Colors balance shift is a key part of Film recipes so my Shortcut would fail to match as white balance would inexplicably reset via Q. Fujifilm found the bug too: “bug has been fixed, which caused that WB SHIFT saved as ‘CUSTOM’ would be disabled by operating the ’Q’ menu.”

Hefeweizen bottling day. Here’s my factory. This’ll be the last brew until winter as I don’t use much air conditioning or have a fridge for fermenting. I’m quite happy with seasonal brewing. It’s kinda stressful!

three TV trays arranged around a chair with various bottling implements.

Avocado flowers! 🌱🌳

understated avocado flowers with barely any sepals. two flies are enjoying the plant.ladybugs enjoying the avocado tree.

Assassin bugs are bad ass. They seem to be more common than ever in our yards. They’re also not camera shy. We welcome them!

assassin bug with a speared bug... and dead bugs around it. assassin bug with a speared bug... and dead bugs around it.

Lessons learned: in MSFS 2020, never change flight phases if flight plan is manually input to FMS. Super lame because the Plan UI doesn’t let you select transitions, VIAs & airways so its IFR plans are 100% bonkers. Also saved flights don’t seem to save my FMS programming. 😤

Finally got to the season two, episode two of Picard 😳 what a great premise

Only 4% of Flight Simulator players have completed an Instrument Landing System landing‽ Clearly I’m too nerdy for this game.

Poppies (1st photo) are now in full bloom and clarkias (2nd) are about to do the same. 🌱

front yard landscape with golden poppiesmagenta clarkia flowers

Recent mornings, our cultivated native California grape leaf tips have droplets of water. Apparently this process is called guttation. They’re likely telling me to cut back on way earlier than normal drip watering. 🌱

chocolate chip cookies on a cooking rack with a spatula looming behind them

Now in bloom in our backyard: cultivated California Wild Roses (pic 1) and Elderberry (2). Still gorging themselves: ladybugs. Everywhere in our front yard. They’re just decimating aphids. Ladybugs particularly love coyote bush (3) and sage.

wild rose flower with white flower petalsyellow elderberry flowersbright orange ladybugs all over a coyote bush

Latest Shortcuts for macOS Has Vast Improvements

What's new in Shortcuts in iOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3:

“End If” and “End Repeat” can now be dragged in the Shortcuts editor

That’s a big deal. I’ve abandoned attempts at refactoring shortcuts solely because I couldn’t move entire blocks of If statements.

“Combine Images” no longer produces empty images on macOS

I ran into this bug right away and couldn’t believe it. 

The "Shortcuts Events" app, which provides scripting functionality for Shortcuts on macOS, no longer needs to be opened manually before it can be used from scripts

This is potentially a big deal? I don’t know enough about how Shortcuts works but I’ve run into many problems running Shortcuts via apps like Hazel, and I bet some of them were because of the above issue they resolved.

This is a great update.

Here goes my second brew - a simple Bavarian Hefeweizen. With way warmer than normal temperatures I figure our house will be close to or within the ideal fermentation temperature range. 🤞

Eurasian Collared Dove drinking party.

Potatoe croquettes for lunch today. Great use of leftover mashed potatoes.

plated golden brown croquettes with one cut open, revealing fluffy white potatoes and chives

Citrus gummies are a great way to use backyard citrus. We made Meyer lemon with Valencia orange gummies. An Alton Brown recipe. We’ve frozen our remaining Meyer lemon juice. Our citrus season is now over.

orange gummies in a bin atop a red cuttingboard and a wooden cuttingboard

macOS Shortcuts, Logger for Shortcuts, Shortcuts Temporary Files, and Hazel

Logger for Shortcuts provided me exactly the information to figure out how to get Hazel to properly use a Shortcut against a file. Now I can have Hazel run a specific Shortcut against a file whenever a new file shows up.

Background: for some reason when Hazel starts a Shortcut, the Shortcut operates on a copy of the file in a temporary folder. My programmer brain assumed that the Shortcut Input would be immutable. Nope. Turns out Shortcut Input is a temporary file that all Shortcut operations (like exiftool) must then run against. So while you think you’ve been working on a specific file in a specific folder, Shortcuts has been working on a copy of it all along in a temporary folder. Thus you must output the Shortcut Input to provide the file you’ve been modifying (in this case with exiftool). It’s very frustrating for Shortcuts to override paths with its own temporary paths but thanks to Logger for Shortcuts I quickly figured out this vexing issue. Already the app is worth $9.99 because now I’ve got the time saving Hazel ruleset I always wanted.

Here’s the Hazel embedded Apple Script I have to run to make a Shortcut with a file output (Shortcut Input (gah)) to work. I suppose now that I’ve fixed the Shortcuts issue this could now be more simply done… but it works (I’ve never had any success with running Hazel’s built in Shortcuts capability and right now it can’t even list the available Shortcuts):

do shell script “shortcuts run ’Shortcut Name Modified for use with Hazel’ -i ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile & “ -o ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile

Logger for Shortcuts output clearly showing me the ridiculous temporary folder Shortcuts is using to work on Shortcut Input:

Screen Shot 2022 03 13 at 7 58 26 AM

From last Monday near Tomales Point in beautiful California, a genus Arctia moth caterpillar on lupins.

red and black fuzzy caterpillar on slender pinnate lupine leaves.

Raspberry Shakes do great science in the challenging conditions of Haiti: When a seismic network failed, citizen science stepped in on Ars Technica

I’ve been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on the Xbox Series S. I’m surprised at how it keeps my mind off everything and on a passion of mine and so it really helps my anxiety. Last time I played was w/ FS 98. This is amazing but not without some bizarre issues.