Jim Willis

Category: AppleShortcuts

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Zoom volume and Music Volume control with Keyboard Maestro

    My new favorite Keyboard Maestro shortcut allows me to toggle between audio outputs (Built In Output device and my USB output). The Built in volume controls my iMac speakers, the USB output controls my Amp. So, combined with the superb Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource, I can easily bounce back and forth between controlling my music volume…

  • 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…

  • Friday Links for Feb 21, 2020

    Beatings, Burns and a Broken Promise – Powerful reporting from the NYTimes on mistreatment of people with developmental disabilities. Amazon: How Bezos built his data machine – Whoa. This is a fantastic read about data harvesting at Amazon. What We Lose by Hiring Someone to Pick Up Our Avocados for Us – I use Prime…

  • 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…

  • Friday Links for Jan 24, 2020

    Friday Links for Jan 24, 2020, #genx @qobuz #hifi and some interesting #Mac reference/tips.