April has been a “full on” month for me. Work has been really busy and included several very busy days in London which I will come on to later. The home life as usual packed in the regular stuff along with a few surprises, and I also managed to end up in my local hospital’s Accident & Emergency department early on after a tumble an existing minor injury became a tad more serious. A few days on crutches and the rest of the month hobbling has certainly presented a few additional challenges I could have done without.
Despite the general hustle and bustle of life I did manage to forge some time to work on personal projects and the good news is I have crammed a lot into April. It isn’t all visible just yet, but there should be plenty of interest this past month and in the pipeline.
ThoughtAsylum
Breaking the recent trend of just one post a month on the blog (excluding this monthly round up of course), I got two good sized posts out this past month. The first of these coming very much from the day job. While I have been known to present in other circumstances, my job requires me to deliver information to groups and I like to do so with visual aids. Be it in person on virtually. The company standard is the ubiquitous Microsoft Office, so for the majority of my sessions I use Microsoft PowerPoint.
I have some strong opinions on slide content, layout and the like, and for presenting content I strongly favour simple visuals over text, minimising concepts and information on each slide, etc. But one thing I also favour is adapting to the needs of the audience. For many years now I have been utilising an approach whereby I use (and re-use) large slide decks in a non-linear fashion. I will jump around to different sets of slides within a deck to cover topics relevant to the audience at that time. Relatively recently I managed to smooth off a final rough edge to my approach that had been nagging me for years and I had simply not set aside the time to address. In my first post of the month I walk through my approach to using a ‘Seamless Switchboard for Non-linear Presentations’ (in PowerPoint). I don’t think the concepts are new, or this offers a revolutionary idea, but it does describe a methodology that I’ve now polished and have got to the point where I was happy to share it for other professionals to replicate. If your job involves sharing information and you find yourself re-using slides but building new slide decks all the time, then this is absolutely a post you will want to read through, and there is a simple demo deck included.
Hot on the heels of that post was a new Home Assistant post on using a small LED matrix display. The post walks through the end-to-end set up and configuration for a matrix display that I have placed in my kitchen and linked to Home Assistant. It provides me with glanceable indications for weather conditions and waste collection services. It may not sound exciting, but if you want to use LEDs with Home Assistant to give you sensor (physical or virtual) indicators, then this will probably make for an interesting read. I find the most useful Home Assistant related posts are the ones that lead you through all the nuances and explain everything and hopefully, that’s exactly what I have managed to do in my Home Assistant Matrix Display for Indicators post.
Forums
I don’t know if it was just quieter on my usual forum haunts this last month or if my focus was just elsewhere, but it definitely feels much lighter on the interactions than usual.
Drafts
Have you ever had app.displaySuccessMessage stop working? Well I have, and a super simple tip I shared managed to get it working again for someone else.
Once again, syntax highlighting for code snippets in Drafts came up. Suggestions were made, but ultimately, in my opinion, Drafts is not a good tool for managing code snippets. If anyone is looking for a good one, I use SnippetsLab. There are many good ones, but for me I get Alfred integration, and Hookmark integration.
There was an interesting discussion about searching multiple Drafts revolving around a user’s drafts about books and their authors. What I was not able to figure out is that why, if the data is being held in a format that is no longer fit for purpose, the next step would not be to change the format. It is literally what I and colleagues have done every time similar constraints have come up. People often cite the overhead, but honestly, with a bit of creative thinking and code, you can always get a computer to do the heavy lifting - and they tend to be more reliable than the human/manual approach.
Whenever possible don’t create, use then delete duplicate draft. Note my second suggestion and what the final streamlined solution adopted is.
Automators
I helped a new member of the forum with a problem bulk messaging from Shortcuts.
I think I gave a string contender for the automation of logging medication health data.
Pop quiz - how can you run consecutive iPad keyboard shortcuts?
Someone (not me) has a solution for how to select a folder (not a file) in the “Create bookmarked named” Shortcuts action.
I jumped in on a brief discussion of is iCloud more reliable than Obsidian Sync when utilising Shortcuts to write data to Obsidian?
“Changing a coding script layout” seems to present more questions than answers.
Occasionally I post responses and decide that they actually are not as relevant as I had first thought, or that I can do better later. My initial response on how to get the response status of a request in Scriptable was one of these.
Another Scriptable query, this time on presenting a webview when run through Shortcuts, and one where I just nipped in at the end with some pertinent documentation to answer the final piece.
I stepped in on the sunrise/sunset offset automation reminders I originally addressed several months back, to explain what the original poster’s final shortcut did. But can anyone give me a good reason to want the final action in place?
Controlling a Stream Deck is once again a topic of conversation. This time through with the poster focused on Shortcuts and wanting to switch folders not profiles.
If you were looking to record location arrival and departure time to a Google Sheet via Shortcuts, what automation triggers would you suggest? Did you have the three I noted? Yes, not two, but three.
There is an issue with one of the Pushcut widget examples at the moment.
What are the alternatives to a Stream Deck if IT won’t install the software on your work PC? As someone who is in that exact situation, I had a list of suggestions.
A simple looking AppleScript problem was one of those queries that evolved as more requirements gradually appeared, then dealing with Apple software bugs that have been around for years, then … well you’ll have to take a look to see what then and how I got everything lined up and working.
