Last year I decided to spruce up my home office for Christmas a little bit, by using an LED light strip around the cupboard door that sits behind my desk. Rather than just using an off the shelf solution, I used a couple of BBC Micro:Bits (aka BBC MicroBit), to control the lighting effects and to provide a remote control. In this post I’m going to cover how I did this.
A few weeks ago I released version 1 of an Alfred workflow called Bypass. I created it to help use Apple’s Shortcuts app on the Mac. I have been continuing to expand the functionality, and have now released v1.1 with many new features. One of the areas I spent a bit of time working on was a way to make Shortcuts easier to use with the Elgato Stream Deck, and in this post I’m going to walk through how Bypass now supports setting up Shortcuts on the Stream Deck.
Anyone who has been following my efforts over the last few months may have noted that I have occasionally made reference to migrating from Evernote to DEVONthink. As part of that move I have been taking the opportunity to sort out some of my lax filing. One of those aspects is the naming of files and specifically the inclusion of date stamps where relevant - e.g. on bills, documentation releases, etc. Fortunately I was able to bring a little bit of automation to bear on this activity, which has been helping speed things up significantly.
I write a lot of things in a plain text format known as Markdown. It provides a set of standardised ways to mark up text for processing into other formats (such as HTML), whereby formatting and other rich content elements are applied. I write all of my blog posts in this format, and also posts for other sites where I publish and contribute. One of these sites is Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC), a site where you can donate to my coffee fund if you like the stuff I do. It is also where I post each month to let everyone know what I have been up to. It regularly surprises me just how much content and support to other Internet denizens I’ve actually provided during the course of a month! Over the course of the month I jot down notes in Drafts, and then in the following month I write these up, in Markdown ready for posting. Unfortunately, BMAC does not support Markdown, but it does support rich text.
Last year I wrote a post about automation with Templater for Obsidian. I showed some examples of using Obsidian’s Templater plugin to do some automation a little bit beyond what you might typically consider as the basics. One of the things in one of the examples bugged me for quite a while, and in this post I’m going to go through how I improved things for creating a link to a new page, and the correctly filed new page at the same time.
Last year I released Conductor, my Alfred workflow for working with Keyboard Maestro. It allowed you to launch Keyboard Maestro macros, get information about them, open them for editing, and even the run them with a preset delay. In this new release I’ve taken things a little further and I’m going to provide a brief overview in this post.
As soon as I had attended my first external work event and been issued a cheap paper badge, I began wondering why conference organisers were not using digital badges using eInk technology. I figured it was probably because people would “accidentally” leave the conference with them and they would be more expensive than the cheap paper print out in a plastic wallet on a lanyard. But, within a few years, eInk badges began to appear, and I felt things were catching up. Roll on a few years and I began attending public and private business-related events where people were not issued badges. Again I wondered why people were not issued badges, beyond the occasional sticky label that leaves a not so delightful slightly sticky patch on your business attire? It was around this time, almost a decade ago, I began dipping in and occasionally looking around for an eInk badge option of my own. I often saw ones available from Chinese marketplaces, but they were typically vaguely specified, only available in bulk and thus expensive for an individual to experiment with. Then several weeks ago I spied something new that looked ideal. I purchased a Pimoroni Badger 2040.
I recently wrote about getting set up for working with a Pimoroni Badger 2040, a small piece of hardware that functions as a programmable eInk badge. The basic unit is the electronics, but in order to make it a functional badge for my own purposes, I found there were a few additions required. In this second post in my introductory series of posts for the Badger 2040 I am going to briefly set out what other physical elements have been added.
This is the third and final post in my introductory series for the Pimoroni Badger 2040. So far, I have talked a little about getting things set up so you can easily work with and find out about the Badger 2040, and about the physical additions I have made to turn my Badger 2040 into a functional eInk badge. In this post I am going to cover the programmable side of this eInk badge, and what (simple) revisions I have made in order to turn this into a badge suitable for my own purposes.
In my post yesterday, I described how I was using Obsidian and Hook to help me support my documentation of automations. Today, I am going to share something that helps me work with documenting Keyboard Maestro macros.
Earlier this week I wrote about how I was using Hook and Obsidian to support my documentation of automations. In this post I will aim to explain how I am using this set up to help me access documentation for my Apple Shortcuts automations.
Today’s post is a quick one about something I find quite useful when working in Drafts on my Mac. It relates to hyperlinks and the feature of Drafts known as link mode that allows you to make links clickable at the expense of making the content non-editable. I found it frustrating to keep switching back and forth to access a link, but with the help of a small Keyboard Maestro macro, I was able to speed this up.
Stephen Millard (ThoughtAsylum/@sylumer) is creating content & tools to help you be productive with your tech
I am the founder of the website ThoughtAsylum.com, and the Drafts app TADpoLe library (and related action groups) as well as the creator or many other things for...
Jeff Brownscheidle has completed over 6000 miles of long-distance hiking on some of America’s greatest trails. He chronicles his adventures at his blog, using Ulysses for iPhone as his ultra-light travel companion.
I came across http://jetsetradio.live by chance and saw immediately that it was more dynamic than 90% of the stuff the web meta-media is covering right now, so I captured just a few moments to share them with ya.
Alexa is freaking its owners out with random laughter and defiance
Amazon Alexa users are saying the device is laughing at inappropriate moments and doing things like reading off names of funeral homes unprompted. Amazon told The Verge it is working on a fix.
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