As a follow up, I’ve updated an older Fujifilm Get Film Simulation shortcut to now include ACROS and Monochrome simulations. This has only been tested on JPEGs from an X100V. Get this not well tested iOS Shortcut version here.. For everyone else, enjoy a stuffing waffle using the Velvia film simulation.
There’s a thoughtful post on Fuji X Weekly. After spending several weeks with a X100V, I’m in agreement with the utility and power of Fujifilm Film Simulations. As a hobbyist, it is liberating embracing Fujifilm out-of-camera JPEGs. I barely need the RAW Power app.
M6.9 earthquake in Alaska registered on my RaspberryShake.
I wouldn’t feel safe flying in that biplane! Almost as bad as a helicopter.
Albums queue syncing between my iOS devices is effing amazing. Start a queue of albums on my iPhone, then effortlessly transition play on iPad (and airplay to home speakers). Why Apple hasn’t done this with their Music app confounds me.
Here’s our resident Western Toad that’s likely en route to the compost pile. And yes, that’s toad scat in front of the toad. The toad has a circuit to complete every night.
I don’t consider this Fujifilm X100V a toy but it sure brings me a lot of joy. Most photos I’ve posted lately are from it. Except this one, of course.
A little bit of excitement at an over crossing today.
Our replacement rear fence got finishing touches today. Very excited to no longer have a very old fence threatening total collapse because its wood posts weren’t set in concrete, had split boards, and rails severely sagged. Photos are after and before. Contractor did great.
I’ve installed valves to isolate our crop rows so we can have slightly better control of what rows get water. Hope to get herbs seeded in the first (closest) row and the other two will be shutoff. 🌱
Now that I’m adding to our compost pile at night, our resident Western Toad can be seen hard at work. Mustn’t let the bugs get too far away from the pile!
Here’s my annual “elderberries are breaking summer dormancy” post.
I had one last use of Dropbox with a iOS Shortcut. Now that iOS 15 supports file operations anywhere in iCloud, Dropbox is a goner.
Quick temp fence repair. Someone long ago didn’t set the fence posts in concrete so they’ll all rotting out. It’s time for a new rear fence. Cross braced it up on the other side with a long 2x4. Empty lot behind us fortunately.
If you use recent Fujifilm camera (e.g. X100V), they have neat film simulations. I’ve made a iOS 15 Shortcut that’ll get the film sim from EXIF of a Fujifilm JPEG. Handy if you need a quick reminder about what film sim you used. Doesn’t yet work on B&W and sepia sims.
Cooler weather today meant I could finally cleanup the backyard garden. I can’t believe how hardy pepper plants are. Most were still alive despite a few months of zero irrigation.
I got a new stand-alone camera. I had forgotten just how powerful choosing your own f-stop is. Makes iPhone cameras feel cramped as they get faster and faster in the pursuit of “more light.”
Our first grosbeak sighting! This is a Black-headed Grosbeak. It is eating our cultivated California native grapes.
Mockingbirds love our cultivated native grapes 🥰 It’s the best seeing them swallow a large grape whole. We’ve seen at least five in our backyard. They mostly get along. We have a kind of neutral zone
We started pickling two almost full pint jars of Santa Fe peppers today. Turns out they’re not great for hot sauce as their flesh is pretty thin and they’re very seedy.
So many ripe Serranos & other varieties. This is hands down our best year for peppers. It has taken many years of trial and error to get here. Hot sauce here we come! (Yes, we are eating some fresh). Oh and it’s fig season!🌱
Edible garden update: we continue to harvest lots of red & ripe peppers for hot sauce. The tomatoes are basically done for the season at 195 tomatoes weighing in at 34 pounds. We froze most. And finally, our figs are starting to ripen and we’re on nectarine watch 2021🌱
Because of Safari’s new clearly bad UI changes, I’m not installing the public iOS and MacOS betas. Just listening to people talk about the new UI makes me cringe. I’m super excited about Focus though.
Covered up the avocados again in advance of today’s 110°F weather. Every time we do this it gets simpler and better. Wrapping the sheet around a ladder is genius.
Windows 11 requires UEFI firmware. I use VMWare Fusion 12 Player (free) for Windows 10. Seems only VMWare Fusion 12 Pro can change firmware from BIOS to UEFI. Maybe VMWare will be nice and enable the UEFI option for Windows 11’s reqs. firmware = “efi” works not.
No surprise why I spent today processing raw photos. Cool that Carrot Weather can report on my weather station.
