It was a cold and stormy start to 2025 in the UK with most mornings seeming to start sub-zero and several named storms battering the country. It was also back to work after an end of year break and a walk into what is going to be a difficult year as the global organisation I work for is demerging and divesting various parts of the business. Change is after all the only constant.
I did however spend quite a bit of time on digital developments and activities over the course of the month and while a good chunk of it I can’t share directly just yet, I can at least provide a bit of a look at what sorts of things those have been.
ThoughtAsylum
This past month I managed just one blog post and it came from me working with an old PowerPoint slide deck. I used to spend time running full day workshops and training sessions. I would be accommodating and professional, but find that people often drifted back into sessions late disrupting what was going on and often requiring later updates because they had missed something important. To try and help people keep to time I had created a visual timer within PowerPoint. Not one that was a video, or one that relied on code, but one built from standard PowerPoint slide functionality and components. The selection of one of several timers became a standard inclusion in my non-linear presentations.
So if you are interested in this sort of functionality, you can read about how it is made and download a fully functional set in a slide deck from my blog post, A PowerPoint Break Timer.
Forums
The forums were a little quiet this past month, but there were some interesting questions posted.
Drafts
There was some discussion about selecting a draft by title in Shortcuts that focused on understanding data types in Shortcuts actions, though I was able to provide a way to address the need using some particular search syntax.
A query about can Drafts receive info from a shortcut and then pass info back to that shortcut generated some interesting discussion.
A user posted a daily note shortcut screenshot and when another user asked for a download of it, I put together a couple of shortcuts. One that reduced the original shortcut to a single action with simplified settings, and another with a few steps that addresses a friction point the original approach incurs.
A question comes up every now and then where a user has an issue where text entry starts half way down the page. It is always important to understand what things like typewriter mode do before enabling them.
I pitched in to help a user with some programmatic draft selection issues, and through a set of checks I describe in my post I was able to help narrow things down to a bug which Greg was then able to confirm and fix in version 47.0.
I gave a user some advice on how to specify a monospace typeface, well mostly on how the standard syntaxes and editor settings work.
Another post on monospace font choices was a particularly interesting one continuing the discussion from the end of last year. It gave me a reason to dive more deeply into understanding fonts than I had needed to previously, and I got to have a bit of a poke around at some of the internal info which was quite fun.
Automators
I gave one Shortcuts user some details about reconstructing their shortcut to accommodate dynamically setting the name of a menu item title?.
Another Shortcuts user wanted help using Shortcuts with the HomePod intercom and while it isn’t a perfect solution I gave a suggestion on how their particular requirement could be achieved … maybe.
Shortcuts remains a popular topic and formatting “appended text” as a markdown bullet list item for Obsidian turned out to be a simple one because the ultimate ask was very simple; so unfortunately regular expressions were not required.
An unusual Scriptable issue where scripts were take a long time to load and widgets do nothing was resolved by following some steps I suggested.
There was a bit of a general programming question on processing SMS content using JavaScript. I think I got the answer, but there’s no confirmation as yet.
Another dead end discussion was on sending customised messages from a CSV file using Shortcuts. It was very light on detail, so see if you would have asked the same sorts of questions I did?
I answered a new query on an old thread I’d sorted out on how to create an Automator workflow to paste the clipboard in the current text window. This time we’re doing things slightly differently.
Other
Tot-ality Update
I have a Drafts action group for working with the Iconfactory’s Tot application. The action group is called “Tot-ality”, and you can read about it in my 2023 blog post. Recently I was contacted on Mastodon, and asked about renaming the colours. It isn’t something I had considered previously as the colours are just that, and I provided some suggestions. After a little back and forth I ended up enhancing the action group so you could maintain your own settings for these - note that this was done before the recent Drafts 47 update even hit the beta, otherwise I may have investigated using that for this sort of change.
You can download the Tot-ality action group from the Drafts Directory on this page.
Chrome Extension
This month I have been investing some time in building a Chrome browser extension to help out at work. We have access to a chat interface to an LLM at work and I figured it would be useful to have a way to share and reuse LLM prompts with colleagues. Because we don’t have any central content insertion solution like TextExpander for Teams, and the LLM interface does not offer something appropriate I figured I would have a go at coding a little solution myself.
I’ve leaned into using some AI to help me build a solution, and I now have something that mostly works. It doesn’t work everywhere for everything (thanks to some security restrictions in some of the various LLM user interfaces), but it works in most places and I created a “its on your clipboard” fallback for such scenarios. But it allows you to create local content and also sync a centralised shared content set alongside.
