One Man’s Obsession is Another Man’s Passion - a multi-generational tale of compulsive lawn mowing, incinerated rifles, talking birds and art galleries.
I subscribe to lots of newsletters, including some commercial ones like Lifehacker and Tech Republic. I’m pretty good at staying on top of them usually but I’m here to publicly confess that I had to commit inbox suicide today and just “select all + mark as read”. It offends my completionist ethos.
This Week's Bookmarks - Mostly Music and Photographs, Defending tech from overanxious parents, lessons for writers
![[David Byrnes in the white suit he wore for Stop Making Sense singing into a microphone]](https://amerpie.lol/uploads/2024/david-byrne-heads.jpeg)
♪ David Byrne | Radio | David Byrne Presents: The Power of Song to Give Voice is Eternal
♪ The Nostalgia Machine - Find the Top Hits From Any Year
📷 Earth Day 2024: Witness our changing planet in 12 incredible satellite images | Space
♪ When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
🖥️ Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again - The Unfortunate Technology Blame Game
📷 Explore NASA’s Best Photos of the Year (gizmodo.com)
📚 David Mamet’s Brilliant Memo for Writer
📚 9 Memorable Lessons from David Mamet’s Writing Staff Memo - ScreenCraft
However big you think UnitedHealth is, it’s bigger than that:
- With a market cap of nearly $450 billion, it’s the fourth-largest company in the US by revenue this year, beating out Alphabet and Microsoft.
- The company is eyeing a $24.7 billion profit in 2024.
- One analyst estimated that more than 5% of US GDP flows through UnitedHealth’s systems daily.
Yay, capitalism.
It’s Saturday again, so I have updated my /now page where I talk about WeblogPoMo2024, some good TV, links to the 19 (!) blog posts I wrote this week and one of my favorite subscriptions, Trakt.
The battery on my M2 MacBook Air lasts so long it seems like it’s from a science fiction novel. To maximize the lifetime of the battery and to protect the environment and my wallet, I use AlDente Pro to keep my charge below 80% and to automatically run a full cycle once a month.
Everyone has their favorite moments, their favorite memories. These are mine. None of them are particularly monumental and thankfully some of them are downright commonplace. Lucky me.
Hiking in New Hampshire is scary at times. There’s a weather station on top of Mt. Washington where there’s a plaque to all the people who have died on the mountain. The scary part? They left room on the bottom of the plaque to add more names!
Free and Cheap Web Tools For Bloggers: Graphics, Design Tools, Editors, Analytics and More
Who doesn’t like free stuff? As horrible as the web is supposed to be these days, you can still find an amazing variety of tools to help you accomplish a bunch of different things. Since I started blogging a few months ago, I’ve discovered or been turned on to several useful online services that I use to compose, illustrate and publish on the web.
Picyard
Picyard is a free online tool that allows you to create images for social media, blog posts, presentations, and more. You can use Picyard to create images, testimonials, code snippets, QR codes and then download them as png or jpeg files.
Simple Page Builder
Simple Page Builderwill do everything you need to design a web page, up to and including helping you register for one the free hosting sites Glitch or Neocities. It explains design principals, basic coding and file management.
Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway Editor cuts the dead weight from your writing. It highlights wordy sentences in yellow and more egregious ones in red. Hemingway helps you write with power and clarity by highlighting adverbs, passive voice, and dull, complicated words. It even shows you the reading level required to understand your writing style.
Tinylytics
Tinylytics is an analytics tool for small websites. It’s designed to be simple to use and self explanatory. There is documentation on the site covering:
- Embedding the script
- Showing a hit counter
- Showing kudos
- Showing uptime
- Showing the webring
- Showing countries
- Ignoring your own hits
Canva Color Wheel
If you are advanced enough to write your own CSS, you will probably need a color reference from time to time. The Canva Color Wheel provides not only colors for your code, it also advises you on what colors work well together. I’ve even used it to help with the settings in Obsidian.
Unsplash
Unsplash is my go to web site for royalty-free stock photography. There is no need to steal graphics from Google when so much is available for free from Unsplash. The images are easy to download and they have a huge assortment for you to search by keyword.
Lex
Lex is your AI editor for Google Docs. Not only does it check your spelling and grammar, Lex also brainstorms ideas, helps to come up with titles and will do rewrites of your work in a different style. It features versioning if you need to save what you’ve already written while contemplating the edited version. Like anywhere on Google Docs, you can work with collaborators without them needing to download an app.
Free online service upscales images for you
NYC Fun Facts
- There is no place to pee. I think you have to go to New Jersey.
- Those 4-year olds on their scooters will run you over and laugh.
- So many dogs!
- The police all sleep in their uniforms. Someone give those people an iron.
- There really are a lot of Chinese people in Chinatown. They don’t just call it that.