40 tomatoes harvested today at just over 7 pounds. During cooler weather a few weeks back they managed to set fruit, so lots more on the way. Our peppers, grown for mainly hot sauce, are ripening nicely.
Went to the Grand Canyon yesterday. Over 250 photos to sort through but here’s two photos from the Bright Angel Trail. Obligatory one of the canyon and then… hops‽
The amazing document converter, Pandoc, is finally available from Homebrew for M1 Macs! So I’ve adjusted my journal workflow to be on my M1 Mac mini. I’ll use
jhead -autorot *.jpeg(instead of Graphic Convertor since I only have one license and I want it on my MacBook Pro) for autorotating photos and
for f in *.md; do pandoc $f -o ./Archive/${f%.md}.pdf -t latex; done to convert the Markdown files to PDFs.
We harvested 2.5 pounds of tomatoes today. Almost 6 pounds total so far this season. We can’t use them that fast so many go in the freezer for future processing into soup, sauce, jam, etc. Same goes for peppers reserved for hot sauce🤤
We have a crazy amount of tomatoes ripening all at once — this is just one plant. We have three more.😳 Marigolds we started from seed are finally blooming.
I can hardly wait for Shortcuts on MacOS. That’s my favorite announcement from WWDC. Automator never clicked for me. I’m willing to wait so bugs hopefully won’t destroy my Shortcuts or iCloud data.
These Santa Fe peppers are prolific! They seem to be more resistant to disease than jalapeños. 🌱
I’ve always loved listening to entire albums, as is evidence by my iOS Shortcut to randomize complete albums in track order. I don’t need that anymore. The Albums app is everything I always wanted Music.app to be. Shoutout to MacStories for letting me know about it!
One day at 111°F in my sunny backyard and another at 105°F, and my Logitech Circle View doorbell has not overheated. Its circumstances: 24V 20VA transformer, north facing in the shade all day. I’m quite pleased with it.
Happy to say this sap sucking Leptoglossus zonatus is no longer suckling our tomato plants. 🌱
These jalapeños decided they had enough being outdoors and came right off the plant during inspection. They look fit to eat though are a little dried out. 🌱
Our oldest jalapeños are starting to ripen to red. We can’t get delicious ripe peppers from the local store so it is worth growing them. We’ve got a few more days of temperatures where fruit will set… and tons of flowers. Should be very productive! 🌱
Serrano & Santa Fe peppers are doing great and just a few dozen tomatoes with end rot. Jalapeños are quickly recovering from black spot. Thai peppers are so close to fruiting and fennel bulbs are growing (not shown). 🌱
Partner made Boston cream pie (dessert after an amazing ribeye). 🤤
I created a shuffle albums Shortcut a while back. It’s now retired for the iOS Albums app. It’s great with its focus on albums and I love its insights. Album’s new releases section isn’t polluted with artists from Apple Music’s Radio.
With the latest iOS, if a martini is in my face, Apple Watch unlocks my phone 🤗
California Corn Lilies contrast with a burned Forest. There’s possibly shallow groundwater below this patch.
iNaturalist hasn’t confirmed but these purple flowers appear to be Moss Phlox (Phlox subulata) near the cirque & summit of Black Butte in the northern Coast Range of California in the Mendocino National Forest. Again, the rocks make the shot!
First bloom of the peppers. Serranos in this case. 🌱
Cultivated California Wild Grapes are looking great after a heavy prune. I always forget to take before photos 🌱
My #RaspberryShake detected a M3.9 earthquake in the Bartlett Springs Fault Zone just northwest of Lake Pillsbury in the Mendocino National Forest. I was asleep — happened today at 04:18 PDT. Probably just shook a few rocks loose.
Might be a Copestylum mexicanum (Mexican cactus fly). If so, it is fittingly on a cultivated California wild rose flower.
Peppers and tomatoes garden update: tomatoes are flowering and peppers are finally growing post-transplant. The Drip Depot crop row irrigation kit is ace. 🌱
I’ve a RaspberryShake that serves up helicorder plots. By default, they’re in UTC. My brain isn’t yet wired to convert UTC to PDT (my local time). So I’ve modified my original shortcut to overlay PDT onto the left Y-axis. Someday I’ll make this a bit more sophisticated such as switching to standard time or be fully international.