While a list of apps and their Shortcuts integrations would be an amazing resource, can it really exist, and how would you actually use it? I do get the feeling some tech enthusiasts are magpies by nature.
Finally, I got called out on a first post from a new poster to resolve their iMessage-merge problem. I’m flattered to be called out, but at the same time, that isn’t how the forums work. Fair enough call out to me directly if it is something I created, but at the end of the day I’m not personal tech support for everyone in the world. However, even though I put together what I believe is a comprehensive explanation and solution (there are multiple diagrams, data, a table, an code (a complete and working shortcut), it still didn’t quite hit home, and in true BuzzFeed style, “You’ll never guess what they did next…”
Other
I have had a number of other things going on this month that I’ve spent bits a pieces of time one.
Home Tech
After getting Home Assistant back up and running from backups last month I spent a little bit of time this past month getting things updated. Lots of configuration and firmware updates for devices, and sorting out integrations where tokens had expired, or external factors had changed so required configuration changes in my set up to realign them.
I also added a Zigbee triple light switch in my kitchen to give us some extra buttons. For the most part this is replacing the Aqara T1 cube (which I have a different location for in the future), and is giving us quick ways to trigger various automations that send different announcements (via Amazon Echos) about food being ready for different people, and setting often used kitchen timers (on the Amazon Echos).
Time Machine Failure
This month I had a failure with my Time Machine backup drive for my MacBook Pro. Plugging it in did nothing and I tried changing the cable and the port, but nothing showed in Disk Utility. I resigned myself to buying a replacement and ordered an SSD and caddy. Before swapping it out entirely I tried the existing SSD in the new caddy and it worked. So it looks like the old caddy broke and I now have a spare SSD drive. Most importantly though, my Time Machine backups are now running once more.
Mobile Config Files
After some challenges relating to the deployment of a third party browser extension and my involvement in user acceptance testing the deployment, I ended up digging around in Apple mobile Configuration files this month. I needed a Chromium browser, but not Chrome, and the extension has configuration settings to accompany it, so I ended up making a new file to put the extension on my Mac and using it with the Brave browser.
1–2–1 Advice
I’ve been continuing to help a few folks out with some complex specifics around their own automation needs.
Conductor Update
I had been doing some work recently with [Keyboard Maestro](https://www.keyboardmaestro.com) macros and things were failing. So, what do you do when things fail? You look in the logs. Now the logs for Keyboard Maestro are not overly obscure to get to, but in doing so, I decided I would like to get to the logs a bit faster. A few thoughts later and I had figured the best thing to do would be to build the functionality to quick access logs into my Alfred workflow for working with Keyboard Maestro, the workflow known as Conductor.
I noted on this occasion that in the requisite folder I not only had the Editor and Engine logs, but also a StreamDeck log. That left me wondering what other logs might get generated now, or in the future, for hardware or integrations I may never possess. For example, do MDI keyboards have a log for Keyboard Maestro? Anyway, the upshot was I decided that rather than just simple links to open the two usual logs, I would build out the enhancement in such a way as to check for available logs and offer those up to be selected from a list. It even de-Pascal-cases the names to display them to the user.
A small update, but one that might be useful to people needing to debug misbehaving macros. You can download the latest version from its page on my website.
Learning Technologies 2024
This past month, as part of my work, I attended the Learning Technologies 2024 conference and exhibition in London. It was a two day event bringing together over 200 exhibitors, 200 sessions, and over 17,000 delegates to talk about and look at the latest and greatest in learning technology - generally focused on corporate rather than primary, secondary, further, or higher education. If you work in the Learning space, it is an amazing event to attend to get a better view of what is available and coming up. Adoption of Artificial Intelligence has dominated the last couple of years, with it being “the new hotness” last year, and table-stakes this year.
This was the first outing for my new Drafts-based conference workflow I wrote about last month, and it went perfectly. My colleagues are still pulling notes together weeks later and my notes were revised and published internally on my first day back at my desk. While on the floor, I used it constantly, but what I hadn’t expected was how much text content I added via my iPhone. I had expected to do most of my text input via my iPad, but in the end, it was probably nearer a 50:50 split.
One slight revision was that my K480 Logitech keyboard did not surface from storage in time for me to take it to the event. So with a bit of thin MDF cut to size, some hot glue and some 3D printed braces I created a lap board that fit in a small laptop bag alongside my iPad and my Keychron K3 mechanical keyboard. Not the most stylish solution, but very lightweight, it works, and I did get a better typing experience.The keyboard locks into position in the lower part of the board, and the trifold cover forms a stand for my iPad propping it up as a screen in the upper part of the board, the braces ensuring it stays put with a snug fit.
That Project…
If you have been following along with my monthly posts, you will have seen me mention of a special project I have been working on. It has been in progress for well over a year and I have been hoping to get it to a point to release it in the first half of 2024. Well, prompted by an external factor, I had to go into overdrive on it this past month and I ended up taking some time off work and exploring some new approaches and workflows to ramp things up. The upshot is I have spent a lot of time working on it in April and I plan to have something ready in May. It will not be perfect. It will not quite be up to the standards of what I had in mind for release, but it will get there, and barring something significant torpedoing it, it will be made available.
Upcoming
There are a few things for May that I will cover in my next round up, but I am not in a position to go into any details about them just yet.
All that remains is to once again thank everyone who has bought me a coffee, and given the day I’m publishing this …