A story from thirty years ago when I was trying to figure out how to keep three adolescents fed without going bankrupt. For WeblogPoMo20224 - Feeding Children
Today on AppAddict - Forget all the fancy apps, Raycast, the Google Gemini website, all the AI stuff on SetApp, because my favorite way to conduct a Q&A with a LLM is using this free Apple Shortcut that has a customizable prompt, transcripts and more.
Automating #Obsidian - Generate Notes About Your Media Consumption via RSS - Books, TV, Movies, Music
Automation
How would you like to have notes automatically created for you in Obsidian to keep track of your media consumption? You could then add your own thoughts, reviews or any other information you wanted to the note. Many apps and services you may already be using generate RSS feeds when you use them to record your habits. Among these are Trakt for television shows, Letterboxd for movies,Last.fm for music and Goodreads for books. There is no need for an intermediate service like IFTTT or Zapier and you don’t even need a subscription to an RSS provider like Feedly.
Just One Plugin
You just need to install the community plugin RSS Copyist and follow the directions to set it up. Basically you create a folder called RSS at the root of your vault with subfolders for each feed you want to follow. Using the provided template, you create a note for each feed that specifies the URL, default tags and other configurable information. The template even contains a prewritten Dataview query to create a MOC for you, complete with images.
There are two other community plugins for RSS. You can experiment with these and see if you prefer them.
📷 #mbApr Bonus Day 32 - Unputdownable My granddaughter, Jolene, named after the Dolly Parton song (note: I eventually did, in fact, put her down. She is a teenager now.)
I feel like it would be a good idea to budget some time each week just for the forums I belong to for different software titles and web sites: Drafts, #Obsidian, Actions for Obsidian, OMG.LOL, the Automators Podcast, Tidbits, AppleInsider, Keyboard Maestro and Hazel. Good stuff to be learned there.
My Top 10 Keyboard Maestro Macros
Keyboard Maestro by Stairways Software is the preeminent automation application for macOS. It acts on nearly 30 triggers to perform almost any Mac function you can think of. It can launch tasks, control applications and manipulate text and images. It’s easier to demonstrate its powers than to explain them, so I’ll share my top 10 macros.
1. Add Today’s Task
This is an example of a macro that runs an iOS shortcut, in this case one that adds my most important task of the day to my Obsidian daily note. I launch it with a keyboard shortcut.
2. Sync Obsidian Vault
This macro uses a time of day trigger to launch Sync Folders Pro every morning at 2am. That application then runs an automated sync of my Obsidian vault to my Google Drive folder where it gets uploaded automatically into the cloud. Keyboard Maestro shuts the program down five minutes later.
3. Create Daily Checklist in Drafts and Copy to Things 3
Every evening I trigger a macro from my menubar to use a template in Drafts to create my daily checklist in Things 3, complete with the due date, tags and areas. Mike Burke wrote a great piece on how to create the template for Things in Drafts.
4. Eject Backup
My daily driver at home is a M2 MacBook Air. Every night before I go to ned, I plug in a backup drive so that Time Machine can do its thing while I sleep. Every morning, 30 minutes before my alarm goes off, a time of day trigger causes a macro to execute that runs an AppleScript to eject the drive, so that when I start work in the morning, all I have to do is physically disconnect it.
5. Morning Apps
Every morning, right before I wake up, Keyboard Maestro launches my browser, Obsidian, Fantastical and the Photos app. That way I’m ready to start my daily note, keep up with my appointments and post a picture to Pixelfed, a daily habit.
6. Various App Launching Hotkeys
I use a hyperkey (CAPS LOCK) mapped as shift+control+option+command with Karabiner-Elements in combination with a hotkey to launch a variety of my most used apps, Edge, Drafts, Things, Bartender, Path Finder etc. All of that runs through small Keyboard Maestro macros.
7. Quit All Applications
At the end of a work session on my computer, I hit control+shift+Q and it quits all my open apps. That way everything can back up properly and I don’t have to worry about open files.
8. Uninstall Apps
When I launch App Cleaner, it serves as a macro that arranges the windows on my computer automatically so that App cleaner takes up the right of the display and Path Finder, opened to the Applications folder, takes up the left half. Then it’s just a matter of dragging over the app I want to remove.
9. Hide on Unlock
For privacy reasons, unlocking my computer triggers an Apple Script that hides all open applications. That way I don’t have to remember what’s on my screen nor do I have to worry about any prying eyes from nosy neighbors.
10. Window Management
I have mapped control-shift and the arrow keys to control window positions for top, bottom, left and right. I get more granular control using Raycast but for most cases Keyboard Maestro does just fine.
Today on AppAddict - a bargain if you can find it on sale, Alarm Clock Pro has multiple alarms, world clocks, timers, stopwatches, and automates emails, texts, program launches, web pages, sleep, wake, restart and shutdown. See the full review
I decided to start off my participation in WeblogPoMo2024 with a bit of humor, so I wrote A Treatise on Office Decorations. If you are a golfer and sensitive about it, you may want to skip this one. Same for hangers of cheesy posters.