As with the last Shortcut, this one assumes your Shake is resolved at rs.local
Get the Helicorder24PDT iOS Shortcut
Our “Bacon” Avocado tree is blooming basically right on time as compared to last year on April 11th. It has yet to produce any fruit and it is supposed to be self-pollinating. 🌱🌳
We planted all our indoor pepper and tomato starts. The Serranos looked most distressed prior to transplant 🤞🌱
I rapidly made a iOS 14 Shortcut that automatically pulls the last 24 hours of helicorder plots from your #RaspberryShake (it assumes a rs.local hostname). Handy to have on the Home Screen. Let me know if there’s any problems. If you’re not in the US west coast, you’ll need to adjust to UTC from your time zone (look for Add 7 hours). Get it here.
I used the Controller app to create an automation that triggers upon press of my Logitech doorbell button. Then I converted it to a Shortcut so that upon doorbell press, my dining room lights will flash. Real cool. So the light is Set on or off and then reversed depending on the light status.
A slow, rolling bloom for the apricot this year. It didn’t fruit at all last year. Here’s hoping for a fruitful year. (it has fruited before so we know it is possible) 🌳🌱
Twitter Feeds in the latest NetNewsWire 6 beta are great. The key is to be really choosy.
I always expected this: Facebook/Instagram harvests photo location metadata before removing it for posts. That data is added to the poster’s data profile. Presumably for targeted ads. I presume when micro.blog crossposts photos to Twitter, locations have already been scrubbed by micro.blog?
Sunday dinner: Sous vide Arm Roast followed by Boston Cream Pie.
Slowly preparing the backyard garden rows over the past few months 😅 Almost time to plant the peppers, tomatoes, and direct sow the herbs. No more lawn!!!!!! Tilling is amazing at removing thatch and dead lawn. 🌱
Easiest way to deal with (perhaps) hundreds of mandarins once ripe: juice them. These have brightened to very red-orange I wonder if they are closer to tangerines?
I’m experimenting with HomeKit Automations converted to Shortcuts. This one, when a Home member arrives, will turn on a welcome light if the Logitech doorbell reads < 200 Lux. Otherwise it’ll flash the living room lamp to indicate an arrival.
This morning: the most symmetrical Dutch baby we’ve ever had.
The Fantasia nectarine (planted Jan 2020) is still in swollen bud stage. Has been for days. It’s sooo close to blooming. Here’s hoping it’ll produce fruit for the first time this year!
Look, I put a pressure gauge on the new hose bibb! I must be an erudite of irrigation systems. 🙃
Korean cheese buldak for dinner tonight. Chicken in a hot chili sauce covered with mozzarella 🌶🌶🌶🌶 😋
I pressure checked the new hose bibb this morning; it had a slow leak at the valve threads & PVC adapter. Tightening made it worse, so after redoing the pipe thread tape with more layers, the new hose bib seems to be fine at full water pressure.
Front yard update: the manzanitas are in full bloom! The poppies are trying to take over. Waiting on the Ceanothus (California lilac) to bloom… they’re the most showy.
I installed a new hose spigot on an old PVC waterline today. I’m trying to have the patience to give the PVC joints lots of time to cure before pressure testing 😬
Someday we’ll figure out how to make rice noodles right. Did a bunch of experiments today and almost got there. We just want perfect Drunken Noodles and Pad See Ew.
Got to make the rock rings around the citrus trees larger so drip emitters can be moved back for better root growth. Also may help with frost as the ground can now radiate heat up into the trees rather than be insulated by wood chips. Here’s before and after.
Energy makes growing peppers & tomatoes in the winter possible. Got lots of jalapeños, serranos, santa fe, and a variety of tomatoe. We’ll transplant outdoors in mid to late March 🌱
I finished City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab ★★★★ 📚
Mud Creek, CA south of Mt. Shasta after a pretty intense debris flow in 2014. The deposits are muddy and full of variously sized rocks and other debris (such as entire trees).
We’re craving Manzanita flower blooms in the front yard. Almost there… 🌱
Apple Photos thinks eating campfire roasted marshmallows off a metal stick is a sport. I agree.
Cats are pros at comfort.
Currently reading: City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab 📚
A screensaver with the best most relaxing photos and a nice hot morning beverage to start the day.
Close up of a Meyer Lemon still on the tree. 😋
Here’s my iOS Shortcut that uses ShellFish App to show all journals over the years written “On This Day”. I’m pretty pleased with it. You’ll see it relies on good file management!
Secure ShellFish for iOS is wonderful. Its shortcut functions allowed me to create a Shortcut that shows all journals written “On This Day” from my SSH server. Slick.
Last year we successfully grew peppers by direct sowing mid-Spring. Today we’re starting plants from seed indoors. Mostly peppers: Thai, Serrano, Jalapeño, Santa Fe. 🤞🌱
Possibly a Cooper’s Hawk casing out bird feeder and really freaking out the House Sparrows and White Crowns. We’re honored to have a hawk visit our backyard. Amazing.
