that it is going to be many more times than that, even employing TextSoap lists to help me. I think I had been too optimistic about the results of a previous automation and now I am at the point of needing to clean up a lot of the data it has generated. While the relative volume is low, the actual volume in terms of time to fix is not. The up shot is, that even with some time off work I have taken to work on this, I am not going to get my “little project” ready to release this year. I am hoping I can at least get over this hurdle by the end of the year, but it is a busy time, so we shall see.
Upcoming
December is always a busy time for me. Travelling, spending time with family, getting work in the day job wrapped up, and all the decorating, shopping, wrapping, etc. Free time is vey hard to come by as a result. I suspect my time will be limited this coming month, but whatever I can spare I expect will be focusing on my background project. I just hope when I finally put it out there that it will be worth the actual amount of effort I have put into it.