Jim Willis

Category: Journal

  • Log/Append a photo to a Day One entry

    Someone posted a question about how to do this on the Day One Community site so I thought I’d build up a little iOS shortcut that: – checks to see if you have an entry for today, if not it creates a blank one and then prompts you to choose a photo, resizes that photo…

  • Essential Working From Home Apps and Tools

    All of this working from home has meant that I have not spent this much uninterrupted time behind my personal computer since I do not know when. This is to say, over the past few weeks I have dialed in my personal setup in a way that is super-useful to me and I thought I’d share…

  • Logging throughout the day with Day One and iOS shortcuts

    [updated on Jan 27, 2022] Spending some time on the Day One community page on Facebook it seems like for those who journal multiple times per day–adding notes, thoughts, activities throughout the day–there are two schools of thought for capturing throughout the day: Create a new entry in Day One for each of the day’s multiple…

  • AppleScript for Day One braindump to Things

    Highlighting the truly first-world problem of Mac automation being totally different from iOS automation, I wrote up a simple AppleScript that mirrors the functionality of my iOS shortcut that takes my brain dump list out of Day One and “intelligently” transfers it to Things. When I write my morning entry in my Day One journal…

  • Shortcut: Day One braindump to Things

    I use Day One as a journal almost every day. Most mornings start with me doing a bit of a brain dump into Day One, listing anything that’s on my radar that I need to deal with. So I wrote a shortcut to help me deal with those brain dumps a bit better. This shortcut:…

  • Could Competition from Private Equity Make Kindle Suck Less?

    I received a Kindle for Christmas. I love it despite the fact that it feels like Amazon has done little if anything to advance the technology of the ebook reader in the 10 years that have passed since I bought my wife her first Kindle 2. Highlighting passages in an ebook on a Kindle still…

  • Essential Mac Apps – 2019 edition

    This week I’ve been building up my new iMac from a base-install of Mojave. I have a text file that lists all of the apps that I had installed on my dead MacBook Pro (and, good backups, thankfully), but instead of just reinstalling all of the apps I had, in the spirit of Cal Newport’s…

  • Catalina

    Upgrading my MacBook Pro, the Catalina upgrade hung up on “Setting up computer…” but as I had already looked into that issue for a buddy of mine the other day, I know that’a a widespread problem so I just rebooted and it everything came up fine. Was a bit of a bummer that Scrivener 2…

  • Journaling and Journalism and Personal Photography

    This past weekend we went out with a couple of other New Jersey families to Cranks Around the Campfire. I’ve wanted to go to this mountain biking/camping/family-friendly event for a few years now but each year it has coincided with our annual pilgrimage up to New England in the VW to go swimming in various…

  • Day One Morning Health Shortcut

    Some folks over on the Day One Community FB group were interested in this shortcut I wrote. It computes your 7-day average for active energy and steps, asks you a few questions and creates a Day One journal entry. You will need to modify this shortcut. It’s a little tricky as it pulls health kit…