I’ve been looking through photos of my work trip to Washington D.C. in 2015. Insurrection against the Constitution at the Capitol was not a thought and I felt safe, secure.
Near the Washington Monument, looking towards the White House:
The Washington Monument:
The Yates Building, U.S. Forest Service HQ:
Looking toward the U.S. Capitol, under extensive renovations:
Ultramafic rocks at the Smithsonian:
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport:
Why did I decide to install the chime-kit and doorbell chime after I installed the Logitech doorbell (and it worked fine)? Netatmo released their doorbell and in their FAQ they wrote this about why a chime is required (Logitech never explained but they require it despite their doorbell seemingly working without one):
The Smart Video Doorbell was specially designed to replace your existing doorbell and, therefore, to work with an existing wired chime. This chime is required in your installation because it creates a charge in the doorbell circuit. When someone presses the doorbell button, a switch closes the doorbell circuit causing electricity to flow through the circuit to activate your chime. Without a chime, when the switch closes the circuit, a short circuit would occur and cause damage to your Smart Video Doorbell.
After reading that, I decided to protect the doorbell investment by spending a little bit more time and $15 to install the chime-kit and hardware chime.
Installing the hardware chime and then the Logitech chime-kit in the garage was easy though I accidentally cut the transformer to doorbell wire; wire nut to the rescue. I did check to see if the doorbell would work with only the chime-kit installed and its switch set to no doorbell – it did. In fact, when I cut power to it, a green LED stayed lit up in the chime-kit above the switch, suggesting it keeps a charge like a hardware doorbell chime. However I don’t know definitively if that chime-kit charge would resolve possible shorting issues on doorbell press. With the chime-kit I can toggle the hardware chime to ring or not via the Home app — I have no idea how Logitech made that work. The chime-kit has a switch for analog chime, digital hardware, no chime, and analog chime.
So far the Logitech doorbell has been great with a perfect view of the front yard and super reliable notifications with videos. Video is pretty sharp and its HDR does work — the shaded porch and bright streetscape are all well exposed. It does well at night with just the almost-bug friendly amber porch light so I’ve disabled the doorbell light to keep light pollution to a minimum. That built-in light does not illuminate far so it is only useful when someone is at the door. So I wish I could set up an automation to turn on the extra light when it detects somebody at the door. I do recommend setting up Activity Zones on an iPad (easier to draw them on a larger video feed vs iPhone) to help minimize notifications. Turns out our street has more vehicle traffic than I realized. I’m very happy I patiently waited for a HomeKit Secure Video doorbell like this. If you think activity zones might limit what the HomeKit home hub detects, it seems as if when there’s motion detected in an activity zone, the HomeKit hub analyzes the entire scene for people, animals and vehicles.
Our data usage for uploads has gone down dramatically now that our Nest Outdoor IQ no longer has Nest Aware and is only useful for on-demand delayed “live” video feeds.
Logitech Chime-Kit at the top and the new hardware chime at the bottom. The included wire splices are nice.
Logitech Circle View Doorbell installed on cement fiber board lap siding, doorbell wire routed through a security door frame and then along the foundation, tucked out of sight between cement foundation and sheathing. I used foam as a spacer behind the straight mount to create space for the wire to come in through the side of the mount. The mounts are made for doorbell wire coming out of a wall, so creative thinking was necessary. Notice how the Logitech logo at the bottom is barely visible. Compare that to a Ring doorbell or the new Netatmo! I love that Logitech decided to not make their logo stand out.
Apple is successfully getting me to put HomePod Minis all over my house. Bought one, liked it for my smaller rooms, so I’m slowly adding more. They all have U1 chips and Thread radios. I hope Apple takes advantage of this new network of devices. So long, Sonos.
I installed a Lutron Caseta in-wall dimmer switch for the hallway today. Before it was wired as a 3-way so one switch is now a wired dimmer and the other switch is now a Pico remote (with adapter for switch box install). Real nice. Caseta is solid for home automation w/HomeKit.
MultiMarkdown Composer and Marked 2 fit my Markdown needs perfectly. One key item is that I can drag a photo into the MultiMarkdown window and it’ll insert the image syntax with relative paths. For some reason that feature I need is astonishingly rare on other editors I’ve trialed. MultiMarkdown Composer can be set to automatically launch Marked 2 for previews and proofing – real nice. It is a bonus that Marked 2 can easily preview MarsEdit in-progress posts too. I’m using the Pandoctor style in Marked 2 since that matches Pandoc output of my Markdown journalling files. However, I had to edit its CSS to remove paragraph indentations.
