Category: Technology

  • Hey Siri/Shortcut Automation with 2023 Outback

    I am not a big fan of the Subaru app. It’s janky but does offer a way to remote start my car. But, as the days are getting colder, I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to be able to tell my bathroom HomePod Hey Siri, Warm up my car. So over lunch today,…

  • Troubleshooting Linking iPad to Mac

    I’m regularly struggling to get my iPad recognized by my Mac for Handoff and Keyboard/Mouse sharing. I like to be able to use a single keyboard and mouse to dive my computer and my iPad, located next to my Mac monitor. Even after making sure that they’re on the same network and signed in with…

  • Netflix Viewing History to Letterboxd

    After doing an export of my Netflix viewing history, I wanted to import it into Letterboxd. The date format in the Netflix export doesn’t work with Letterboxd, which wants the data as ‘YYYY-MM-DD’ so I wrote up a little python script to do the date conversion because knowing when I watched something is pretty useful.…

  • Deciding Between Shaarli and Reader: A Personal Taxonomy Approach

    Following several weeks of digital housekeeping, I’m determined to do a better job about being consistent about where I’m storing links, online articles, resources and various “read later” type stuff. My tools of choice are Readwise Reader and Shaarli. I’ve been pretty lax about what goes where so I spent some time thinking about how…

  • Bulk import WordPress posts into Day One

    This export/import process requires bouncing back and forth between the Desktop and iOS versions of Day One as the import/export feature set is very different for each version and you’ll need to leverage both feature sets.

  • Nginx, WordPress & ActivityPub

    I have been deep in the terminal these past few weeks whenever I get a moment or two of free time. We have had a lot of rain recently, resulting in way more free time than usual. This allowed me to sort out a bunch of issues on my new $5/month linode. I didn’t love…

  • Thanks, update!

    Morning after update to 15.4, all shortcuts look the same now. Not super useful, Apple:

  • PESOS vs POSSE

    I didn’t realize Dries founded/manages Drupal until I checked out the about page on his website. In any case, he has a really excellent comparison of PESOS vs POSSE on his site. For me, I’m just trying to find as friction-free a way to collect/post/share. After a bunch of false starts I’m leaning towards WordPress…

  • Memory, time and quarantine.

    “I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”  – The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway.   At baseline, my memory is only so-so. For example, I can remember chord progressions to songs and lyrics only with a lot of…

  • Day One and iOS/Mac Shortcuts Parity

    One of the most popular Shortcuts I’ve written is my “Logging to Day One” shortcut that allows you to keep a timestamped list of items to a single day’s journal entry throughout the day. I wrote a post about it two years ago, you can read more about it here. I updated the post today…

  • Last.fm to Apple Music playlist shortcut

    This is a pretty handy Swiss Army knife-type shortcut for creating Apple Music Playlists from last.fm data. I originally wrote it so that I could create Apple Music playlists based upon the listening history of my last.fm musical neighbors. But as I started poking around on the web, I noticed that last.fm users were looking…

  • Getting better at tracking listening

    I use this service called readwise that helps me remember what I read. I’ve posted about it before.  Anyway, it occurs to me that I really need something similar for my listening. Like, what artists have I recently followed in Spotify or tracks I’ve dug Apple Music, etc. I think there’s probably some way to…

  • iOS Shortcuts and Email interfaces to OneNote

    One of the tools in the MS Office suite we use at work that I find myself using more and more is OneNote. It is my “everything bucket.”  Unfortunately, Microsoft’s OneNote can not be easily targeted by the powerful automation affordances that Apple provides (Apple Script, Keyboard Maestro, iOS shortcuts). Meaning, while OneNote runs on…

  • Prepping for WFH during winter months

    As we head out of summer, the shorter days combined with all of this working from home are going to present some real challenges when it comes to keeping my circadian rhythm chugging along. Over the years, I’ve had a variety of light boxes that I’ve used to try to keep my mood up and…

  • Diet success with Due App, shortcuts and app launching

    Here’s one truth about how I lose weight: nothing is as effective as simply writing down what I eat. If I track everything I eat in a calorie tracking app (I use one called Track, but there are a bunch of similar apps), I eat less. Maybe seeing what I’m eating makes me more conservative…