I’ve obviously done a fair bit of testing as I built it out, and I’ve now shared it with some colleagues to give it a try and see what they think. It’s being loaded as an unpacked extension with developer mode on at the moment, but if it works well enough I’ll probably add it to the Chrome and Edge stores - though I am not expecting to build this out or support it on an ongoing basis so it may just be something I make available on the store and link in a blog post or something rather than more widely. I’ll have to see.
It has been interesting to see how extensions fit together and to build a relatively lightweight extension like this was interesting, but I ran into a lot of dead ends while building it. I obviously have a lot to learn about the right sort of structure to adopt, and where you can run into limitations.
3D Printing
This past month I’ve also spent a surprising amount of time printing 3D models for friends and family based on models I have previously printed for others as Christmas gifts. I’ve no plans on setting up a print farm any time soon, but being able to churn these out for people has been a nice thing to be able to do for them.
While most have been just reprints, some have required modification and that lead to some challenges. Most of these were around customising a festive cat decoration to match the colours of people’s cats - a lot of them as it happens. The original decoration was a plain black cat and so I could more or less paint in some extra colour patterns in the Bambu Studio app I’m using. I’m not an artist, but a bit of careful splodging was sufficient. The bigger challenge came when I needed more than four colours on a print. The AMS unit I use with my P1S supports four colours and I assumed I could use a manual external feed at some point. That turned out not to be the case, and so some prints required adding some print pauses and swapping out spools. This combined with the odd print that included extra layers of custom objects added atop the original sufficed, but there were a couple that even with spool swaps I simply had to take a different approach.
For those prints I ended up slicing out some of the elements and printing them separately at a very slightly reduced x-y scale. With these removed from the main print and recesses left, I was able to add them back in through a bit of physical coercion. The first time I tried using super glue, but that actually caused issues due to the tolerances, and eventually just forcing the sections in with what was in effect my bare hands and then tidying up with a soft mallet, worked surprisingly well.
I also worked quite a bit on exploring OpenSCAD, and building out some designs of my own. I had some print challenges around that which I will come back to when I release the designs. But that has progressed well, and I even ended up using Autodesk Fusion 360 some more too. My replacement toaster handle came out perfectly (Vernier calipers for the win), but my slimmed down waste chute for the printer based on an existing waste chute I’d been using came out pretty rough.
The reason I needed that was because I’ve added in a riser for my AMS unit. While you would normally do this for an AMS that is on top of the printer, using it at the side actually gave me a bit more shelf and storage space - especially because I printed a drawer to replace the external spool mount at the back, and a side tray for Gridfinity items. It also gave me somewhere to stash my new smooth PEI plate. In the photo below, the keen eyed my note that the riser looks to be floating on the right side. There’s actually some spacer blacks placed intermittently underneath the ‘floating’ edges. These are just 3D printed blocks to raise the riser to the same height as my base board on top of the shelf, but with some recesses that lock those blocks onto the wire shelf. Atop them there are also thin rubber mats to stop the AMS shifting during printing, and it’s been great freeing up space on my lower shelf and providing storage for a few things that I didn’t have ideal storage for before.
The AMS riser itself is fully 3D printed and was a multi-part multi-day multi-spool print. It is easily the most expensive print I’ve created, and while I was dubious about whether it would be worthwhile, I am very happy with the end result.
I’ve also been doing some data compilation to support an idea I have for something OpenSCAD related, but that’s definitely one that’s not ready yet.
I have added some more content other it in the last month, and while I haven’t added information about everything above just yet they will appear in time on my 3D printing notes site - forge.thoughtasylum.com.
Upcoming
February is shaping up to be very busy work-wise, but I also have a list of things I want to get out as soon as I can. There’s the stuff about 3D printing, something I’ve done with some new hardware (and software) on my desk, I want to get some more Forge and Automators Vault content completed, and then there’s all the other bits and pieces I have on my to do list. Even while I’m a good week into February at the time of writing, I’m still a little unsure as to what I’m going to get out there in the next few weeks.
Regardless of my so much stuff so little time quandary, I do of course make time to thank you all for reading and to those of you who have bought me a coffee I remain as grateful as ever. Maybe one day I’ll be able to grab a coffee with you in person? Have a great February and I’ll be back with an update in a month’s time.