I like Apple Fitness+. HIIT workouts are accessible for a newbie. The trainers make me feel at ease and not judged (it’s irrational). I exercise daily for mental and then cardio health. Usually I’m on an elliptical watching Netflix or I go for a brisk walk.
Annual caramel making. These seem 👌and perfectly plastic. Here’s a series of photos showing sugar mixture color at ~300°F, 320°F, near 340°F, after cream & butter added, and cooling to finish. Stressful making these as one errant crystal can cause it all to crystallize.
Unidentified hummingbird enjoying rosemary flowers today. Maybe a Black Chin. Doesn’t seem to have the colorations of an Anna’s.
I expected a stressful post-election as Trump clearly foreshadowed his shenanigans but this is nearly beyond imagination. So glad I resumed an SSRI a few months ago (due to panic attack etc). Anyway, here’s a Moravian star, our only exterior facing holiday decoration this year.
If you have any bootable APFS containers on an external drive, macOS Big Sur will not allow you to assign any of the containers on that drive to TimeMachine. I had to delete my SuperDuper! volumes, but SuperDuper! doesn’t work yet on Big Sur anyway. Here goes another reorg of my external drives! Hope I don’t need to buy another. But dang TimeMachine on an SSD is incredibly fast.
Pecan Squares instead of Peacan Pie. And as we’re not having Thanksgiving with anyone, dessert is a day early! 😋
I bought a new M1 Mac Mini, 8gb RAM with 1 TB SSD for home server duties and testing software (like Homebrew) I need for a non-server machine. I’ve been using an older MacBook Air for server duties and it did fine but its lack of ports, large power wart, and space it all takes is less than ideal. The MBA also has the butterfly keyboard but admittedly, it infrequently acted up. Hoping Apple will give full credit for trading it in. It boggles the mind the new Mini will grossly outperform my 16” MBP with 16 GB ram.
Cistus × purpureus (Purple-flowered Rock-rose)
Good morning. This morning’s sun rise almost makes up for my neighbor being obsessive with their sheet metal shelters and sheds.
I tested my journaling workflow in Big Sur on a secondary Mac and it worked. So I couldn’t help myself and, despite SuperDuper! not being ready for Big Sur, I installed Big Sur on my production machine. I’ve zero complaints so far.
Pumpkin pie! And rump roast. Sunday is the best.
I accidentally trashed my Windows 10 Virtual Machine and thought it was a total loss with no backup. Two weeks later I realized I had a SuperDuper! clone of my MBP as I… prepared to update the clone. Phew and glad I remembered!
PowerPhotos is worth the cost alone for trashing duplicate photos in a MacOS/iCloud Photo Library. I’m curious about using it to move legacy scanned photos into a separate library. I’ve got those hidden anyway…
On iPhone 12: I love the telephoto lens so I’ll wait for the 2.5x camera or better to migrate down into the iPhone Pro from the Max. The Max is a nonstarter for my small hands. My 11 Pro already pushes my limits. As for the super wide angle lens, I use that more than I expected.
If you have a weather station with Meteobridge, I’ve made a iOS Siri Shortcut so Siri can tell you about current conditions. You can tweak the weather report using variables on Meteobridge’s template page along with other small shortcut adjustments.
By default it reports current temperature, humidity and gusts in the last hour.
You’ll likely want to change the shortcut’s name. I chose simply “Yard” since Siri on HomePod finds it unique enough to not do something else. And my station is in the yard.
Upon import, It’ll ask for your Meteobridge IP address and credentials. Those are private to your device! Then be sure to go to the shortcut’s details screen to enable Internet access. Test it out on your handheld device then try on your HomePod. If you’re using HomePod, it may need a power cycle to see the shortcut……
For iOS 14 Shortcuts, seems the volume control function for AirPlay devices is only reliable after the audio begins. So for a DarkNoise shortcut, it switches to an AirPlay device, then DarkNoise plays, and finally after a four seconds wait the volume is controlled.
Coconut-Gochujang Glazed Chicken With Broccoli is pretty good. We added Gochugaru (Korean pepper flakes) for extra heat. Would recommend serving as a rice bowl though. It begged for a bowl.
Upon a recent update to VMware Fusion 11.5.5, sound began crackling in Windows 10. For some reason
sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"
was missing from my .vmx file so Windows 10 was using VMWare’s generic audio drivers. Added that line into the .vmx file and all is well as now Windows is using its High Definition Audio device drivers. Thanks to this AppleVis post for giving me the idea.
Follow up: I just noticed that this AppleVis post reported nearly the same issue I had and the same fix. Apparently this may be known to be an issue at VMWare.
The MacOS app Amphetamine is pretty slick. As promised, it keeps my MacBook Air awake even if the lid is closed and there is no external display attached. So now I can run it as a part-time file server (via SFTP and Secure ShellFish for iOS). At least, that’s the plan. Since it is running on a laptop, I really appreciate the audio alert it’ll give if I unplug the MBA while Amphetamine is keeping it awake. Now that MacOS 10.15.5 has battery aging management, now is the time to try this out.
My goal is to somehow simplify things by no longer needing an aging QNAP NAS and using a single platform. I love the idea of having a spare laptop but also actively using it and getting more value out of it.
I finally got around to messing with iStat Menu's Time menu and I’m sold. Having a calendar and events embedded in the clock is lovely.
Since 2010, I have always had a 13” Mac laptop — now I’m on a 16” MacBook Pro and I love it. I upgraded from a 2018 MacBook Air.
I waited for the new 13” MBP. The new 13” MBP had the necessary Magic keyboard but didn’t satisfy in terms of evolution: its screen was not 14” as rumored; it has the same thermal system; the same speakers; and the same mic. However, the latest 13-inch MBP has slightly better single thread CPU performance than the base 16” MBP I got. Finally, it seemed as if the latest 10th gen Intel chips that might work for the 16” wouldn’t provide too much of a performance boost (no wonder there’s so much interest in ARM). And I might be waiting a while for that. Assuming the 16” ever gets a refresh before the surmised ARM revolution.
What did I want? I really wanted the wide color gamut of the MBP since I’m a prolific photo taker and editor. In addition, I really wanted a laptop that will last beyond three years (like my first ever 2010 13” MBP, RIP)— even if ARM becomes a thing. A laptop that has enough CPU cores for ARM emulation, if needed (though I suspect for a few years apps will be delivered as dual Intel-ARM binaries).
I use x86 Windows 10 in VMWare and on my 2018 MacBook Air, it was nearly unusable. So the 100% base 16” MBP seemed like a good fit.
So without a solid evolution of the 13”, the 16” began to look pretty nice.
Now, my Windows 10 VM can take over two of six cores and four gigs of ram without any noticeable system impact. Also, it is now apparent 16 gigs of ram really is the sweet spot for my use cases. And it is awesome to use a 16” screen on my lap wherever I want. For basic things, like writing to my blog in MarsEdit, it never gets warm enough to notice. Oh, and yes, photos look so very good and editing on this 16" screen is a dream. I’m uh also taking a liking to the Touch Bar.
For the Touch Bar, I just wish I could enable the expanded control strip without losing app-specific controls. For example, if I’m in an app with Touch Bar support, it should show the app’s controls with a shrunk control strip. However, if I’m viewing just the desktop, the Touch Bar should immediately show me the expanded control strip — I don’t want to press the <.
Why must Apple hide three finger drag on their touch pads under Accessibility? It’s my favorite touch feature of the touch pad.
Just found out that MacOS Catalina’s new shell (zsh) doesn’t require me to remove spaces from file names for my simple Markdown to PDF shell command — nice!
for f in *.md; do pandoc $f -o ./Archive/${f%.md}.pdf -t latex; done
With [Watchsmith](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/watchsmith/id1483088503), I get a hamburger when my move/exercise/stand goals are met.
Apple delayed shipment of 2020 MacBook Air. Understandable. Buyer’s remorse came fast and furious so I canceled. I’ll keep mashing those butterfly keys for a while longer.
“Hey Siri, play some music.” “Okay, let’s kick things off with Widespread Panic.” 😳
Our journal workflow is probably more complicated than it needs to be. There’s room to optimize this workflow. It grew out of our moving away from Day One when they went to the subscription model. At the time there were some terrible limitations and we wanted none of it. Instead, we went with a semi-automated method involving iOS Shortcuts, iOS Notes, 1Writer, Homebrew (for Pandoc and LaTeX toolchain), and my favorite Swiss army knife GraphicConverter. The final archival format of each journal entry is a beautiful, open standard and searchable PDF generated by Pandoc using LaTeX (MiKTeX distribution).
The Shortcuts step creates or seeds a range of dated Markdown files with dated headers. The filenames follow the very sortable format of “yyyy-MM-dd HH.mm.ss.md” or, for example, "2020-02-09 19.24.38.md". Of course, with Shortcuts limitations interacting with Files, I have to create the files in the Shortcuts folder and then move them to the 1Writer iCloud folder shared with my partner. 1Writer is thus setup to save all journals to iCloud folder where both my partner and I can write.
If we need to add a photo to a journal entry, we split screen with 1Writer and Photos and drag a photo over to 1Writer. 1Writer puts the image file, with the original filename, in the same folder as the Markdown files. If we need a collage, we create it in Google Photos app (though we don’t actually use it for sync!) because it does a really good job at collages of photos with different dimensions. Google Photos saves the collage to Photos and we go from there.
Once a month’s worth of journal entries (Markdown files) are complete, I then have a workflow to convert the Markdown files to PDFs. This is where Finder, GraphicConverter, Pandoc and LaTeX come in.
Since 1Writer is using iCloud, it’s all downloaded to my MacBook without any effort. So first I copy the files to a non-iCloud syncing folder in my ~home folder or into a folder with .nosync postfix.
Next, some photos won’t be properly rotated, so I use GraphicConverter to Auto-rotate photos by clicking the Rotation icon on a thumbnail in Browse mode.
Next, I finally run a command that I modified from somewhere on the internet. I was not talented enough to put this command together from scratch. This command is why I had to wait on installing Catalina until Homebrew was compatible with it. With the following command, you just need to have a working Pandoc and LaTeX environment with a subfolder named Archive:
cd ~/Journal-compile/
for f in *.md; do pandoc $f -o ./Archive/${f%.md}.pdf -t latex; done
Then I load GraphicConverter, and in Browse mode, use the “Set Exif Date from Filename” tool on all the freshly minted PDFs. This sets the file date to the date of the journal entries. The format I use is YYYY-MM-DD. Then I copy the PDFs and source files (with images) to various Cloud and NAS folders. Of course, I keep the PDFs separate and that’s what we always reference back to. PDFExpert is currently our choice app for viewing journals since it has excellent file content search and SMB syncing.
Now, a lot of this is broken up so the workflow isn’t onerous. But I admit for most people, this is just ridiculous. But the benefit of this workflow is our memories are in a open format where it matters with no proprietary nonsense.
Since you likely read through all of this, here’s the Shortcut for generating blank journals. I bet it is also more complicated than it needs to be. But it works well.
11/15/2020 - edited to reflect that we now use iCloud Shared Folders to edit journals directly in 1Writer. Previously we had to use Notes first, then transfer to a Markdown file, complicating things a bit. It also now reflects that zsh, the shell that MacOS started using since Catalina, no longer cares about path or filename spaces. But realize, there is still a very powerful Rename tool in Finder in the right click context menu,
The dull spectacle of me trying to figure out the kitchen sink’s plumbing. My iPhone is a handy remote eye, well suited for dark, tight spaces.
I would very much love it if MacOS Catalina stopped logging me out of some anonymous Apple ID service. Every week, if not more. And the process to log back in is mayhem. Maybe 10.15.3 will fix it?
Unearthed and powered up a Raspberry Pi 3. Took a bit of time to remember how I configured it for HomeBridge. Upgrading to Debian Stretch for the heck of it.
I’m pleased that MacOS 10.15’s Photos app reconstructs Live Photos from exported .heic and .mov pairs that I uploaded to my NAS via PhotoSync. 📱👍
I love Shortcuts. There goes a tedious repetitive task to oblivion!!📱
Never fails. This infernal badged Sys Prefs issue is so far the most annoying MacOS Catalina issue I’ve had. What services need iCloud to be logged back in? Why does MacOS forget so easily?
To HomePod: “How’s the timer?” HomePod: “The timer is cancelled.” 🙀🤷♂️📱
Dear iPadOS notes: I’d love a default where a new single Notes window launches when I tap your springboard icon instead of the last split screen I used with 1Writer.
There’s been some frustration with the current state of HomeKit Secure Video, but coming from a very pricey Nest Cam IQ Outdoor that basically is useless without another subscription (cancelled when they removed camera features), HomeKit Secure Video is a revelation. I’m using a Logitech Circle 2 with HomeKit Secure Video and its non-delayed, non-lagged, over the LAN, live video starts… every… single… time. Compare this behavior with always having to toggle the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor Cam off and on to get past the blue spinning wheel and get a several second delayed live video. So HomeKit Secure Video’s direct over the LAN live video coupled with video clips as a value add with an iCloud storage subscription, HomeKit Secure Video is great. But yes, be careful about those notifications and the sensitivity of people/animal/car detection. I’ve had people detected across the street, which frankly, is more impressive than annoying. And yes, you can only get one live stream at a time with the Circle 2. That’s workable.
Sometimes my Sonos goes out of sync with the HomePod. The HomePod appears to then go through a process to resynchronize — maybe 75% successful. They’re within earshot of each other so makes since a HomePod might do some fancy sync.
I didn’t end up with even one permission prompt after installing MacOS Catalina & launching various apps. Maybe I accidentally turned off SIP? No… that’s not it. Or it’s not so bad in the current installation version. 👍👍📱
So MacOS Catalina’s SideCar feature requires the Mac user and target iPad to be signed in to the same AppleID even if the iPad is connected to USB. 👎👎👎👎👎👎👎📱
HomeBrew and SuperDuper! just released MacOS Catalina support so I suppose I will try to upgrade today…
Very pleased that HomeKit Secure Video streams live video on the LAN. No more stream to cloud and download, adding many seconds of video delay & failure points. 📱
I finally got a HomePod and I’m impressed that it can accurately hear me mumble across the room while it plays music📱
I love listening to full albums. But often I’m not in the right mood to choose them. So a long time ago I created a Shortcut that creates an Apple Music playlist of a variable number of full, track list ordered albums. It allows you to unselect albums that you have a strong opinion to not listen to. The shortcut unfortunately needs at least a 1 second wait between adding albums or it’ll silently fail and the playlist won’t be complete. Note that I mostly did not modify it to iOS 13’s new Shortcut features but hey, I think it is more readable setting specific variables. It did need tweeking from iOS 12. Get Random Full Albums Playlist Shortcut.
Pleased that my HomeKit devices still worked from the Home app during a big Comcast (Xfinity) & Verizon internet outage. Pretty sure Alexa and Google alternatives would have been dead.
Old iPad Pro 9.7” just got replaced by an iPad Pro 11”. I did not expect to be impressed by the differences but dang that’s nice!
I have some anxiety over the iOS 13 Reminders upgrade button. If I upgrade, then my partner has to upgrade, and she lives on reminders. So if the upgrade goes wrong… 😱📱
All these years Apple still has no way to share entire photo libraries with family. The shared family album is useful only to temporarily share the week’s photos. So I use PhotoSync iOS App to sync our iPhone photos to the NAS, files prefixed with first names, and then once a week manually import to the two libraries via macOS Photos. Works well enough but Photos has very poor dupe detection. Supposedly iOS detects dupes – I wish they would surface them in an aptly named album. Once imported, I use PhotoSync to mark the new imports on each device all as sync’d and then delete the week’s worth of shared photos from the family shared album. That’s two nearly exact copies of a 50 GB photo library stored in iCloud. We used to use Google Photos but decided they no longer deserved analyzing our lives.
My new iPhone refused to access old iTunes Match music, perhaps as a result of my unsubscribing from iTunes Match months after subscribing to Apple Music. I did that as Apple Music includes Match. But things broke anyway. No idea why. So I spent yesterday rebuilding my collection using Apple Music. To Apple Music’s credit, their library is massively better for British & twee pop than ~3 years ago. So with exception of Manic Street Preacher’s Know Your Enemy and older Billy Bragg albums, I only had to match really obscure stuff. I think the rebuild solved some perplexing issues such as certain matched songs never playing on Sonos or Apple TV. Also the rebuild got rid of the slight annoyance of my iTunes Match albums existing along side (eventually available) Apple Music albums. Overall, I think it was worth the effort searching for 250 or so albums and adding or matching as necessary. I also got to add many new (or older) albums from artists I like!
🤦♂️📱 iPadOS 13.1.3
Oh cool. The exercise trigger for iOS 13.1.2 Shortcuts finally started working today.
Using iOS 13 shortcuts & iPad home screen widget to set audio output to my airplay capable Sonos speaker and then immediately play music are all I ever needed. Using control center to change audio output is 👎
My new favorite watch face, from WatchOS 6, is Solar Dial. I’m often outdoors for work so at a glance view of the sun ephemeris is nice. Apple put a lot of effort on this watch face!
The audio sync feature on Apple’s tvOS 13 is 👌 Also, here’s a🌈 🌈
HomeKit is great because it doesn’t require internet for day to day operations. Internet goes down, I can still operate or expect automations as normal. The same cannot be said of the other smart home ecosystems. Ecobee goes out of business? HomeKit!
Going to be jealous of that iPhone 11’s 📱grown up front camera! About time it has near parity to the rear.